In his speculative article at Forbes on contact with extraterrestrial intelligent species why does Ethan Siegel never ask why such beings would travel the enormous distances between worlds to reach us? I can only think of one plausible reason: they live on their ships, need resources to survive, and probably won’t be overly scrupulous about taking what they need.
As to why we haven’t encountered aliens from outer space so far my guesses are:
- We have. They just haven’t bothered us whether through benignity or distaste.
- We are the elder race.
- There aren’t any.
- It’s just not worth travelling that far.
I lean towards #2, a depressing thought.
I’d go with curiosity and maybe missionary zeal. If they can make the long trip here (assumption FTL not possible), they would have the ability to mine asteroids, etc for raw resources, as they did on the way in. As to why they haven’t, would go with #4, remote sensing and VR are much cheaper as is radio.
Lester del Rey actually wrote a novel based on the notion of missionary zeal as a motivation for space exploration.
We’ll encounter them when they send the demolition contractors to clear Earth out of the way of the hyperspace bypass.
If they’re anything like Earth contractors, they’ll clear Mars or Venus out of the way by mistake. And, yes, I’ve read Hitchhiker’s Guide.
Any species with the technology to make the journey might not have our problems. The dread alien invaders who are as resource-hungry as humans are just human projections. I’m not a huge Iain M Banks fan, but I’ve liked to some of his Culture novels, in that they look at post-scarcity in a distinctively non-puritanical way.
I thought of MMS point too. Maybe a race of beings plagued with greed is incapable of cooperating to the extent necessary for intergalactic travel. It raises an interesting theological question for Christians: if Earthly humans aren’t unique creations, do we suspect that the allegory of the Fall applies to the other beings as well or might they be without “Original Sin”?
Another question considered by Lester Del Rey in one of his novels. James Blish, too, IIRC. Most famously by C. S. Lewis.
I’ve read a lot of CS Lewis’s essays but haven’t read the Space Trilogy (I assume that’s what you meant?) Do you recommend it?
Highly. At the very least read Out of the Silent Planet. It’s the first of the three (the others are Perelandra and That Hideous Strength) and the best.
Thanks…I’ll check it out.
I would also highly recommend Cixin Liu’s series Remembrance Past (first book is 3 body problem). Very dark and different. Good Asian sic-fi which can take a bit of getting used to, but worth it I think.
Steve
Space travel is hard – very hard in terms of time and resources and physics. There’s a reason that virtually all sci-fi has some sort of FTL
technologymagic.The truth is that aliens are probably stuck in their own solar systems just like we are.
Yeah, we might be an Elder Race. We didn’t get elements heavier than lithium out of the Big Bang, so we’ve needed time to grow a couple generations of stars which have swollen up and exploded and cast out clouds of gas and dust and heavier elements which have needed millions or billions or years to merge with other clouds and begin the process over again. And over and over. So we’re maybe 14 billion years from the start of things and the most active period of star formation in our galaxy was maybe 10 billion years ago and … yeah, maybe we’re the first kids on the block in our stellar suburb, or real close to being the first. Maybe.
And maybe we actually are out in the sticks, comparatively speaking. If you contemplate the universe on a large enough scale, what stands out eventually is that some places have a lot of matter — not just galaxies floating around by themselves but clusters of galaxies, clusters of clusters, millions and billions of galaxies — and other places look empty in comparison. We, us, our solar system, our Milky Way galaxy and our neighboring Andromeda galaxy and the rest of our galactic cluster and even our local group of galaxies … we’re actually in a low-density zone. So maybe the universe is teeming with life but we aren’t going to see or be part of its progress. We’re like country kids staring out at the empty fields while a hundred miles away a million other kids are in school or playing stickball or joining gangs or getting introduced to sex.
Or maybe we’ve got the wrong notion about the attractiveness of our planet and ourselves. If you’re a species which has developed good enough solar power collectors or half a dozen varieties of fission and fusion power, you probably don’t care much about coal and oil. If you’ve got the sort of atomic-scale manufacturing we’re starting to get into with 3D-printing, you probably don’t need large factories for making things and large warehouses for storing them. Maybe you can sieve the minerals and elements you need from the dust on unvisited moons or billion year old drifts of frozen gases on the likes of comets in the Oort Cloud. Maybe while you and your mates slumber through centuries on interstellar voyages, your unattended ship will be capable by itself of gouging out continent-sized bites of solitary planets moving about between the stars. And after a time, planets and their numerous inhabitants may just seem too primitive for your attention, too chaotic and ungoverned, too variable for civilized existence, too risky.
And of course these notions assume alien beings will resemble us in some ways, so that we might in principle understand their actions and goals and imagine that our concerns are of interest to them. They could be quite different ….
Dave Schuler —
A puzzle of sorts. It’s been a few years, but as I recall in the space trilogy, Lewis assumed that Earth creatures had fallen and needed a Savior to be restored to a proper existence, but that Martians and Venusians had escaped that danger. Other hand, in the Narnia books, which I read … hmm, 55-60 years ago, first time … though the theology isn’t laid our particularly thickly, I think most kids raised in Christian societies will understand very clearly than Aslan is the Narnian equivalent of Jesus Christ, who is killed by soldiers — as he must be — and reborn in even greater glory to show that the world and its inhabitants have been redeemed and will in time be reborn also pass on to an even better existence.
So was Lewis of two minds about whether non-humans needed a Christian form of salvation, or were such thoughts simply (!!!???) part of his mental life, so that they naturally formed a thread in the fabric of his tales?
I’ve no notion myself. Your thoughts?
I think the latter. For those who haven’t read the novels, Out of the Silent Planet tells the story of a man from Earth who travels to a Mars where the inhabitants’ Adam did not succumb to temptation. Perelandra is effectively the story of the Garden of Eden transported to Venus and told from the point of view of the serpent. That Hideous Strength depicts the subsequent battle on Earth between the forces that want to keep the Earth as “the silent planet” and those who want to break its silence.