Evacuating Earth

[Yoda]

Since according to the Mayan's the world ends in December of next year we might as well tell the alien spaceship to stay put; nothing left to save ! :rofl:

 

[T.Neo]

If we did not have - need - live by money

Then we would have, need, and live by something else.

 

[jedidia]

Whoa, ZOMBIE-thread! Everybody hold on to your brains!

 

[garyscott]

Then we would have, need, and live by something else.

. . . Then would we be worth saving?? . . . :goodnight:

 

[Artlav]

Money - is the greatest disease that our species suffers from. It stifles innovation, it governs our lives, it divides peoples, it causes wars, people die for it, lie for it, and like a drug, some will do ANYTHING for it. . .

Aren't money, at their basic definition, just a system to distribute resources and settle priorities?
If you remove money the basic problem of who gets what won't just go away.

In smaller communities people can be aware of each other's problems and preferences, as well as common goals, and can freely share things and time based on what would be best.
But even on the scale of a small city this is already infeasible.

Whoa, ZOMBIE-thread! Everybody hold on to your brains!

It's been over three years, so that is now a safe and clean skeleton.

 

[Jarvitä]

If we did not have - need - live by money, if we did things because we can, because its betters us as a whole, for the benefit of us as a species, can you imagine where we might be now??

Money is just a unit of caring (although some people also perceive it as hit points). Those will always exist in human societies, regardless of whether it's money or not. Money just makes it more convenient and universal. Think about it, it's just about the only standard that's truly universally accepted, barring uncontacted primitive tribes and college communists.

 

[blane]

Not sure if rich people would get much preference as "buying a pass" would have no meaning because money would no longer be worth anything.

On the contrary, it would mean more. Rich people would pool their fortunes together and fund privately-build spacecraft on the condition that they get a seat.

I disagree here. At least if we settle for a scenario of 10 to 20 years until destruction and it is a fact, not speculation. All markets would instantly collapse. We'd have an instant hyper-inflation, within a very short amount of time, money won't be worth the paper it is printed on. Worse: Precious metals will lose all their values either. Very quickly the only materials on earth worth anything would be livestock, food, etc. And *Nothing* else.

For those who actually construct spaceships, some other materials may be of value. But this would be of no concern to the commoner. As there is no market anymore, all stock of such deposits would be used until depleted and simply mined more to construct the necessary technology to evacuate people from earth.

 

[dumbo2007]

Well there is a certainly a lot of doom and gloom predictions, God help the aliens

We should take into account the effect that the revelation of alien life elsewhere in our Universe and the possibility of interstellar travel, will have on us. Also the appearance of a sudden, shared and definite fate for everyone on this planet may be a great unifying factor across nations. One can go by history to judge human behavior when faced with a common impending disaster that can suddenly equalize everything else. There has been only one other such a possibility and that's the possibility of global nuclear war or nuclear holocaust .

Have we pressed the button yet , no!. So what does that tell us, it tells us that inspite of a reptilian core in our brains, our humanity can intervene with reason and compassion when faced with a common cause.

Furthermore we have to take into account mindsets of people. There would be an urgent need to get off the planet and probably out of the solar system in a hurry. That would lead to funding and efforts to be completely diverted to technologies relevant to space travel with the bare minimum kept aside for the time life needs to be sustained on Earth.

Suddenly it would be possible to validate a lot of theories and ideas regarding space travel that may never have been tried for the next 100 years. I think many scientists would want to see the successful culmination of their lives work. Especially if it results in the construction of projects like Orion or similar that gets a large number of people off this world. Or they would die trying. There may be unforeseen engineering challenges to building the Orion that may need brilliant and bold steps to resolve.

Furthermore, there would be others who would prefer to stay on Earth and face the disaster rather than take the giant leap in courage and faith required to adapt oneself to an alien world(one cannot even begin to fathom the sheer amount of courage that would be needed). These people would just continue with their daily lives and would contribute to efforts on the ground.

Also the aliens may have given up on saving our planet. But we wont(not may be we wont, we wont ). Every theory, even the wildest ones, every ounce of reason and mathematics, each and every resource at our disposal and on this planet would be committed to saving it. And we may find a way. Even 10 years is a long time, especially if a billion minds start working on the same problem, there is no knowing what may happen.

Lets not jump to conclusions about getting off this planet therefore or that we will all drown amidst mass hysteria ! We are probably in the most peaceful period of our civilization in all our history. There is a lot of reasonable people around and when it comes to light that this problem cannot be solved with money or wished away, and reasoning alone can solve it, then each one of us would be forced to rethink our lives and decide what to do.

 

[blane]

Well there is a certainly a lot of doom and gloom predictions, God help the aliens

Why yes, indeed. If I picture an alien race on some exploration mission finding earth, the most likely outcome would be that they leave us the hell alone and make a rather large detour around our planet. Chances are good that mankind will destruct themselves and the aliens might actually hope for just that. In their place, I would not want to deal with such a warmongering and selfish species.

We should take into account the effect that the revelation of alien life elsewhere in our Universe and the possibilty of interstellar travel, will have on us.

I have the feeling that this effect is often overestimated. Sure, there will be excitement and the media (especially talkshows) would go crazy. But in the end of the day, people will take care of their daily problems. The ruling class will make sure of that.

 

[dumbo2007]

Well then the question is why would they jump to the conclusion that we are war-mongering ? Is there evidence of such from space. Ok, they can probably analyze whats on the Internet, but the majority of information there does not pertain to war-mongering anyway. We have had wars in the past, but any reasonable (especially space faring species) will acknowledge that wars are a part of the growth of civilization and the major wars are history. The trend is towards a peaceful world with bumps and aberrations here and there but there is no reason to believe that it will bring us to the brink of a war.

As regards selfish, well I think they will get mixed ideas about that There is a segment of our population consumed by greed, but they certainly do not define the rest. As for the fight over resources, resources are scarce and they may be forced to ask themselves, if the technology were present to obtain food, water, energy as easily as to be almost free, if the selfishness would persist as much.

 

[blane]

Well, you are right. I made some unspoken assumptions here. An exploration mission that finds Earth would include a thoroughly study of its inhabiting species; certainly monitoring the planet over a period of at least a few years. Furthermore I'd assume they would be able to receive all broadcasts and decipher our language, nowadays that would include accessing all information available on the Internet.

And with this I'd rather make a detour :lol:

 

[dumbo2007]

Also about religious fanaticism and mass hysteria...

Religion has been used to justify violence to achieve political aims and get people in power. History is testimony to that fact.
Well ok, so some people ride the fanatic wave and do achieve their nefarious end, then what ? They stay in power for 10 years, then who is going to save their a..(ahem!) :lol: , even the stupidest person will ask whats the point of it all .

We also have to deal with mass hysteria ::sigh:: , so fine mass hysteria sweeps across the planet for a month, then what ? Who is gonna feed the kids back home? certainly not the darned aliens !! back to work it is >>>

 

[T.Neo]

I have the feeling that this effect is often overestimated.

I agree. It would soon become mundane.

For example... landing on the Moon is an amazing feat, unbelievable at one point in time. But it's almost practically forgotten about today.

Ok, they can probably analyze whats on the Internet,

I think it would be very difficult if they didn't know how to decode the information. You can't magically analyse the internet if you don't know how.

 

[dumbo2007]

You can't magically analyse the internet

Interesting

Binary logic is the basis for computers. Surely they would know about it, even if their machine logic is based on tri-state logic or higher . They only need to observe the signal levels in a circuit component or wire to realize that its based on binary.

They can progress logically from that point. Bitmap images would be doable even if they do not know about compression algorithms. They would probably have pattern matching software, and they can put the bits serially through them and get identifiable images of the earth(maybe not immediately, but eventually, there are many images of the earth in .bmp format lying around in computers over the world). Once they recognize the pattern its logical to proceed to compression etc. They would have been through the whole thing themselves.

Its possible to crack codes sitting meters away from a phone by simply observing the electromagnetic radiation emanating from it. Or crack encryption algorithms by observing the heat pattern from a ASIC (more heat..floating point operations probably etc), so they would probably have better techniques. The trick is to always fall back on common ground between us and the proverbial alien , laws of physics are common, so they would probably proceed from there.

So hmm...yes you can magically analyze it, given sufficient cpu cycles.

I am actually a bit more worried about this massive ship they are introducing into the Earth-Moon system

 

[T.Neo]

Without knowing how binary logic translates into specific things you could be looking at a bitmap or text file and not know the difference. If you don't know how it works, it's meaningless.

 

[blane]

Sorry, but rather this argument is meaningless as my point about aliens doing a detour was based on a hypothetical situation in which they know mankind's history. It does not matter how they achieved that and whether it's possible for them to analyze data from the internet is irrelevant.

But then I admit, saying that aliens would rather avoid us is off-topic as well as this was not the theoretical scenario that TSPenguin originally laid out. However, I merely wanted to point out the possibility.

As for the original scenario I still believe the largest problem will be unifying the people and actually make them pull at the same string to rescue as many individuals as possible. Frankly, I believe it'd end in chaos.

 

[jedidia]

there are many images of the earth in .bmp format lying around in computers over the world

There's also a lot of other images lying around on computers all over the world. I wonder what the aliens will make out of those... :shifty:

 

[T.Neo]

There's also a lot of other images lying around on computers all over the world. I wonder what the aliens will make out of those...

A seemingly meaningless string of 1s and 0s? :shifty:

 

[fsci123]

For this hypothetical scenario let's assume an alien race came and warned us about the imminent destruction of earth. They are kind enough to bring everyone to another suitable planet for us (in another solar system), but only those we can bring to a LEO where they will board the alien mega vessel.
Let's further assume this vessel is on a 300x300 km orbit around earth.
How many could we save and by what means if we had:

• 10 years
• 25 years
• 50 years
• 100 years

EDIT: And by what means? Existing tech? Building new ships, if yes, what kind?

First they will need to give us the blueprints to their docking port...