but that is interpolation. Positing future "stages" and "advancement" requires a extrapolation of the next stage and supposition of what goal is being advanced towards. There is enough danger in doing this with scalar variables (a polynomial expression that describes 20 years of data points will almost never describe the next twenty. unless you are lucky enough to have collapse or run away growth right after the end of the data.)
when your model is a n-dimensional complex of nested Lotka–Volterra equations (like evolution and technology seem to be.) It becomes -what is the word for impossible that falls just short of the whole hog? impossible - Δ. The branch from Lucy to us only seems straight because of pruning. I can not think of a darwinistically feasible goal other than adaptation to a niche and we don't know the niches of the aliens.
I would also like to point out that technology does not work towards goals in those terms. Technology that is lasting tends to be created to solve immediate or somewhat immediate problems, and then is adapted to later problems. Look at rockets, to keep with the space alien theme. Rocketry started off as a form of entertainment first with crude fireworks in China, though it quickly became weaponized. Modern rockets have the Germans to thank for their existence, and those rockets were developed as long-ranged bombs to spare the vulnerable Luftwaffe from dangerous bombing runs. They weren't designed to have people in them. A couple decades down the line and you have people strapped to the front of a rocket landing on the Moon, using computers that would one day evolve and merge in to phones, which are further changing to integrated communications tech if Glass takes off on the scale Google hopes. Nobody who designed the cell phone looked at it and said "I'm building this so that in the future people can have a camera on their glasses." They looked at a phone and went "man what if you could carry this?" You can generally extrapolate on trends in technology; decreasing weight, increasing battery life, increasing power, increase screen size, decreasing environmental impact. Predicting what things will be like in the future is impossible, even if we're only talking about the next 5 years. Once an idea like the cell phone or the computer is released to the general public, it goes beyond the minds of its creators and changes in to something totally different. There's no unified goal because the technology is not being developed by a unified structure. Its just happening, and nobody can really tell technology as a whole which way to go. That just happens based on the desire of society in general at the time.
general agreement. I would not bet on the lessened environmental impact at unit scale it happens but in aggregate tech tends to increase resource use or at least has so far.
Seems like kind of an arbitrary thing to take issue with, man. I think we can agree that the above graphic lays out an overly-simplified/fabricated view of how we got to where we are. But I don't think it logically follows that we can't or shouldn't assume that our current "stage", as a whole, is more "advanced" than the "stage" ape-like creatures inhabited however many hundred thousand years ago. As such, it doesn't seem outrageous to chew on the notion, no matter how abstractly, of how an intelligence more "advanced" than us would present itself. Anyhow, in this case, it seems like we're all saying more or less the same thing: alien intelligences may be so alien, either in their adaptation to an alien niche (as you put it, I think) or in the nature of their awareness/intelligence that we may not even be able to identify them as intelligent, or even beings, for that matter.
right right the ladder of life is bad enough when looking back using it or similar thinking to look forward is meaningless.
The only thing we would know for sure about a species that flew to earth is that they are better at spaceflight than us it would tell us nothing about their other technologies, interests or "morality". The last paragraph is my thought exactly.
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0601101h.html read the martian bits.
I don't agree with you on this. Technology tends to be interdependent on other technologies. Thus i think it would be totally plausible to be able to determine something about the species other then they were better then us at flight. At the most basic level assuming they had flown to earth we would know they had a mastery of space flight and potentially aerodynamics (assuming they landed). This would mean they would have to have mastered certain areas of Physics and thus have an understanding of the areas of mathematics necessary to understand this. In addition most modern engineering problems require large mathematical solutions which would also suggest for advanced space flight they would also need some sort of high speed information processing / simulation capabilities i.e. they developed and discovered some form of computing. I've only written a short synopsis but there would be a ton of other areas they would likely need to have advanced in as well such as material sciences (to handle vacuum, re-entry, strong acceleration), biological sciences (assuming craft had passengers, if it was artificial or a "drone" then this links back to my point on computer development)
Unless they did not do it how we would do it. My whole point is the tech is interdependent don't have the wheel don't get the pulley etc. The new world did not apply the wheel but somehow figured out road building irrigation running water etc. So if I see a paved road should I assume wheels? In a similar way aliens visiting only tells us they can visit. It implies a lot of stuff but it only tells us one thing. There seems to be lot of projection in what you have written. I partially cede that some tech may be inferred but only in a general sense we know nothing about their physical requirements or limits. We don't even know that mathematics is the only way to arrive at tech. (actually if you look at the history of the jet engine it does not seem to be true) As for moral and ethical "advances" I assume you agree that can not be inferred at all.
I am not trying to posit that I know what an advanced alien civilization looks like. I don't believe I could possibly know their behaviour, morphology, communication methods, etc. That is the whole point. Your quote does not contradict what I am trying to say. By "stages" and "advancement" I am referring to complexity of system organization and energy extraction. The reason why this is plausible to discuss is because we do know the niche that hypothetical multi star-system civilization would inhabit (unless they leave or exploit areas of space we are currently unaware of - which of course is possible).