Been tossing this around in my head: Suppose we found another planet that had life no more intelligent than a horse so there wouldn't be anyone to fight or oppress. The question is can we eat the food? Can we handle the microbes, drink the water? An example from fiction is H.G. Well's 'War of the Worlds' where the (Martian?) invaders were done in by microbes against which they apparently had no defense.

A contrary example from fiction is Star Trek where Bones could cure any weird disease easily and so could Dr. Beverly Crusher in Star Trek TNG.

That's the question: Would w/e passes for the alien DNA make colonization impossible (outside of controlled environments)?

I'd guess we wouldn't have the enzymes to break down the stuff in our guts, it's quite a delicate process.

By the time we are able to colonize fast such distant locations we will be able to defeat any biological problem also i think. We will in principle know all routes to life before we even met them. Plus of course you know my ideas that there is no way in hell there is another advanced life system in this galaxy (like mammals type animal i mean). Simply because it would imply that its easy to happen in general (to find one so close i mean) so that out of billions of other galaxies it would be inevitable to have had thousands of civilizations with billions of years age difference hence we would be already visited/altered etc or we would be seeing evidence all around or remnants of such past more direct evidence.

Yes of course there are other possibilities but they are tiny in probability in my opinion.

If even we could not eat the "food" in the traditional sense we could process it or generate our own with other nontraditional today but mainstream then methods.

My main argument is that when this happens if ever it is so distant that we are by then a lot more above this even being remotely a problem.

I didn't know know that you believed that there aren't any other advanced life systems. I argue the same when it comes up bec there should be some sort of evidence (radio isn't that hard) and I get chuckled at.

I hadn't considered that by the time we could get to another world our 'food tech' should be up to the problem.

Not a bio expert by any means. Just spitballing with the little bit of knowledge I do have. I would welcome corrections to errors in my understanding of things.

The simple carbohydrates like glucose, etc. would be the same, so as much as you could ensure that you have just that stuff in your gruel, it would do in a pinch if you just need some calories.

Proteins in earthlings is comprised of a chain built using a set of 22 amino acids, which we need to survive, and they wouldn't have the same makeup as us.

There are some relatively simple molecules which have can be arrayed in a mirror image format (left- or right-handed, called chirality) which have the same chemical properties but react differently with other molecules, and for each of those molecules, all organisms use either one or the other. And if you ever encounter the opposite one, it can have disastrous effects, so you need to watch out for that.

The mechanism by which microorganisms harm us is varied, but I'm guessing that most of them would be harmless to us. The ones that use very simple molecules that are destructive to our cells as toxins would still be toxic. Ammonia sucks no matter what planet you're on. A good rule of thumb is that eating a vegetable that's slightly rotten is probably harmless while eating slightly rotten meat is probably harmful because the mechanism for attacking the cells in your meat will be similar to how they attack ours, so those bacteria are bad for us, while the mechanism for attacking plants (with cell walls, etc.) is very different, so those probably won't be so harmful to us. So I imagine that most of the microbes on those other planets will not have the proper mechanisms to attack us, and our bodies will just treat it as detritus. I still wouldn't step outside without a biohazard suit, ldo.

Water would still just be H2O, if you remove all impurities.

This is all assuming that they are carbon-based, of course.

You plan on starting an empire on another world Howard?

Viruses and diseases work by hijacking the human cells and working with their biochemistry. It would be almost certainly impossible for an alien microbe to do that because they don't speak the same language; it would be like a Mac virus trying to infect a PC. We wouldn't have great immunity to them, but they wouldn't be able to replicate and couldn't do much harm. Now that I think about it, wasn't that the plot for the ending of Independence Day?

Eating alien life would probably be a waste of time for the same reason: our biochemistry is designed to break down proteins and reassemble the building blocks, but if the building blocks are alien, your body would have no idea what to do with it. Maybe you might get some simple carbohydrates and nutrients, but it would mostly either be hazardous or just a waste of time.


Edit: Basically, what iversonian said.

>chuckle<

Even on Star Trek, they are about 500 years in the future. So, if some civilization out there is about 500 years advanced from us, they would have only been sending radio for about 600 years. That would only put in range solar systems 600 light years or less from us. That is a very small number, relatively speaking. If there are advanced civilizations out there, it is far more likely that their radio signals just haven't reached us yet.

Yup, all there need be is the carbohydrates, and maybe proteins, that we need. Then we have machines that gobble it up and poop out soylent green, free of microbes and dangerous materials.

Still working on being emperor of this one, tbh. I am the one pulling Orange Man's strings but let's keep that between ourselves.

@pig: There really ought to be signals coming from all over the sky says me the expert astrophysicist.

Why? I mean, it would take an enormous amount of energy to beam out a signal in all directions that would be detectable. Our own civilization isn't doing that. We're sending inadvertently out radio waves, but far too weak for anyone out there to pick up. And in fact, we're quickly moving away from radio/broadcast TV toward cable and local WiFi. If you think about it, an advanced civilization might communicate with focused, intense signals rather than blasting them all over the cosmos --it would be far more efficient.

Have you got your subspace transceiver fixed yet? Agreeing with trolly above there may well be signalling phenomena we know nothing about. A hundred and fifty years ago mankind didn't even know about radio.

In a universe teeming w/ intelligent life there really ought to be something noticeable at least it seems that way to me.

It's not "teeming". Look at our solar system - only 1 planet has conditions where life as we know it can exist. Most solar systems probably have none. There might not be any other planets with life because it was a weird combination of circumstances that got life going here. Like a very large moon in comparison to the planet, large enough to cause substantial tides and clear a lot of asteroids. The chances of another planet forming such a large moon are microscopic. But that doesn't mean that the fact that we haven't heard from anyone proves that nobody is out there.

If there was a civilization just as advanced as us located at the star closest to the sun we wouldn't have noticed.

Let's go off on a tangent then: How would we determine which star system would be likely to have a colonizeable world?

Observing exoplanets is a way forward. On a large scale. Finding free oxygen would be a hit, for example.

Stars in the main sequence, similar to the sun. Red giants and dwarfs have probably vaporized any livable planets they had.

All of them that have planets are prime targets because even if a system had 1 mil years or 10k years or "life" left it would be worth the investment. Mostly because in 1000 years you can do anything to alter the future of it using local resources lol.

In fact a civilization that can do these things (like visit such other systems) can even alter the star's history or protect the planets within 1k years of entry into the system or create a ton of new colonies that are protected by taking down in pieces a planet for large scale engineering reprocessing.

We can sacrifice a planet like Mercury or the big asteroids and a couple dwarf planets to effectively create habitats that can allow the exploitation of the entire Jupiter and Saturn for millions of years of fusion energy and even more exotic near full mc^2 ideas if possible. They can support with amazing luxury a trillion humans or more even.

At that kind of energy you can manipulate entire solar systems at will and that makes all of them habitable!!!


Either you are an optimist or you are an MdZ optimist! Make your choice lol.

The most important thing in this life is getting to the future. Surviving to get there is the most important thing. This is why top super-intelligence AI is not going be an idiot about violence and other stupid risks or other better AI will take care of it for us and them and all the ones that get it...

By the way regarding communication if you wanted to broadcast details you can do it with super high energy photons/cosmic rays that have specific properties that make it hard to be confused for background noise like weak communication signals.

You can even have your own pulsar and manipulating its properties if you wanted to broadcast an important message to other civilizations like what to not do for example lol.

The easiest thing in the universe for a high technology civilization is to make themselves known if they wanted.

What is the chance you get high energy photons from some source that have energies that are spelling a funny message by accident? You can very fast distinguish a higher complexity creation (using mathematical concepts) from random natural noise of basic astrophysical processes. You probably only need to receive 1000 bunches of them to get a very good message out that will propagate across galaxies like gamma ray bursts do.


Force the light from your own sun to be periodically fluctuating in a way that communicates information. You can propagate a very slow signal that way that is revealed within days by manipulating the luminosity of your own system.

You can generate neutrinos in particular rare sequences and other civilizations can see in their labs. Neutrino communication can penetrate anything and survive in its integrity as message for billions of light years.

Making an artificial pulsar seems like a non-trivial problem.

And to verify what i said see this i didnt know about;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search...mma-ray_bursts

"Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are candidates for extraterrestrial communication. These high-energy bursts are observed about once per day and originate throughout the observable universe. SETI currently omits gamma ray frequencies in their monitoring and analysis because they are absorbed by the Earth's atmosphere and difficult to detect with ground-based receivers. In addition, the wide burst bandwidths pose a serious analysis challenge for modern digital signal processing systems. Still, the continued mysteries surrounding gamma-ray bursts have encouraged hypotheses invoking extraterrestrials. John A. Ball from the MIT Haystack Observatory suggests that an advanced civilization that has reached a technological singularity would be capable of transmitting a two-millisecond pulse encoding 1×10^18 bits of information. This is "comparable to the estimated total information content of Earth's biosystem—genes and memes and including all libraries and computer media."[58]"

Well it does take some higher level civilization. You can visit a nearby pulsar and interfere with its properties systematically in a subtle but detectable level from very far away.

There would probably be a lot more efficient manners to send a large distance message of course but if you are level 2-3 you can do it.

We can be that within 10000 years easily if we are not self destroyed.

Such message would look eternal in terms of your lifespan as civilization. It would take a few million years to reach other galaxies so by then you would have been far more advanced or totally different or gone and even found other ways if not extinct and having become something else (ie higher AI).

I see such signals as legacy of one's knowledge at the time sent as gift to the universe.

But i do think we are very rare and probably the next one is several billion light years away rendering even 100 civilizations in all observable universe still almost entirely isolated from each other minus a few rare exceptions.

Gamma ray bursts don't travel any faster than light, so it's a dumb method of communication. You might as well use radio.

Nobody said they travel faster. Where did that come from? The high energy photons are very hard to be lost in the background over large distances.

You go ahead and tell me that you can observe a bunch of gamma rays at 10^15 eV that are ordered in time as primes that this is an astrophysical origin signal.

The point in using gamma rays is in the link above. These things travel across galaxies without interacting with anything often and in direct manner. They carry a lot more information too in principle.