I read The Three Body Problem series over the last year, it’s a Chinese science fiction series where first contact takes place. MAJOR spoilers below, but the author’s views of how alien civilizations would interact was unlike anything I’ve read before. You should read the book instead of the spoilers, but:
The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life — another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod — there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other people.
There’s a strange contradiction revealed by the naivete and kindness demonstrated by humanity when faced with the universe: On Earth, humankind can step onto another continent, and without a thought, destroy the kindred civilizations found there through warfare and disease. But when they gaze up at the stars, they turn sentimental and believe that if extraterrestrial intelligences exist, they must be civilizations bound by universal, noble, moral constraints, as if cherishing and loving different forms of life are parts of a self-evident universal code of conduct.
Being a law professor is a great gig. You make $200k to work like 15 hours a week, and $200k goes a long way in university towns. Oh, and summers off.
The dirty secret of law is that it really doesn’t matter how good you are at it, at least at big firms. The guys who bring in business make way more money than anyone doing the actual work.
Fairly long, but found this part quite interesting:
"Meanwhile, we’re continuing to search for aliens who aren’t transmitting or building anything at all. The most likely way we’ll find extraterrestrial life is via the observation of exoplanets—those numerous planets orbiting other stars. We’re just getting to the point where we can make detailed observations of the chemistry of exoplanet atmospheres. If we can directly image an exoplanet, or see it pass in front of its star, we can search the spectrum of its light for signatures of chemical balances that only biological organisms can produce, whether they be microbes or mushrooms or megafauna.
These studies are in their early stages, but the hunt for biosignatures is developing into one of the most exciting projects in astronomy today. When we finally find other life in the cosmos, the evidence will likely be in the form of an unusual set of spectral lines seen in the stretched-out starlight reflecting off or filtering through the atmosphere of a distant, untouchable world."
Well, I’m assuming he’s not a genie who would peace out after convincing the most gullible. Also, my standard for a guy claiming to be god and doing godlike things isn’t “impossible to doubt,” just that he seems legit. Anyway, if he wanted he could presumably manifest himself such that doubt was impossible, even if that required tweaking the nature of reality or whatever. Ie, he could make everyone 1000x smarter such that it was super obvious he was god and impossible for him to not be god or the universe wouldn’t exist.
I think people get very mixed up thinking about god. If you say god is infinite they think like, “oh, you mean a big number like 100.” No motherfucker, we’re not talking Poseidon, we’re taking an infinite, omniscient, omnipotent being. He’s not really strong and really powerful, he’s incomprehensible, he’s literally everything. He’s also, by all appearances, more or less incompetent and/or unethical.
Contra Nietzsche, one could argue that science didn’t kill god, ethics did.
50 more pages left in three body problem. Not sure I’ll read the rest of the series, but this is one of like three times in life I haven’t revealed a spoiler.
