Makes me wonder if we ever do meet intelligent aliens will we instantly try to kill them not because we’re a tribe based war loving species, but if it’s simply because we’re so absolutely and deeply repulsed by something so different than us on an instinctual level.
Or, as various sci fi stories have laid out, will they immediately try to kill us, because they are an insect based race and we are dealing with drones that only follow basic instinct, and we’d need to commune with the queen or some such to get them to understand that each of our species has a consciousness and free will, and we don’t exist in a hive mind
I just want to state on the record that the book is a short read and extremely better than the movie and that anyone here who hasn’t read Enders Game, should do so.
I thought the movie did a pretty good job tbh. It’s just that Ender’s internal monologue is so important to the novel that it’s hard to translate that into a film.
Of course, I also blame Ender’s Game for every shitty YA series having a War Academy arc, so I just don’t care about its legacy that much.
the one huge and quite funny flaw with that idea is that queens have absolutely jackshit power over a colony, if anything the queen of a colony is basically a slave that gets constantly pampered and directed by the workers with no free will whatsoever.
If we met an alien hive-mind species it’d probably be much like interacting with a military, just much more tightly integrated and profoundly devoid of corruption, imagine HAL 9000 but made up of a million people working together to run the computations.
So they’d likely work tirelessly to figure out what precisely we are, if they determine we’re a threat they’d attack without mercy, and if they determine they can benefit from cooperation with us they’d be the best ally we could ever imagine albeit extremely manipulative.
the borg are artificial and have the goal of assimilating as many people as possible, a realistic alien hive species wouldn’t particularly care about that beyond the inherent benefits of diversity and a higher population.
Their goal would, much like ours and that of any species, be to proliferate but primarily ensure they don’t get wiped out, which requires a lot more nuance than “resistence is futile”.
They would also inherently have a decent amount of independence, because that’s specifically how hives operate: it’s a large group of individuals operating on similar logic and working together to create what is effectively a superorganism. Bees and ants aren’t controlled by some hive mind, every individual makes small decisions and as influenced by the other individuals, and eventually one or two decisions become the most popular and are acted upon.
Hives are basically anarchic democracy taken to its absolute extreme.
nah, people work with deep sea creatures all day and just find them cool.
it’d just make international relations with them extremely difficult, honestly district 9 is probably the most realistic take on how we’d treat aliens. We’d be sufficiently unable to empathize with them that we’d treat them like shit, but there’s no real reason to actively try to wipe them out.
The District 9 aliens are a direct and extremely obvious metaphor for apartheid. The lack of empathy had nothing to do with capability, just a cultural hatred of the other, and it will, and did, like all apartheids, end with genocide.
Makes me wonder if we ever do meet intelligent aliens will we instantly try to kill them not because we’re a tribe based war loving species, but if it’s simply because we’re so absolutely and deeply repulsed by something so different than us on an instinctual level.
Have you ever met a Belgian? Same thing
There’s two things I can’t stand. Intolerance, and Belgians.
But have you had Belgian beer ortheir fast food. No wonder everyone goes there for a fight.
Moules-Frites and Hoegaarden.
I prefer La Chouffe, you get to laugh at the gnome on the bottle too 😄
Or, as various sci fi stories have laid out, will they immediately try to kill us, because they are an insect based race and we are dealing with drones that only follow basic instinct, and we’d need to commune with the queen or some such to get them to understand that each of our species has a consciousness and free will, and we don’t exist in a hive mind
It’s fine, we’ll train a ten year old prodigy to kill their entire race.
I just want to state on the record that the book is a short read and extremely better than the movie and that anyone here who hasn’t read Enders Game, should do so.
I thought the movie did a pretty good job tbh. It’s just that Ender’s internal monologue is so important to the novel that it’s hard to translate that into a film.
Of course, I also blame Ender’s Game for every shitty YA series having a War Academy arc, so I just don’t care about its legacy that much.
the one huge and quite funny flaw with that idea is that queens have absolutely jackshit power over a colony, if anything the queen of a colony is basically a slave that gets constantly pampered and directed by the workers with no free will whatsoever.
If we met an alien hive-mind species it’d probably be much like interacting with a military, just much more tightly integrated and profoundly devoid of corruption, imagine HAL 9000 but made up of a million people working together to run the computations.
So they’d likely work tirelessly to figure out what precisely we are, if they determine we’re a threat they’d attack without mercy, and if they determine they can benefit from cooperation with us they’d be the best ally we could ever imagine albeit extremely manipulative.
Interesting deduction. After analyzing all of the data, we have decided to expend zero effort and go around.
Not our problem, sorry, fly-past planet.
Have you met the Borg?
the borg are artificial and have the goal of assimilating as many people as possible, a realistic alien hive species wouldn’t particularly care about that beyond the inherent benefits of diversity and a higher population.
Their goal would, much like ours and that of any species, be to proliferate but primarily ensure they don’t get wiped out, which requires a lot more nuance than “resistence is futile”.
They would also inherently have a decent amount of independence, because that’s specifically how hives operate: it’s a large group of individuals operating on similar logic and working together to create what is effectively a superorganism. Bees and ants aren’t controlled by some hive mind, every individual makes small decisions and as influenced by the other individuals, and eventually one or two decisions become the most popular and are acted upon.
Hives are basically anarchic democracy taken to its absolute extreme.
Speak for yourself, I exist in a hive mind.
Bold of you to assume there won’t be humans trying to fuck them.
Porque no los dos?
Didn’t feel the need to state the obvious lol
That’s the plot of Starship Troopers.
nah, people work with deep sea creatures all day and just find them cool.
it’d just make international relations with them extremely difficult, honestly district 9 is probably the most realistic take on how we’d treat aliens. We’d be sufficiently unable to empathize with them that we’d treat them like shit, but there’s no real reason to actively try to wipe them out.
The District 9 aliens are a direct and extremely obvious metaphor for apartheid. The lack of empathy had nothing to do with capability, just a cultural hatred of the other, and it will, and did, like all apartheids, end with genocide.
Embrace the framling, study the ramen, kill the varelse.