Out of Pod Experience

Might makes right.

There's a lot of people who refuse to even consider the possibility there's other intelligent life in the universe, for a variety of different reasons. For them, it would come as a big paradigm shaking surprise to find any life there, and how they'd treat any less advanced life is evident in how they treat less advanced life here on Earth. The scientific community is only now coming to the consensus other animals on Earth are just as sentient as humans, and it still hasn't caused any change in how we treat them. I can see mining operations taking place on another planet which do serious harm to resident life, but they're considered to be acceptable losses as long as just enough of them are left to avoid extinction. Like we do on Earth.

And hell, they don't even have to be less advanced, look at how we treat eachother.

Some people believe more advanced alien races keep us stuck here on Earth until we mature more as a race, specifically because of what we'd do to anything we found out there. If you can accept the idea there is more advanced races that would definitely make sense. Kind of like animal control.

War of the worlds.

It will end in the same way.

They never nuked the entire site from orbit....

Oooooh, biological warfare will be used to beat those aliens with the audacity to live where we can reach them

And what would gravity be like on a planet with seven times the mass of Earth?

edit: Added 'would'. Also, I'm starting to see drawbacks to tablet interfaces.

I suppose that depends on whether you think everything got here by statistical coincidence or not. If it did, then arrival of the fittest would mean that if we could we will as moral authority is irrelevant, and no legality is established.

If it didn't, then there is such a thing as good and bad, and we'd have neither moral nor legal authority (although the last would be guesswork).

But then it's a silly question.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth

According to this Saturn's mass is 95x greater than Earth's and it has almost the same gravity.

I think it's already obvious that the odds that there is life in other planets, in wich planets look to be made the same way as our planet is pretty high to say the least, and all we have to do is look at the dinosaur periods in our past.....According to paleotologists there's been at least 5 major extinctions in the past 700 million years that the earth had life, and the earth is 4.5 billion years old so it spent a lot of time with no life on it's surface at all, at least until we find evidence that there was something living that's even older than 700 million years.


Sometimes i do imagine if that big rock hadn't impacted the earth 65 million years ago and the dinosaurs were left to evolve even further, and mammals never had the chance to eventually take over, how advanced would they be?.....We're on this assumption that some take for certainty that we are the most advanced thing that can exist a little bit to litterally, as 99% of all species that have ever lived on earth have come and gone already.



So expecting said planet to harbour only primitive life and expecting us to easily dominate it without trouble is jumping the gun a little bit, especially considering the size and mass of the planet at 7x higher than earth, meaning life there, even if primitive, has to be pretty sturdy and the average 200 Lbs human would weigh 1400 lbs there, so it's a possibility that what lives there are species you wouldn't want to mess with in the first place....Now imagine if they're smarter than us...



As for how we treat species on earth, i don't think morality comes into it but more of practical necessity since the earth's population keeps growing and by 2040 we might be hitting 10 billion people, so if we're doing such practices now at 7 billion people( keep in mind 1 billion people don't have regular food or water as it is), imagine when there's 3 billion more to feed, house, provide water, hospitals, schools and jobs while doing all this without increasing pollution and keeping the world economy going strong for everyone.....At some point the planet will simply give us the proverbial finger as there's only so much it can handle, but we're concerned about what happends today, or next week or next year......Issues that may be reality is just over 25 years from now, most don't care about it or state that they'll likely be dead by then, so they don't care since it won't affect them at all anyhow.


So once we're done with this planet and exausted everything it can possibly sustain, we can greatly reduce the total population by the means of war or desease, we can terraform much closer planets like mars, but that takes hundreds of years to transform an entire planet, we can go to these far away planets wich are already terraformed and hope we don't get our asses kicked by the locals, or we go extinct like many other species that have come and gone over hundreds of millions of years on earth.....Take your pick.


Here's a situation that's a riot though....The species living on that planet is at a similar intelligence level as us, and they've also detected our planet as being similar to theirs and are having this exact same discussion as we are right now...

Read Harry Harrison's Winter in Eden and Return to Eden.

Depends on what you qualify as sentience though....For instance whales and dolphins are known to communicate between eachother and dolphins actually have a larger brain than humans( relativee to their body size), and since nature and evolution in general isn't one for wasting resources if they're not needed, then there's got to be a reason why a dolphin has such a large brain but we don't know the reason....Nor do we know what they say to eachother for that matter.


Many other species live in large groups because they know they're safer that way when it comes to the odds of becoming dinner for tigers or lions or crocodiles, or hyenas or sharks....That requires some very basic sentience to increase the odds of survival...


Or species that stay with their offspring for extended periods of time until they grow up and can fend for themselves...