Spider Star
The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an extinct alien race. But then an archaeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon...
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Alien Sociology
March 27th, 2008
Seth Shostak over at space.com has a nice article today mostly about why aliens won’t visit the Earth. I agree with the vast majority of his assessments, and the one reason he proposes that they would. As he points out, most “aliens coming to Earth” stories (at least on TV and in the movies) are stupid. Star Trek, however, seems to fit this reasoning pretty well in most cases.
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This is interesting, but doesn’t really come to grips with the problem that aliens are… well, alien. We can’t know how they think or why they might do what they do.
True, to some extent. But we know they’d have no reason to come here for our water, for instace, which just made “V” stupid. OK, one thing that made “V” stupid. And the mating. And the Earth food. “V” was just stupid all around from a science viewpoint.
Maybe the human anus is the most beautiful thing in the whole galaxy, and so they have to keep coming here and probing all those abductees.
Maybe worlds with multicellular life are very rare, rare enough that one example is worth study (That will tend to space out civilizations, of course).
Hal Clement had the aliens overlook Earth even though there were lots of FTL-enabled civilizations because the aliens were all from K and M stars. They knew that suns as massive as the sun evolve too quickly for it to be likely for complex life to appear.
As I recall, this meant the aliens thought of us as impervious to radiation and were a bit unclear if that just meant UV or if Xrays were included as well.
They’d also never seen anything made of molten water. Everyone else used water/ammonia, methane or some other fluid. I think Clement wanted the red dwarf worlds out far enough to avoid tidelocking.
[…] may have noticed me linking to some of Seth’s articles in the past, sometimes responding at length or just a brief mention in […]