I represent an interstellar civilization, What does Earth offer for export?

[randomness5555]

I'm sure even alien school children would love to learn about how crazy, brave and primitive we are to strap ourselves to giant explosive devices just to reach orbit.

You know what? I like that idea, I think you could be right there. And what we could offer them? Variety maybe? New ways of thinking, types of culture and entertainment and the like. But no human zoos, that ain't cool.

[Frozen_Heart]

An inexhaustible supply of endless slave labour?

[vixr]

Tweakers... Please take as many as you like (no trade required)

[FishInferno]

Now, this debate is cool and all, but has anyone given any thought as to how we would actually communicate with said aliens to arrange a trade deal?

[Wjolcz]

Oh hey, that's a cool thread I haven't replied to yet!

A civilization able to go interstellar would probably treat us as an amusement park, or something like that. They could take from us whatever they wanted without even caring about being attacked. My lasers defeat your heat-seeking missiles! PEW PEW!

They would probably take a few pics here and there, chat about the economics and politics for a few minutes, gather some animals or plants for DNA and fly away.

[PB666]

Oh hey, that's a cool thread I haven't replied to yet!

A civilization able to go interstellar would probably treat us as an amusement park, or something like that. They could take from us whatever they wanted without even caring about being attacked. My lasers defeat your heat-seeking missiles! PEW PEW!

They would probably take a few pics here and there, chat about the economics and politics for a few minutes, gather some animals or plants for DNA and fly away.

Really? Aliens go PEW PEW.

[Wjolcz]

Really? Aliens go PEW PEW.

Yes. PEW PEW!

On a serious note (and after some thinking and reading of this thread), I think it might've been nice if we taught them our languagues and they would show us some of their math or physics equations we don't know about. One of the languagues spoken on Earth might be similar to a languague used by some other civilization in the universe so knowing it might be useful. I mean, what other thing an all-knowing civilization has to do? Space travels get boring and they might actually consider learning a form of entertainment!

Either that or they would talk to the dolphins.

[legoclone09]

rule 34

You stole my answer...

Welcome, Robbaz here to another episode of the Sims

*que Billy Jean*

Now to move on, I'd say culture. If you have ever played Civilization, you will realize there are different things in every Civ. The aliens mightnhave warp drives. We might have say, cats. They get cats, we get warp drives.

[Pixel of Life]

Food and drinks? Assuming these aliens eat actual food instead of consuming some sort of nutrient fluid or something.

[Requia]

Military advisors.

So what if alien technology is X years ahead of our own? It's very possible we humans are better at war than they are. Tactical and strategic skill are things you can't build with advanced technology.

Oh, and that's also a damn good reason aliens best not mess with us......

Our history suggests military minds aren't usually great when faced with new technology, there are some very brilliant exceptions, but a lot of WWI generals were stumbling around in the dark with how to attack a position defended by barbed wire.

[FishInferno]

Interesting thought. In terms of how civilizations evolve, what if becoming a space-faring race demands that we lose a lot of our "jerk" tendencies to become a unified and cooperative race? Competition may simply make such a civilization impossible if we can't get over it.

I don't know if we would completely lose our "jerk" tendencies. We would definitely have to become cooperative to ourselves, but once humanity is working together the competitive drive will be replaced by other interstellar civilizations.

[Clear Air Turbulence]

We have Donald Trump. You can experiment on him.

[GeneralVeers]

Interesting thought. In terms of how civilizations evolve, what if becoming a space-faring race demands that we lose a lot of our "jerk" tendencies to become a unified and cooperative race?

It doesn't. We're already a spacefaring race even though we haven't done the unified cooperative Kumbaya thing.

Our history suggests military minds aren't usually great when faced with new technology

Aren't great, compared to what?? It's all relative. If you assume humans are clumsy and dimwitted at war? Alien civilizations could be even clumsier and more dimwitted at warfare than we are.

Strategic and tactical concepts are things that don't require technology. Attack the enemy where they're weak, not where they're strong; attack their economy instead of their army; deceive the enemy as to where your military strength really is and what it's doing; wear down their courage and will to fight instead of wearing down their armies. These are all ideas that can be applied in any theater of war, anywhere. And there's no reason to assume alien civilizations will have invented them already, because in our own past we humans were once fighting wars without knowing any of the above.

We have Donald Trump. You can experiment on him.

You seriously don't want to go there, and here's why: you have no idea what experiments the aliens have planned. They could be trying to give humans telekinetic powers.

Yikes. I can hear Clear Air Turbulence screaming in terror through my ethernet cable. Didn't know that was possible........

[Mazon Del]

For the record, technology DOES enter greatly into warfare. It's not just a matter of the items that you presented. Yes those are obvious, but there are plenty of other things as well. Technology for example provides the possibilities that your military thinking may or may not be able to exploit or comprehend, not to mention that various social mores can keep you from fully utilizing a given technology. An example of this would be air defense setups. You might have the technical know how to detect your enemy's anti aircraft systems some distance away from you, it's not strictly speaking that difficult. And so you might see how a particular setup clearly made sense for a lot of reasons, but left a hole due to terrain off to the side. Utilizing this hole you can clearly get much deeper into the enemies defense network before revealing yourself as you undertake your mission. A clear advantage. Turns out, the enemy saw this hole and decided that instead of simply plugging it, a good 10-15 miles back from the front they have another AA setup geared to pounce on you the moment you got too far in to do any damage, but too far in for you to take any maneuvers to escape one of the three AA batteries boxing you in. If the society in question either was not used to deceptive thinking or had moral qualms against deceptive tactics, than it might never occur to them that such a setup could be a trap to either be wary of, or that they could set up themselves.

That is an example of a decision that used the limitations and advantages of both sides technology to drive the tactics of either side. If one side did not have the ability to see the radar the other was using, they wouldn't have even known of the possibility of the hole. Which of course means that they would never be able to take advantage of real ones should they exist. Meanwhile, the other side knew the limitations on its systems and used it to sucker the other side in. If their technology was particularly better or worse (lets say they have flack guns instead of missiles) than either the holes wouldn't exist in order to exploit, or you'd rather plug them up to increase the chances of detecting an enemy with enough time to do something about it.

There are many scenarios that can demonstrate this, but the point is that your technology enables a great many tactics and strategies for you, but if you do not have the requisite thinking in order to take advantage of them, then your effectiveness goes down against an enemy that does.

[GeneralVeers]

Technology doesn't really enable new military strategies and tactics, it just makes existing ones easier (or more difficult). The concept of going around the enemy defenses instead of through them, for example, has existed for a lot longer than air power has. Air power (and the catapult, in all truth) simply added another way to go "around": by going "over".

Whether or not technology can open new doors....it can definitely close them. An advanced military that comes to take particular technologies for granted (such as, say, satellite surveillance) tends to forget how it did things before those technologies existed. Then, when some evil genius sets off an orbital EMP or something, and the entire satellite network goes dead......big problem.

[Skyler4856]

Why do Americans go to Central America?

To see the sights, eat the food (Which could likely be made edible, Id be surprised if Aliens didn't utilize similar organic compounds for energy), may be build a school or two.

[X10Z]

An alien's experience on Earth would be less like an amusement park, and more like a township tour. We just don't have that much to give them.

[Bill Phil]

An alien's experience on Earth would be less like an amusement park, and more like a township tour. We just don't have that much to give them.

Ignorance? I mean, we have boat loads!

[luizopiloto]

humans... we offer humans... you can get as many as you need... they are hard workers and can do anything if you give green paper to them... and some iPhones...

Edited November 2, 2015 by luizopiloto

[Rakaydos]

Totality Solar Eclipses on the seurface of a habitable planet are a seasonal tourist attaction unavailable anywhere else in the galaxy. (statistically speaking)

[Alias72]

Internet memes. They can have over 9000 internet memes.

[Rath]

I'll give them bigots, sexist, racist, and other-ist people.

Edited for too much left-wing crazy juice.

[Ikaneko]

War. Lots of War.

What is it good for?

*stares at you expectantly*

Yeah, medicines and genome harvesting, mainly.

[Mazon Del]

On a side note, I have to admit getting a bit sick of the scifi idea that aliens contact us because they cannot even conceive of how to fight and thus are grabbing the violent monkeys. Mostly because in a lot of ways I think that while sure, they might have developed their society into one in which enacting violence is just not something that would occur to them, they clearly have engineering (they did just come here in an FTL ship to grab us to fight for them). Rather quickly they'd figure out that whatever is going on, it's not an accident and so they can SEE violence in front of them. People willfully attacking other people. Sure, they have no experiencing doing this well, but in many ways combat tactics, ESPECIALLY spaceship tactics are just an engineering problem. Making weapons is obvious, they can control titanic energy forces already, so figuring out how to...lose control...of those forces in directed ways shouldn't be that hard for them to figure out. After that its a matter of running simulations on what might work, trying them for real, etc. Learning how to be good at violence/war at violence isn't particularly hard. With the exclusion of learning things like military discipline and developing such a culture in their forces, I'd honestly posit that them starting to figure out war from a standing start probably ends up taking only a bit longer than us figuring starting with new tactics and such given suddenly having magic-grade hyper tech to work with as weapons (at least, as compared with our current things).

But on to the main topic. I recently read a book (whose name I am struggling to remember) where the US discovers that aliens set up a space station next to Jupiter and is trying to quietly assemble a mission to go there, hoping not to tip off China (who has a ship prepping to start delivering colonists to Mars), so that they can get there first.

[HoloYolo]

Now, we are by nature extremely war-mongering (I'm looking at you USA), and hate even the slightest difference in cultures and peoples. That doesn't mean were that bad. The invention of the Atomic Bomb and a German scientist named Werner Von Braun, we have been able to explore our native system to the very farthest. We plan to send people to our fourth planet from the sun, Mars. I'll leave it up to you to decide our fate/relations.