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

[Monkeh]

Hmm, let me see. We have a population surplus so how about we give you everyone over the age of 80 and under the age of 18? In return for this generous gift we shall be given the secret of ever lasting life.

The paradox will destroy us both!

[PakledHostage]

an fun story idea would be some aliens who had observed earth and knew it had complex life but did not think it had any intelligent species

There's a short story kind of like that by Terry Bisson called "They're made out of meat?". You can find it on his website:

http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html

[MBobrik]

Stupidity. gargantuan amounts of purified weapon-grade stupidity, hubris and hatred. Just scoop in and spray onto the enemy you wish to make self-destruct.

[Starwaster]

Republicans. The United States of America stands ready to export vast quantities of this unique trade item.

Edit: Oops, I didn't see MBobrik's post when I posted this. I apologize for the duplicate post.

Edited December 9, 2013 by Starwaster

[DerpenWolf]

Someone was just telling me about a new book they were reading called Steel World in which an alien fleet arrives over earth and gives humanity the choice of joining/swearing allegiance to their galactic empire or annihilation. However to join their empire Earth had to have something of value to trade, and considering the fact that all of the civilizations were too civilized to have a proper army, the only valuable service Earth could provide was mercenary work/soldiers.

[Brotoro]

We have a cool computer game about bug-eyed little green guys that fly in space...it's loads of fun!

[Whirligig Girl]

Our crust is full of relatively rare minerals for planetary crusts to have.

[tetryds]

Don't come to us, we are hostile.

I'm talking seriously.

[nhnifong]

We have a cool computer game about bug-eyed little green guys that fly in space...it's loads of fun!

You're right! this is loads of fun! We'll buy 100,000 licenses In exchange we give you a 1 Petawatt galactic torque dynamo!

Edited December 10, 2013 by nhnifong

[Starwaster]

We have a cool computer game about bug-eyed little green guys that fly in space...it's loads of fun!

Dood that's awesome!! Where can I buy it? I've looked everywhere!!!

Our crust is full of relatively rare minerals for planetary crusts to have.

And I thought my mom was lyingnwhen she said the crust was the best part...

[AngelLestat]

Sorry if someone mention this before.

Stupidity. We can sell that by tons.

[xzxvrx]

We have your Elon Musk. If you want him back, prepare to pay up.

[qeveren]

Pretty much the only things I can think of that would be of any value to interstellar-capable aliens would be cultural in nature; eg. artistic expression and language.

[Galacticruler]

Hmmm...rare minerals, and slaves/test subjects.

Really, if they come to "trade", they can take all the swaggots.

[OrtwinS]

Stupidity. gargantuan amounts of purified weapon-grade stupidity, hubris and hatred. Just scoop in and spray onto the enemy you wish to make self-destruct.

Republicans. The United States of America stands ready to export vast quantities of this unique trade item.

Edit: Oops, I didn't see MBobrik's post when I posted this. I apologize for the duplicate post.

BWHAHAHAhaha... Oh THANK YOU for that. Though it distresses me that even in the (hypothetical) face of an alien civivilization, you STILL thrive on hate (or 'dislike', 'disapproval' which both=='hate-light').

Ontopic:

I think there are very little material goods we can offer them. Cultural artifacts perhaps, if they are into that kind of thing like we are.

Any other bulk of (possibly processed) material is probably too expensive/difficult to haul out of our atmosphere. Unless there is a more specific situation and they want to build a base (or something) in the neighborhood and they didn't bring much themselves.

Information, culture (if they have any concept that matches our affinity for knowing about other peoples habits), perhaps philosophy.

History, being able to grasp how we came to be what we are.

The knowledge imbalance will be a factor 100 over the Euro-america balance in the 16th century. The power balance is unknown since we don't know how dependent they will be on our resources to survive (like our 'explorers' did need to stock sweet water before they could go back).

We better behave on our best, and hope they will not 'help us get civilized' like Europeans did to Americans. Though if they are willing to help us solve our troubles, we should accept and proceed (with caution, though that does sound a bit paranoid).

I wonder how quick we'd be able to solve our disputes when they visit. We, Euro-Japan-America (and China, probably) are the most dominant influences on our world politics and economics. I believe our earth does have enough to feed us all, without breaking down our ecosystem. Will a confrontation with another intelligent race wake us up to our responsibility? Will we overcome our nationality-handicapped sense of righteousness? Considering that about half the US-euro politicians are already willing to condemn half their own population in order to support their individual needs, will we be able to overcome our ego?

I think those social issues will take priority over any other 'practical' trade.

[ProjectXMark1]

'Ranium, got a bit of that lying about.

Also some of our science, you might want to see it if you are curious, y'know, exchanging notes and all.

[nhnifong]

They might not respect the idea that information can be 'owned', much like the native americans didn't recognise land ownership. Hell I don't even respect the idea that information can be owned. If we make an offer like "you give us that fancy tachyon generator and we'll give you a record of everyone's phone calls." They might be offended and not accept the deal because we didn't offer them something substantial. On the other hand, they might accept information for information, like giving us the plans for that tachyon generator in exchange for our records.

Actually upon reflection, we might have to give them billions of hours of telephone records just for them to figure out how to talk to us.

[regex]

Slaves, oppression, fear, and violence. It's what we do best.

[Drunken Hobo]

A different way of looking at things. As others have mentioned, even the likes of the Native Americans formed completely different ideals in just a few thousand years of isolation from the rest of the world. Imagine what differences there'd be between completely different species from another star system.

Or we could just be one giant reality TV show to them, like that episode of South Park.

[Moar Boosters]

Even if we assume the milky way is absolutely teaming with intelligent life, we have one thing that could be very rare indeed.

The specific time we are at in history.

We only crawled out of caves a few thousand years ago, we only discovered scientific method a few hundred years ago, and first made it into space a few decades ago.

It's fairly safe to assume an intergalactic civilization would be much older than our own, so our planet would be like a snapshot of an extremely critical moment in their own civilizations past. It might have happened for them millions of years ago and all knowledge of how they developed may have been lost. Our own scientists would give anything to travel back to when early men discovered fire or the wheel, and that's pretty much what we'd offer for an intergalactic civilization.

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.

[Schitzree]

They might not respect the idea that information can be 'owned', much like the native americans didn't recognise land ownership.

While many (most?) Native American tribes didn't recognize the concept of individual land ownership, they all understood the concept of territory. And fought wars with each other over it.

As for owning information, I would assume that in a post-scarcity/nanotech-revolution economy that Information (not just general knowledge, but also designs and 'copyright') might be the ONLY thing of value. They might not even have a concept anymore of 'property' as a physical thing. What is the value of an item if you can make as many copies of it as you want. Then only having the plans for building it has value. Ironically it would be like KSP's career mode right now - you can have as many of any part you wish, but first have to 'pay' for the plans. In this kind of economy you would HAVE to put the value on the info, the only other limiter is raw materials for the nano-fabbers, and that doesn't come into play until you start running out of planets to disassemble. It's literally the only workable post-scarcity economy.

The only alternative would be a level of communalism that would make our worlds most dedicated communist governments seem positively mercantile in comparison.

Edited December 11, 2013 by Schitzree
spelling

[BrokenPhysics]

The only alternative would be a level of communalism that would make our worlds most dedicated communist governments seem positively mercantile in comparison.

There's another alternative, I believe: They could value the production of information. With material needs out of the way, you actually don't lose anything, if you give your information away for free. Yes, you could trade it for other information, but only until that information has spread enough to become worthless. So it could be considered normal to just hand out your information to everyone you meet, just as you'd hand out tap-water to your thirsty guests.

In this society, the ability to create new and intersting information would be of value. You'd pay someone to create information of your specification, be it designing a device that can execute some specific task, music tailored exactly to your taste or the understanding of some physical phenomenon you're interested in.

For example, you're a skilled poet, but you can't even draw a straight line. Someone might hire you to write a poem about his beloved. And you might hire someone to figure out, why it takes exactly 12.4 seconds to make a hyperspace-jump.

This could actually be something humanity can provide in abundance, if they are not too different from us. Suddenly all those with a major in arts would be rich and the engineers would work at starbucks

Edited December 11, 2013 by BrokenPhysics

[Seret]

Well, the whole point of trade is that it's about what the other guy thinks is valuable. Who knows, aliens might be willing to trade us cool stuff in exchange for oxygen, rap music and tennis balls.

Probably the main thing they'd be interested in would be information on Earth biology and history. We'd sure as hell be interested in theirs. The nice thing about information is that it's actually feasible to move it over interstellar distances.

[PakledHostage]

Well, the whole point of trade is that it's about what the other guy thinks is valuable. Who knows, aliens might be willing to trade us cool stuff in exchange for oxygen, rap music and tennis balls.

Or cat food...

[Seret]

Or cat food...

Quality film. I liked the way the aliens were a bit inscrutable and not at all a homogenous group.