German philosopher Schopenhauer (1840s) thought that alien life couldn't evolve to a higher level of intelligence than that already reached by humans. Why? He pointed out that in all human civilizations which have reached a settled level the most intelligent men and women realize that life isn't worth the candle and refuse to procreate, instead retreating to monasteries to contemplate their navels. He believed there would indeed be alien societies in space but assumed the same evolutionary process would be repeated on their planets. So you can forget about looking out for space brothers to help us out. They'll be as dumb as us.
I quote him: We should be driven crazy if we contemplated the lavish and excessive arrangements, the countless flaming fixed stars in infinite space which have nothing to do but illuminate worlds which are the scene of misery and desolation and, in the luckiest case, yielding nothing but boredom - at any rate to judge from the specimen [ie, Earth] with which we are familiar. Cheerful bugger wasn't he? On the other hand, he was an early advocate of the humane treatment of animals. This quote made me smile: The highly intelligent dog, man's truest and most faithful friend, is put on a chain by him! Never do I see such a dog without feelings of the deepest sympathy for him and of profound indignation against his master. I think with satisfaction of a case, reported some years ago in The Times, where Lord - kept a large dog on a chain. One day as he was walking through the yard, he took it into his head to go and pat the dog, whereupon the animal tore his arm open from top to bottom, and quite right too! What he meant by this was: 'You are not my master, but my devil who makes a hell of my brief existence!' May this happen to all who chain up dogs. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> wrote : ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <sharelong60@...> wrote : Salyavin, I admit that when I imagine more developed beings, I automatically assume that would include being ultra compassionate. I guess the tricky part is, how would ultra compassion be expressed? Opinions vary about what an ultra-technological society would be like. Some think that they would be extremely friendly because crossing interstellar space is such a big undertaking that, surely, any species would have to have conquered any bad attitudes amongst themselves long ago and pulled together. Another way of looking at it is that intelligence implies belligerence. Maybe it's only possible to evolve to this space-faring level if you've had the environmental and social hardships to drive you towards mastering the environment and defeating any enemies. Bad attitude built in. Both are projections from our state of being of course, but I tend towards the friendly interpretation. Particularly concerning our Wow! signal. Assuming that it was an alien broadcast, they must be curious to be sending messages and curiosity would mean they are philosophical. And friendly too because if you want to steal a planet's resources or suck the occupants brains out you wouldn't call them up and say Hi! Unless the message reads "Start running - you've got 30 years before we get there". Maybe we'd better work on decoding it before it's too late.... From: salyavin808 <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Sent: Tuesday, November 18, 2014 1:10 AM Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: Okay, let's put it on the table: UFOs ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <s3raphita@...> wrote : Re "Did you know we received a message from the stars in 1977? ": In the Wiki link about the possibly alien signal it says: "In 2012, on the 35th anniversary of the Wow! signal, Arecibo Observatory beamed a response from humanity, containing 10,000 Twitter messages, in the direction from which the signal originated": Ye gods! After intelligent aliens wade their way through the messages from 10,000 twits they will definitely conclude that Earth is inhabited by small-minded, grudge-bearing oiks with the attention span of a gnat, and that our planet isn't worth visiting. Instead they should have sent 10,000 FairfieldLife messages to show them how enlightened we are ;-) Hmm, yes. First one to troll our new alien overlords does a double shift in the dilithium crystal mines. I always wondered if we should be a bit more careful with what we broadcast into space. Look at the average days TV, that's a bubble of drivel spreading away from us at the speed of light. What's an intelligent being going to make of it all? If they're a really Spock-like race they might take it all seriously, maybe that's they leave us alone...
