Intergalactic network of planets and civilizations come to Earth to welcome us into the fold

Given that they found us rather than the other way around, we can be certain their technology is vastly superior. Basically, should they ever come to want to annihilate us, they will.

But no, retards in this thread insist on pissing them off. Solid idea, fucktards.

>space is boring
This is literally correct, but you do realize there are planets in space, right? With non-boring things on them?

Pretty much this. Hell, even if they were only 100 years ahead of us, they could still just sling asteroids at us until 90% of us are dead.

Or just throw ice-nine in the ocean.

>you do realize there are planets in space, right? With non-boring things on them?
>Planets
>Not mostly boring too
Oh boy a rocky planet, oh boy a watery planet, oh boy a gassy planet, so exciting to have chunks of matter floating around doing nothing at all in a cloud of sporadic matter floating in a vast void of emptiness.

The ocean is only fun when it's in a story with atmospheric description and characters, and then written into a book.

Otherwise it's the most boringest thing conceivable. It's mostly water.

If going there counts as "enlightenment", then fuck enlightenment, I'm gonna go listen to the village elder tell that story about how Hrothgar killed that dragon for the fifteenth time.

But hey, we still need people to think the ocean is cool. That way all those explorers will die in a typhoon instead of telling us about "the infinite majesty of the waves" or some shit.

Back in me day we used to send oil drillers to asteroids so they could blow them with nukes.
But now we only have soft-handshaked fags who buy solar panels from china.
Of course they'll kill us all.

So when your chunk of matter gets flooded by climate change/hit by a stray asteroid/struck by a gamma ray burst, what then?

What do you mean what then? It doesn't matter one bit, the universe keeps on going.

Got me there, I guess. I'd prefer to see humanity survive and become a massive, galaxy-spanning civilization, discovering the secrets of the universe and its inhabitants, but then that's just my opinion.

Being galaxy spanning is pretty silly considering the distances involved, we'll probably just build a dyson sphere or something and once we figure out everything there is to figure out spend the rest of our few billion years in our pleasure domes playing virtual reality games in eternal ecstasy or some shit.

That is if we don't go full transhumanism and make AIs or androsynths or robo people to replace us before then.

...Do you live in the middle of the ocean, user?

>figure out everything there is to figure out
but that's impossible, user.

everyone does, user

And why is that user?

>>"Enlightment"
Yeah that's codeword for imperialism you useless collaborationist fuck.
We'll just copy their technology and become Space Hussarls.

(OP)
I don't understand why all fiction treats aliens as being some higher order of more enlightened beings who can only look down on mankind with contempt or pity, and aren't as violent, or fucked up, or didn't do the same things we did.

>"i am better than all of you"
Except you aren't.

>Join us and live forever and travel the Universe, settle on any one of a million worlds

>lol le nah, we r ok down here ;) I'll do ok with my job at McDonalds and paying Mr Singh $900 a month for my one bedroom apartment

your edgy contrarian howling never ceases to amuse /tv/

At least one of these doesn't exist.

Because that's how humans act, and ayy lamos act like humans in human fiction for lack of examples of actual ayy lamos.

Also they might not have done the same shit, you never know.

>/tv/
Moshi moshi Veeky Forums desu.

Imagine if we spend 100 years and 10 billion dollars attempting to build a time machine. At the end of that time, we have nothing. Do we know that time travel is impossible? No. We can never know the answer to "is this impossible?" We can only ever know whether or not we can do it right now.

Yeah, I'm sure your 9-5 is really important. I'm sure you're going to be sorely missed by your friends and family. But 10,000 years from now, when you and everyone you've ever loved is dust, they're gonna find a corpse on Titan, middle finger still flipping off Earth.

>all fiction
See Star Trek, Star Wars, and any 40K race that isn't Eldar.

Except according to our model of the universe, which according to all human observation thus far is correct as well as simple logic says that efficacious time travel don't real. Just because our model is inductive and therefore fallible doesn't mean that we don't reasonably know that time travel is so improbable as to be practically impossible. Don't get smart allecky about knowledge when everything is a construction built on assumptions, for human intents and purposes we will eventually likely reach a state where we have a model which is complete enough to provide a base from which all knowledge can be formed and thus figure out all there is to figure out within reason and reasonable probability.

you still be a slave (wage or otherwise)

use us as eatable slaves, ruin earth as leave. read history it well give you a long list.

if they came to us meaning no harm in the first place???? OR are they here to force their views on us

Sorry, our shared chunk of matter.

I'm currently thinking of a black guy who got enslaved in Africa, shipped across the ocean and worked to his bones until he was so weak that he could only lay there and rattle out his last breaths.
Do you think he feels superior to his brothers in Africa?

What makes you think the aliens would not use you up like the perishable resource that you are?

I'm not talking about aliens. I'm talking about humanity doing this by themselves.

>Use as eatable slaves
Wow, what are the odds that a species with a completely different morphology and evolutionary history than us finds humans delicious enough to cross the endless void of stars in search of it.

>Accourding to our model of the universe
Models can be vastly incomplete. Even if you're right, you could still be missing most of the picture. See Newtonian physics versus our current model.

The travel time to interesting stars will be measured in decades, at least.
Spaceships will likely be dictatorships. You need strict order when a single mistake can fuck everything up forever.
Sure, you won't be a slave to aliens. You won't be a wageslave working from 9-5 either.
You'll just be a slave.

>Implying they're not virulent racists and won't encourage us to murder each other until there's just one race left.

But as time goes on models become more and more incomplete, the chances of our models being woefully inadequate are fairly slim compared to the models of old, and the chances will continue to shrink as time goes forward and we increasingly focus on searching for and filling in gaps of understanding.

>What makes you think the aliens won't use you up like the perishable resource you are?
Probably because a race that can travel across the stars has no use for a body as fragile as a humans. Even if they did need humanity for something, no reason they couldn't just close whatever they needed in isolation. This is like asking why you think other people won't kill and eat you: there's simply no reason for it.

>the chances of our models being woefully inadequate are fairly slim compared to the models of old
Do you have statistics to back that claim up?

If every opinion is slavery, then I choose the slavery for a better future.

Science has made exponential progress, but the last real revolution lies way back.

This.

You know how in independence day the aliens are like "locusts that take the resources of other words" or some shit?

Well, they bypassed multiple planets that had orders of magnitude more resources than Earth on the way here. It makes no sense.

By the same time, there probably won't be any 9-5 wage slavery on Earth anymore though.
We are already facing a new challenge to our economic model as the first general purpose robots are getting ready to replace large chunks of the work force, assisted by the specific purpose robots that are also becoming more numerous.

As I already stated the way our scientific method works is gradual refinements to make a model more and more correct, so far in the modern age with almost a hundred years of intense observation and searching we have yet to find many gaping flaws in the models we use and really have only effected a series of tweaks and adjustments to them, but nothing has so far indicated that we are missing anything categorically. If we have come so far without noticing any shocking inadequacies it is therefore fairly unlikely that we are still missing huge swaths of our models.

I wonder if Universal Income will ever happen in the USA. Its a given for Europe, though.

>I wonder if Universal Income will ever happen in the USA.
Without it, the USA are going to simply disappear. It's a matter of course.

Therefore it can't happen.

>Don't get smart-aleky
Oh, I'm sorry. Was I supposed to tell that "everything" meant "some things"?

>Implying UI is a solution and not a temporary measure to keep the discontented masses from rioting as wealth becomes too concentrated for capitalism to function as the main economic system of society
>Implying pure stateless communism isn't the answer to automation

Look in your heart, you know it to be true.

Are you moving the goalposts?

Cool. So can you tell me whether other people are actually conscious, or merely acting on automatic response?

Did none of you ever watch the movie?

The whole point of the movie was that 99% of people could not live the way the aliens put forward. If they agreed to the aliens' offer, it would mean that only 1% of the population survived - Everyone else would be replaced by puppets.

What kind of shitty deal is that? You don't get to enjoy the benefits. You're literally going "Yes, please replace 99% of 7 billion people."

No. I'm just saying that "it's been a long time since the model was changed" is not equivalent to "the model is correct".

I don't think pure statelessness is an acceptable answer to anything anymore. What with production cycles being global but also the effects of human activity having global consequences you need some kind of authority to make decisions like "we need a new supersized factory here".
(bigger means more efficient)
Possibly also "we should stop hunting this kind of animal because the ecological system will collapse if we don't."

Except they won't,
You'll die alone And a neet, And no convenient aliens that agree with you on everything and for some reason want a primate in their spaceship will ever come to save you... I was going to say "from us" but actually I should say "from yourself". You're beyond saving. Go on like you've been doing up to Now thus assuring you'll never reproduce, please.

Yes, you were supposed to have the human capacity to realize I was not speaking entirely literally and instead was using the fuzzy logic of language to express a general idea, and that complaining about philosophical limits of knowledge was not a proper response to the statement.

Define conscious.

This isn't about the movie, user. It never was.

That is moving the goalposts.
You have turned near certainty into complete certainty.

You know you're a real failure as a human being when you even fail at an ad absurdum argument.

Yes, the Ocean is boring as fuck, and nobody in their right mind would go explore it for fun. The fact that you typed all these obviously true things ironically is more astounding than anything you heard Carl Sagan spout.

Surely a sufficiently advanced society would be able to pin down consciousness?
Also, if you could tell me if there's a God or not that would be fantastic.

Define God.
You can't look for the existence of something that isn't defined.

>Surely a sufficiently advanced society would be able to pin down consciousness?
Yes, why not, but you asked ME specifically, not a hypothetical advanced society.
>Also, if you could tell me if there's a God or not that would be fantastic.
Nope, not a one. Hope that helps.

Except colonization. And trade. And importing items from other places. And knowledge.

>Surely a sufficiently advanced society would be able to pin down consciousness?
To answer your question; no, not surely at all, and even if a society did that it wouldn't be a sure sign of advancement.

>>"wage slavery"
By definition, impossible. If they pay you You're not a slave.
>>AUTOMATIOOOOOON!
RETARDEDNEEEEES!

Knowledge is a very poor form of entertainment.

>Except colonization. And trade. And importing items from other places.
none of those things are fun, they're busy work

What are you trying to say?

Our precision has certainly increased in orders of magnitude, but I think the point that was trying to be made is that we may be aiming at the wrong target.
I think we're aiming just fine, but there's technically always the opportunity for unknown unknowns to come into play. They would be much more difficult to find, but they could exist, so there's always the warning about people assuming beyond their means, which is interestingly enough the majority content of this thread.

>no, not surely at all

>Acting like consciousness is magic and not just a phenomena arising from complex but ultimately decipherable physical processes
user pls.

>our precision
>our science
>our knowledge
you don't own any of those things and they don't offer you any tangible advantage

why do you care about them?

Seeing as you've made a positive claim "God definitely doesn't exist", can you provide some evidence?
>inb4 "burden of proof"
I would have given the same argument if he had said "there is a God". Until you've scoured every inch of the multiverse, your answer can only be "God might exist, but we don't know for sure."

>they don't offer you any tangible advantage
How are you posting on Veeky Forums without a computer or access to the internet?
Where do you even live? In some cave? I bet you are angry you let the fire die yesterday because it's such a pain waiting for the next lightning strike.

Magic is not "invisible electricity that does weird things", that's mana.

At any rate a phenomenON is, by definition, not something that can be decyphered, because it's not a code, it's the thing itself.

knowledge/science =/= machines

Without knowledge, you have no machines.
Saying science gives you no tangible advantages means to ignore all of technology.

>you don't own any of those things
I don't own the number two, but I can use it.
>and they don't offer you any tangible advantage
Now that's just plain false, unless you count the wealth of civilizations acquired by technology intangible.
Definitions of divinity are so much of a sore spot with philosophers that I consider the argument effectively pointless when it comes to deciding definitively.
If you really wanted to be particularly smart-mouthed, you could call physics a god because it defines and controls everything under its power. It's not 'conscious' as far as we know, but some philosophers argue humans aren't 'really people' either.

>but there's technically always the opportunity for unknown unknowns to come into play. They would be much more difficult to find, but they could exist,
Correctness of the overall model is correlated with how rare the exceptions to it are. I mean it is exceptionally unlikely that a model could be 99.999999999 or whatever percent correct, yet completely overturned and proven outright wrong by that one incredibly rare event, if anything the rarer the event the less the model has to be adjusted to fit it in.

>warning about people assuming beyond their means
The problem is doing the opposite is arguably even less useful, it is true that we can never truly know anything, but erring on the side of caution for events we believe to be extremely improbable is silly. It's like betting on the lottery, sure it could happen, but it is not functionally useful to put money on such an unlikely event.

> can you provide some evidence?
I said so, and I'm correct.

Oh, no, I absolutely agree with you, I'm just saying that the devil's advocate has a position for a reason. If we just assume we can do no wrong instead of hedging our bets as we do through peer review and rigorous proofing, things will go south particularly quick. Thankfully, our current methods don't lend themselves to those results.

Oh, alright then my apologies for misinterpreting your post.

Nah I don't think so such a network would give us a lot of wealth and luxury, I think people would grab the chance immediately.

en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/evidence

>1.1Law- Information drawn from personal testimony,

In the case of law, evidence must be evaluated by several people and processes - most of which are not possible here.

That's decidedly your problem. You got the testimony. Now make your case.

>replace some people to influence the population
That was their mistake. They didn't do the research. Humans hate being told what to do, hate being deceived, and hate change.

That's comedy for you.

>Humans hate being told what to do,
Explain why we have governments then.

Because most humans hate the negative aspects anarchy even more than they hate being told what to do by a collectively empowered government.

So if humans understand that listening to others' orders can be beneficial, why not listen to aliens who wish to uplift them?

>hate being deceived,
Given what governments we have, I find that hard to believe.

>hate change.
Obama was elected twice. Granted, he didn't bring a whole lot of change, but he did promise to.

I really, really, REALLY hated this film for this reason. Am I supposed to agree with him? Because I sure as hell don't. And don't forget: because of him Earth did became literal hell.