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George Dinwiddie

A friend shared this thought with me, and, to be honest, I find it a little depressing.

67 comments
Jeff Miller (orange hatband)

@gdinwiddie There's a novel for that: Charles Stross's Singularity Sky.

Ash_Crow

@gdinwiddie some other planet's asshole billionaire's indentured servants*

Christoph G.

@Ash_Crow @gdinwiddie Nah, apparently the Bros like to ride their steeldicks into space themselves.

Frank Quednau

@gdinwiddie @romeu but billionaires are nothing without their slaves - those are the interesting people. Also I find the idea that every intelligent species ends up with money a bit meh.

Splinux :mastodon:

@flq If it were a zillionaire we would relate with human history, like the pharaoh of the great Pyramids, the emperor of The Great Wall and all Human massive endeavors as a species etc etc. So we'll be meeting brothers. But some form of distributed being is kinda orrifying... Imagine if they were an hivemind. That would be horrible.
Think about privacy:
"can you keep a secret?"
"yes, we won't tell any other alien race"
😑

@gdinwiddie @romeu

@flq If it were a zillionaire we would relate with human history, like the pharaoh of the great Pyramids, the emperor of The Great Wall and all Human massive endeavors as a species etc etc. So we'll be meeting brothers. But some form of distributed being is kinda orrifying... Imagine if they were an hivemind. That would be horrible.
Think about privacy:
"can you keep a secret?"
"yes, we won't tell any other alien race"
😑

jer

@gdinwiddie

“Teasers are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They cruise around looking for planets that haven’t made interstellar contact yet and buzz them.” “Buzz them?” [...] “Yeah,” said Ford, “they buzz them. They find some isolated spot with very few people around, then land right by some poor unsuspecting soul [...] and then strut up and down in front of him wearing silly antennas on their head and making beep beep noises.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Adrien Plazas

@gdinwiddie One Elon Musk is already too much, we don't need Alien Musk.

Mason Loring Bliss
@gdinwiddie I can fix this for you. Any species advanced enough to visit a world in another solar system will have long since abandoned capitalism. (Corollary: We need to evolve past capitalism too, lest it serve as our Great Filter.)
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_…
Red Hood

@gdinwiddie great, now I'm depressed too. :frog_jealous:

Jim Direct - cartoon

@gdinwiddie

Have you heared of @esa ? It might be a little more possitive. :)

Robin Winterschon

@gdinwiddie There’s really only two things that I can imagine an extraterrestrial being would want from us: Our dirt and/or our culture.

You can get pretty much all other types of resources from elsewhere in the universe. Water/Ice is all over, metals, gases, etc. Our decomp. organic matter is unique to our planet, as is our culture.

So basically our culture is worth as much as dirt (to an extraterrestrial)

frank87
@robin_winters @gdinwiddie Great, they enslave use to use our culture...
mike805

@robin_winters @gdinwiddie There are two logical reasons aliens might be hostile. 1) they see us as a threat. We might be one breakthrough away from near light speed spaceflight, and humans would spread like a plague if we got loose.

2) they want the planet. Habitable planets are rare, terraforming doesn't work well, and the easiest way to find habitable planets is to do large scale passive SETI and wait for some idiot to broadcast his presence.

Johanna Janiszewski

@gdinwiddie that sounds like a movie I'd watch - edit: I imagine it like the movies from the late 90s / early 2000s which viewed aliens as enlightend gods who would come to save us from ourselves - but this time in reverse: we understand that we can't rely on aliens and have to help ourselves if things are supposed to get better

Lord Caramac the Clueless, KSC

@gdinwiddie More likely, they're just the last surviving refugees from a planet they fucked up with the unintended side effects of their technologies.

Colin from Edinburgh, Oklahoma

@gdinwiddie
They are already submitting postal votes.
The USPC has done a great job, but I am unsure about the legalities.

its Ameise

@gdinwiddie of all the current actual astronauts i dont think any are billionares because its an actual job and a dificult one

davidpmaurer

@gdinwiddie

or carnivorous shrubs wearing hoomin skinsuits to groom your entire species into becoming fascist-controlled happy meals for hungry interplanetary travelers.

6 of one...

Oliver Schafeld

This planet's supreme a***hole billionaire will never set foot on another planet.

If you can name a bookmaker that accepts € instead of crypto-crapcoin, I'd take a gamble.

Colin from Edinburgh, Oklahoma

@oliver_schafeld
That title goes to Putin.
Musk is worth $200 bn.
Putin is worth at least $700 bn by virtue of stealing a whole country and all its resources.

Oliver Schafeld

@photoncollector

Well then, correction: "billionaires", plural.

😎

InkySchwartz

@gdinwiddie Only if the aliens are just reflections of us. Otherwise, aliens are really just that, alien. And as such, should be unknowable until we meet them.

For all we know they live in a post scarcity religious theology where every action is based on an expression of devotion of their god, which happens to be their uplifted neighbors from 30,000 years ago.

Note: That is still too human to be probable.

#alienisalien #alien

Daniel Bohrer

@gdinwiddie No wonder they always say "take me to your leader"… they probably don't know any other form of civilization

stay hinged

@gdinwiddie may i introduce you to ... posadism

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_I

>Arguing that only communism can allow the development of interplanetary travel, they concluded that visiting aliens from other planets must live in highly advanced communist societies and are bound to help Earth-based communists with bringing about the world revolution

Anthropy :verified_dragon:

@unspeaker @gdinwiddie I was going to comment "assuming they're governed by capitalism", but this is a whole new level I didn't expect haha

floydgump

@gdinwiddie Maybe the idea of billionaires or those of great wealth does not exist in advanced civilizations.That's why they are advanced because greed/money was not an artificial barrier to their progression as a species.

nonameoldman

@gdinwiddie Really explains the anal probes…. Are we their “island”…..??

Arapalla

@gdinwiddie

I thought they were shoe salesmen and phone sanitizers with maybe some middle management thrown in.

ErgonWolf

@gdinwiddie “Teasers are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They cruise around looking for planets that haven’t made interstellar contact yet and buzz them.” “Buzz them?” Arthur began to feel that Ford was enjoying making life difficult for him. “Yeah,” said Ford, “they buzz them. They find some isolated spot with very few people around, then land right by some poor unsuspecting soul whom no one’s ever going to believe and then strut up and down in front of him wearing silly antennas on their head and making beep beep noises.”

― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

@gdinwiddie “Teasers are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They cruise around looking for planets that haven’t made interstellar contact yet and buzz them.” “Buzz them?” Arthur began to feel that Ford was enjoying making life difficult for him. “Yeah,” said Ford, “they buzz them. They find some isolated spot with very few people around, then land right by some poor unsuspecting soul whom no one’s ever going to believe and then strut up and down in front of him wearing silly antennas on their...

OddOpinions5

@gdinwiddie what if the aliens treat humans the way Europeans treated indigenous people ?

we will all wish we were dead

Asier Izquierdo 🇪🇸

@gdinwiddie I have hope capitalism doesn't exist in other worlds and if they come they can suggest a better way

Full Metal Accountant

@gdinwiddie
I read a novel about little green men that suddenly appeared on earth seemingly just to torment us. They could disappear in an instant so there was no way to make physical contact with them, they never tried communicating with us, except to make rude comments during our sexual activities.
Don't remember the title.

Jan Orszulik

@gdinwiddie Why? First contact visit is most likely to be scientists/explorers. Somewhere along the way it might be tourists or invasion force. And all of that ofc assume their society has similar structure to ours, which I find fairly unlikely.

Breaker (ブレーカ/Bristeoir)

@gdinwiddie

Unlikely. If another civilization has mastered FTL, then their culture has evolved past that of leftist thinking, and you've been made obsolete, elitist. Remember, you are the institutions, the businesses, the machine.

You aren't the change and the future you think you are. You are the present. Furthermore, you and your movements are failing mankind, and you are driving civilization into the ground, and you're too ignorant to see it.

Breaker (ブレーカ/Bristeoir)

@gdinwiddie

You still haven't apologized to most of the sane world for your COVID vax, mask, and lockdown epic fail of big fascist government failure, lefty.

We the majority of America will hold Nuremberg type trials where we will hold the left/Nazis accountable all around the world.

Apologizing, publicly, will make the courts go easier on you.

Breaker (ブレーカ/Bristeoir)

@gdinwiddie

All the world knows that you pushed the vax and the masks. What you think that when you left Twitter your accounts were REALLY deleted? Nope.

Amir

@gdinwiddie and imagining who will represent us in front of them.

Genette B :verified_trans: :hacked: :nix:

@gdinwiddie imagine being on another planet and making first contact with aliens only for it to be Elon Musk

Flex Foot

@gdinwiddie I'm of the opinion we're on galactic quarantine. We appear in the charts as being a "scam planet." We can be visited by aliens after we resolve our colonial issues

King Beauregard

@gdinwiddie

I disagree: a society capable of interstellar travel is one that finally figured out peace and prosperity. Put it this way, suppose someone were to get their hands on a warp drive here on earth; you can bet that it would eventually fall into the hands of someone who set it off just to kill millions. We won't be able to go all Star Trek until we stop producing those kinds of people.

mike805

@kingbeauregard @gdinwiddie It might also fall into the hands of people who would zoom off to conquer another solar system or many.

If that is physically possible, it has probably happened before, and it was the equivalent of COVID or the plague on a cosmic scale. There is no defense against a relativistic projectile. You don't see it coming in time to do anything.

If aliens in UFOs really are watching earth, with special attention to the military tech, that's probably why.

jessor

@gdinwiddie I reject the notion that capitalism is a natural part of the universe

Meko #nowar
@gdinwiddie @alyx alternative idea about aliens that looks even more probable for me https://m.youtube.com/shorts/iJeMyI25VIQ
Takiro 🎨

@gdinwiddie
I once read a comic about Elon Musk finally going to space and meeting aliens and then getting depressed because every one of them is much richer than he is.

frank87
@gdinwiddie wait till you realize this possibility is probably one of the best. We went to the moon to put military bases up there.
EffingComputer

@gdinwiddie that is hilarious. Never thought about it but now I think it's probably correct.

Tim Ward ⭐🇪🇺🔶 #FBPE

@gdinwiddie I think it's Douglas Adams who has them as (admittedly rich) kids joyriding rather than asshole billionaires.

lproven

@gdinwiddie Yeah, no. You don't survive to the interstellar phase if you still are primitive enough to exchange value tokens.

Woozle Hypertwin

@gdinwiddie I dunno, I don't think capitalism is going to prove able to maintain a civilization long enough for it to develop interstellar travel.

Flohlaus

@gdinwiddie maybe they are communists and Yuri Gagarin is visiting us? 🤷🏻‍♂️

Alex Chaffee

@gdinwiddie @alice

some other planet’s asshole billionaires *on safari*

linguistic chaos goblin

@gdinwiddie This is such a modern and white and western way of thinking though. Most space exploration on earth has been done by governments and has been trained specialists instead of billionaires. And it's clearly best done as a collective endeavor, not by billionaires. I wouldn't expect our society's recent dysfunctions to be so universal I'd expect them from aliens!

Liz❤💃

@gdinwiddie I find that reassuring, as that means they'd not choose MY lil home!

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