4cal wrote:It highlights the silliness of your position. For all we know, the only “edge” the aliens have on us is that they have developed interstellar travel. Their civilization may have no music, no poetry, no helium….whatever. The clear analogy that you missed in your non-worked-up rant was that you can be ultra advanced in one area and totally clueless in another.
I’m guessing that if Warren Buffet was asked to explain Motzart’s genius, he’d probably sound as like Fred Flintstone. Monetary genius? Absolutely. Classical music forensic specialist? I’m betting not.
This is a good point. To add to it we tend to think of interstellar travel as being particularly difficult but actually a lot of that difficulty comes down to the technical challenges posed by our own particular physical condition and not so much from actual technical difficulty of pelting a solid object into the heavens:
- we don't live too long, so for us to cross the vast interstellar distances in a reasonable amount of time we would need to push as close to the speed of light as we can or just accept intergenerational flight times on a space ark either approach are highly energy and resource intensive and thus technically demanding. But for a species with a very long lifespan or the ability to go dormant for long periods then travel times taking centuries or even thousands of years are bearable and so consequently even primitive rockets such as we have now would do just fine for interstellar travel.
- outer space is a supremely hostile environment for us, a lot of the technical challenge of space travel comes down to keeping our biological bodies alive in this environment utterly hostile to us, lacking atmosphere, oxygen, awash with deadly radiation etc. Aliens with a different physiology might find the interstellar vacuum less fatal, perhaps even being able to survive without cover in the vacuum. For such a species interstellar travel would present a much easier technical challenge.
- Earth has a fairly steep gravity well. Earth is a moderately big and dense planet consequently it's gravity well is steep. This makes for a substantial barrier for getting out into space which affects all the logistics of space travel. An alien from another world which was smaller or lighter would be able to get to and from space much easier.
Consequent to these factors it is quite possible that these hypothetical aliens weren't even that advanced in space technology depending on their physiology and such.