05-18-2022, 01:24 AM
Something to contemplate.
So far as we know there are no technological civilizations more advanced than ours. Obviously there must be some super-brainy creature able to think out a technology, but if it lacks the appropriate limbs or lives in the wrong environment for such, then it isn't going to build any transmission towers. We humans are not alone among such brainy creatures. Cetaceans and elephants may exceed our intelligence; dolphins aren't going to build radio telescopes because they can't smelt metals. Elephants are apparently better at destroying structures than at building them. Pigs and seals come close to our intelligence.
A technological civilization obviously devours huge quantities of resources, including energy, and may destroy their worlds in doing so. Unintended consequences may be horrible. It doesn't take long from the refinement of certain levels of physics to figure out how to separate U-235 from U-238 or to make Pu-240 out of U-238. Highly-technological civilizations can operate only with rigid organization, and the society that can do rocketry or manipulate atoms can put nukes in missiles.
I look at the movie Independence Day and find that the hostile aliens have some great technology, but they have so ruined first their home world that they had to go out on conquests... and that with each conquest they soon ruin the planet that they have conquered by ravaging its resources. Don't fool yourself: we have people just like that.
So far as we know there are no technological civilizations more advanced than ours. Obviously there must be some super-brainy creature able to think out a technology, but if it lacks the appropriate limbs or lives in the wrong environment for such, then it isn't going to build any transmission towers. We humans are not alone among such brainy creatures. Cetaceans and elephants may exceed our intelligence; dolphins aren't going to build radio telescopes because they can't smelt metals. Elephants are apparently better at destroying structures than at building them. Pigs and seals come close to our intelligence.
A technological civilization obviously devours huge quantities of resources, including energy, and may destroy their worlds in doing so. Unintended consequences may be horrible. It doesn't take long from the refinement of certain levels of physics to figure out how to separate U-235 from U-238 or to make Pu-240 out of U-238. Highly-technological civilizations can operate only with rigid organization, and the society that can do rocketry or manipulate atoms can put nukes in missiles.
I look at the movie Independence Day and find that the hostile aliens have some great technology, but they have so ruined first their home world that they had to go out on conquests... and that with each conquest they soon ruin the planet that they have conquered by ravaging its resources. Don't fool yourself: we have people just like that.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.