Hello Veeky Forums...

Hello Veeky Forums. I was watching a video where Neil Degrasse Tyson was having a conversation with an individual about the possibility of hostile aliens attacking earth with the intention of acquiring more territory. Tyson was saying that an alien species may not have the biological drive to be territorial and that there are species on our planet that are not biologically driven to be territorial. My question is, what specific species are not territorial? If there are any that are non-territorial? I'm searching but I can't find a conclusion for his claim.

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eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf
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>what specific species are not territorial
plants? idk

>Tyson was saying that an alien species may not have the biological drive to be territorial
how could he possibly know this? fucking hell man. we have a lot more to worry about than flying spaghetti monsters trying to invade us

Just a guess but earthworms and other similar species

Off the top of my head, the Lemon Shark is distinctly not territorial.

Also, a lot of schooling/herd animal aren't exactly territorial.

Most species aren't - though that's mainly because they are physically incapable of it.

Assuming FTL isn't a thing, however, biological drive isn't going to be an issue. Anything that gets out here en mass is going to have modified itself for whatever is optimal for space travel, leaving nearly all its original biology behind, if it remains biological at all, and no biology that we can conceive of deals with territories over worlds across solar systems.

Unless there's hyperspace lanes, and Earth happens to be at a strategic point, there's no conceivable reason for such a civilization to take this place. Even humans rarely take territory for the sake of territory - we take it for strategic value, resources (which includes people), and cultural conflict. If none of those come into play, we tend not to fight over empty dirt. We also put up with all sorts of invasive species living along side us, so long as they aren't causing real problems, and sometimes even encourage it.

On the other hand, if FTL is a thing, and we've just missed it somehow, then you might have a problem. Not because the aliens want "territory", but because they might not have actually solved their raw resource problems, and we might be rich in one or more of the ones they want, being a fairly varied planet, in terms of raw materials.

Though that's also about the only situation in which we may stand a chance, if we're lucky:
eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf

The whole concept is pretty retarded because chances are any interstellar civilization will have perfected space habitation to a degree which makes planets not much more than a source of material for building stuff in space.

There do exist non-territorial creatures, usually simpler species like small fish and certain insects but also including creatures of much higher orders like elephants and polar bears.

There's also the more classic territorial behavior, which wouldn't be intrinsically threatening as long as we don't impede on their occupation. They're just trying to raise young and harvest resources, and I'm not sure we could impede on that in any significant way even if we tried.

It's expansionist territorial behavior that would pose an issue, though that's pretty much limited to only humans and chimpanzees

Humans don't declare territory due to territorial instinct. We declare territory for resources, strategic advantage, and cultural differences.

This is why the nations were so quick to agree that no one gets to claim the open ocean, or, well, space - and why huge swaths of land have been claimed with no conflict at all. If territory was a purely biological drive, we would lay claim to everything, and fight to the death for it. We don't. If it's of no value to us, we tend to let it go.

Though, I suppose, a species with such an instinct, might actually evolve faster - assuming it doesn't run itself into extinction first.

Why the hell would someone attack Earth just to acquire more territory? Space is huge. Earth is comparatively tiny. It's just a terrestrial planet, there are tons of those, and there are plenty of resources just floating around in space in asteroids and the like.

The only reason anyone might attack Earth is to get the people on Earth. Either to eliminate them or to conquer them or whatever. The actual planet isn't really anything special. The life on it is the only thing it has going for it, and if you can inhabit a vessel capable of carrying you between stars, you can build a space-based habitat.

And honestly, the difference in technology between two species that might encounter one either is probably going to be vast. Consider the tech difference between the Australian aborigines and British colonists. That's, what, a few thousand years at most? The tech difference between two species that evolved at different times on different worlds could easily be several million years, since there's nothing forcing two different species from two different worlds to develop anywhere near each other on even a geologic timescale. There could have been an alien species a hundred light years away going through our equivalent of the industrial revolution back when dinosaurs dominated the Earth. That would give them maybe a hundred million years of a technological lead. The idea that they would even need to fight us to take whatever it was that they wanted is kind of silly. They could be so vastly superior that we wouldn't even notice them.

> Though, I suppose, a species with such an instinct, might actually evolve faster - assuming it doesn't run itself into extinction first.

How likely would such a species be to engage in the level of cooperation necessary to achieve space flight? I'd say not very. With humanity, it took societies of literally millions of people to develop the technologies needed just to get into orbit. That's millions of people who need to not be constantly killing one another just because of some territorial instinct.

Honestly, even if they didn't go extinct, I doubt such a creature would be capable of developing the complex societies necessary for space flight.

Appreciate the replies.

Well, if it was about individual territory, like say big cats are, not very.

If, on the other hand, they got along with their own just fine, and were space nazis, species 8472 style (before the revision), evolving alongside a whole lotta other similar species, and won out, then they might be a problem.

Granted, if they are so offended by other life forms around them that they wipe them out rather than making use of them, they'd probably evolve much more slowly. (That'd also assume their biology evolved in such a way that they didn't need to eat other life forms, which might slow them down even further, especially if that was universal among all species in their world.)

But yeah, space is big, and if FTL travel is an impossibility, the sheer amount of time and resources it takes to get from place to place means there'd be nothing on this planet any such species might be interested in - maybe not even the life on it.

If they, however, see all other life forms as abominations, we'd never see our death coming.

Most of them, comparing other instances of life to our instance is absolutely retarded though.

If a species isn't territorial, it's not gonna get far enough to become space-faring.

Depends on your definition of territorial.
Every living being needs space to live in and resources to maintain itself so by default everyone is territorial.

>Humans don't declare territory due to territorial instinct. We declare territory for resources, strategic advantage, and cultural differences

So as an instinct for their survival?

>So as an instinct for their survival?
Yeah, but there's no survival benefit to taking a random spec in the middle of nowhere if you're advanced enough to be traveling around the galaxy regularly. Like I said, we don't take territory just for the sake of taking territory - nor really, does any other species here. Even among territorial predators, it's always about resources and mating and the like, and among insects, about growth.

I suppose there's the Defiance possibility - some species, very much like us, manages to just barely gain very primitive space travel right as their star is dying off, and makes a desperate run for Earth in a mass suspended animation colony fleet. Since they started their journey so many thousands of years ago, the Earth looked uninhabited at the time, near as they could tell. At that point you have a territorial motive, but it's still not about instinct, it's about necessity - and the odds of all that, and that we'd be the nearest suitable rock to them to boot, seem slim to none. (Betelgeuse is due to blow, I suppose, but there's gotta be better targets closer.) Makes for a good enough generic TV sci-fi plot though.

Space criminals and escaped genetic slaves are other possibilities that various sci-fis have explored. Still nothing to do with biological territorial drive though. Then again, even if you have no such biological drive, there are more fringe possibilities for the rock being useful for small groups of aliens, if not whole civilizations. (Exponentially more, if resource-friendly faster than light travel turns out to be possible.)

>Every living being needs space to live in and resources to maintain itself so by default everyone is territorial.
Well, most species don't actually give a damn. Provided they can find an ecological niche, they'll live together with whatever (sometimes crowding to the point where it's fatal). Some species do develop territory instincts, but those generally are only territorial periodically or among their own kind (and even then, often just against the same sex). Few species are universally territorial - man certainly isn't - and even those very few that are tend to be so incidentally (eg. the various destructive ants that will occasionally rampage, eating everything in their path that isn't them).

If you can get to the point where you can travel between stars, then in all likelihood you probably are only going to be territorial towards those with equivalent abilities.

Humans would be like a stone age people, not even worth investigating.

A black man is that intelligent?
That's a smarter thing than trump ever said.

Humans would be pretty interesting to them because we'd be species that might have the same potential as them given enough years.

Wouldn't we be interested in finding bacteria on mars?

Two problems with that - first, not so much so if you've explored the galaxy and found life to be quite common. Plus (assuming there is no bypass for light speed), the sheer scale of technology required to travel around like that regularly would probably allow them to figure all possible permutations of life here with minimal examination.

Second, having the same potential is quite an assumption to start with, but if they decide we do, then we are a possible future threat, and may be best nipped in the bud. Given that they'd probably have to be biologically or otherwise immortal, just to be doing what they do, they'd probably think very long term in regard to potential problems.

Really, when dealing with such giants, the last thing you want to be "interesting", and the best you can hope for is not to get stepped on. Even benign advanced aliens out to "uplift" us would have such a radically different view of the universe that we might find the process quite disagreeable.

Neil De Grasse Tyson

Water could be a valuable resource though if aliens understood elements like we do, it wouldn't be very hard to make water.

Ice is the fourth or fifth most common molecular compound in the universe - add heat, and you have water. Not exactly a valuable resource for a species that makes black holes as a pass time.

Well heat and pressure - don't get water in a vacuum. But yeah, water isn't hard to come by or manufacture for an interstellar species in a universe with this speed limit.

The planet does, nonetheless, have a lot of rare materials on it, and a wider variety of them than most planets, thanks largely to what, near as we can tell, is the rarest resource of all: life.

It seems unlikely that such an alien race would have any raw resource concerns though - it would have had to defeated them all to get to where it is. It might have artificial resource concerns, but none that we could produce better than they.

But if faster than light travel is possible, all that goes out the window, especially if it's a resource friendly process. If that is the case, they could want any number of things from us - even water.

Anything with enough ambition to achieve interstellar travel is probably gonna be bad news for us.