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Based on a current understanding of physics, the only reason to launch an invasion would be to acquire the population as human capital for empire building- terraforming is at least an understood problem and the dark forest theory is more easily resolved by WMD’s than boots on the ground invasion.
Therefore any potential invaders can be negotiated with, and it’s not worth worrying about.
If they can do interstellar warfare, they should be capable of ASI or at least mass-cloning of geniuses with the same biology. Maybe they have 'ethics' that block those two and they're trying invade-the-galaxy, invite-the-galaxy for political reasons?
But how likely is it for an advanced civilization to have such a flawed system of govt?
Very.
The problem with the 'technological approach' to human capital is that its embracers never actually get around to it. They insist on Just One More Master's Degree and reason that they can mass produce geniuses eventually so why worry about it. In contrast, Sex Is Fun(go ahead, dispute it if you want), and women like babies. We had an AAQC recently from a woman who wanted another baby and thought it was a horrible idea, she just wanted one anyway. Making young women take care of robotic babies designed to discourage them from motherhood raises the teen pregnancy rate.
But go ahead, try to mass produce geniuses through technology. That's what South Korea thinks it's doing(yes, hangwon is pointless zero sum competition. They don't know that). The single digit number of their young will attain impressive credentials if they don't kill themselves first. No, you cannot avoid hangwon and gaokao if you have designer babies. Or expect AI to replace us until they paperclip maximize in their own solar system until the collapse of the local civilization turns it into something like Golgafrincham or Magrathea or Frogstar B or in fact most of the rest of Douglas Adams' cautionary tales because no one can figure out how to program common sense. Maybe AI fueled economic bubbles is the great filter of the fermi paradox, or maybe uber-k selection until the kids kill themselves rather than subject their own children to 18 hours a day of school is the great filter. Either way, the alien civilizations which make contact with us will be empire builders that seek to integrate conquered races into (a lower tier of)their power structure; the other alien races would just wipe us out rather than landing.
Perhaps 99/100 alien civilizations succumb to silly governance. But if they're capable of reaching us then we should assume they're actually competent.
An actually competent civilization is nothing like ours. Actually competent civilizations would go all in on eugenics the moment they came up with it, cloning too. Actually competent civilizations would spend surplus wealth not on subsidizing boomers or makework jobs but on building out infrastructure, investment, R&D. They'd do things we wouldn't even think of but would make sense in retrospect, they take all the low-hanging fruit and the high-hanging fruit too.
A popular sci-fi writer doesn't actually hold universal deep wisdom, he just produces fiction we find interesting. 'Nobody can figure out how to program common sense' is a fun, self-congratulatory fictional idea. But it's not actually true. It was based on an old paradigm and has been disproven recently, irregardless of how much people might want it to be true.
There are all these potential objections like 'what if optimizing for IQ results in a nation of 'gifted' child prodigies who burn out in adulthood'? Sounds like a clever objection but there's no actual truth behind it in and of itself. You could adjust your education strategy for this, test, iterate, improve...
'Maybe all this AI stuff is just a great big bubble' is another tale people want to be true. Maybe it is true, perhaps there's some hard wall that scaling, algorithmic improvements, synthetic data and so on just can't surpass. I wouldn't bet on it.
Why not? You could structure the economy such that it wasn't just a few chaebols who dominate everything. You could give affirmative action to applicants with siblings. There are any number of things that a country could do. They could give the top students in exam a harem and tell him to produce 50 kids.
A powerful alien civilization has no need for us as contributors. A few billion low IQ humans are quantitatively and qualitatively inferior to whatever they could cook up with local resources. They would be rightly wary of disrupting their hyperefficient status quo with foreign blood.
If aliens are here, they're doing research to better understand social dynamics because if there's even marginal gains in better understanding the universe, they'll take that cost.
A totally rational civilization will never explore the stars, because the actual use cases for space are not that far. Yes, satellites and 0-g manufacturing are real things but you DON’T go past the orbit for them. Maybe asteroid mining but that’s still not interstellar travel.
Theres game theoretic reasons for interstellar WMDs, but not for much actual exploration.
And it doesn’t address that when kids are optimized, parents want something back from that, which leads to grinding hangwon helicopter parenting into zero sum competitions. Notably higher tfr strata are the ones that are OK with their kids becoming plumbers- republicans in the US, yankis in Japan, and so on. We can reasonably expect the adoption of literal designer babies to have the same effect on people who optimize for IQ as selective college admissions.
What are you talking about? A rational civilization will want to grow. They'd seek access to more resources. Exponential growth in population demands it.
They could legislate and move against zero-sum competitions, especially if they're a civilization composed of geniuses. We can avoid zero sum competitions and handle collective action problems sometimes. So can they. Imagine they've been through these cycles and traumas and declines many times, their history is thousands of years longer. They'd learn eventually.
A powerful civilization is not South Korea with a few more fancy gadgets, just like we are not Ancient Egypt with combustion engines. The whole structure of their society would have developed to fit with their technology base. They would be on a whole other level to us.
Perhaps there are no families and engineers are in charge of making children by carefully splicing together genes, there are no parents, only technical factors, input and output. Perhaps they're educated and raised in a series of simulations carefully orchestrated by AI so they have excellent skills and character. Perhaps they're uploaded beings that can reproduce in a tenth of a second, printing out bodies like clothes.
A conservative assumption is that they'd have biological immortality which renders fertility much less relevant.
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It's also possible that we get a lone alien craft who was drawn here following an amateur radio signal after his home planet was destroyed in a nuclear war, which he survived because he was in the orbital guard at the time.
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That sounds awfully confident given that we can make no assumptions about the utility function of the aliens. Perhaps they just want to fuck koala bears and think wiping out humanity is easier than convincing them to leave 95% of Earth's land mass to the koala brothel project.
Perhaps they are the superhappy people, who would simply invade because Earth allows kids to experience pain on the level of stubbed toes.
Perhaps it is just a science fair project on conflict in the early nuclear age.
Even if you assume that any alien life could only have an instrumental interest in Earth, we have a ton of species besides humans. Not that capturing or subjugating a few billion humans will do them much good -- much easier to transmit the human genome and synthesize humans on their home world if they need humans for some weird reason.
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We're all going to be shocked and disappointed when we end up being collector's items, like a peculiar cultivar of tulip.
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Aliens have been following LLM progress and are involved in their own Butlerian Jihad.
Pros: all thinking machines destroyed
Cons: Earth terraformed into another Arrakis so sandworms can produce more spice
Tge sleeper has awakened.
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Somehow I doubt our "elite human capital" is that elite. I'd cross that one off.
Earth still produces plenty of geniuses, and indeed plenty of not-genius tier but highly capable engineers, technicians, etc.
You know what, I could die happy if people tried to make a magic dirt argument to aliens about how we could raise their GDP if they just allowed us into their empire, and the aliens just went "Then why didn't you do that already on your own planet?" and hit delete on all of us.
The alien society that would say that wouldn’t try to land in the first place, thats my point. They would just launch a relativistic impact or hit us with a gamma ray laser or something.
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Impossible; your internalized speciesism is just showing. With their empathy and higher education levels, aliens would be beyond such bigotry and would understand that—if not for socioeconomic factors and institutional speciesism—humans would be just as capable as they are.
I love when people just project their favorite moral frameworks on higher inteligence aliens, no one considers that aliens could be yes chadding highly intelligent speciesism nazis.
No one?
>you meet the space elves
>they are hot
>Immediately they start calling you monkeigh
...and I can work with that.
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There are people who say "would" to Slaanesh daemonettes; fucking Eldar isn't even something they would blink at.
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>space elf society starts debating the moral rights of monkes
>the alien women find monke men’s primitive ways irrationally attractive
>space elf company creates human dildos
>alien incels begin claiming that some fraction of space elf women would rather fuck a monke than an ugly space elf
>space elf women start fucking the humans
>space elf males’ sense of unearned status is irrationally compelling to human women
>women start fucking the space elves
>mfw alien interbreeding solves the fertility crisis
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Oh my god, you're right. I was raised with "Hell is other people".
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That argument doesn't pass any sort of smell test. Even the wars of conquest and colonization on Earth (like the European Age of Exploration) were typically not motivated in any particular sense by acquisition of human capital, and there the conquerors and the conquered were significantly closer to each other in disposition and in particular capabilities/talent than any presumable spacefaring race would be to us. Instead, it's always acquisition of inanimate resources, or land, or preemptive weakening of a potential enemy. I figure the last one would be by far the most relevant one on a space scale.
If we (or, better: someone less sentimental, like the Victorians, the Saudis or the Chinese) went to Alpha Centauri and discovered a race of sentient insectoids somewhere around the development and intellectual level of Aboriginal Australians at the time of contact (but without aesthetics or ethics that are appealing or recognisable to us), do you actually think we would be integrating them for insectoid capital, as opposed to keeping a few specimens for study and either declaring the place a nature preserve or exterminating them and proceeding to colonise or strip-mine the place?
...Have you never heard of Slavery? The Triangle Trade?
Human capital != creative intellectual ability
If the sentient insectoids could do warehouse work, there would be millions of them in the inland empire in a few years. That goes double for Victorians or Saudis.
Considering that @hydroacetylene explicitly said, quote, "Earth still produces plenty of geniuses, and indeed plenty of not-genius tier but highly capable engineers, technicians, etc.", I assume that at least he specifically meant creative intellectual ability when talking about "human capital". Whether aliens would be interested in us as slaves for their menial labour is a different question, but that would certainly require certain additional circumstances (such as them having the technology to build us habitats in which we can be employed to do work they need, but not to just automate the same work or terraform our planet for themselves).
Slaves don't need to be used purely as manual labor.
Intelligent slaves offer advantages over intelligent free peers. Our insect owners don't have to worry (for a few centuries at least!) about a high level human slave becoming Hive President.
We theorize about creating self replicating intelligent machines. We are, once properly aligned, self replicating intelligent machines.
This comment makes me feel like there's a scifi story or alternate universe somewhere where humans, on the cusp of inventing AGI, get invaded by intelligent aliens, somehow miraculously defeat them, and discover that raising and reproducing these aliens is actually much cheaper on a per-intelligence basis than building servers or paying AI engineers, leading to AI dev being starved of resources in favor of advancing alien husbandry. Conveniently, the AI label/branding could remain as-is, for Alien Intelligence.
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What are you talking about? Acquiring the civilian population of weaker powers has been a key goal of conquest since ever. The Bible records thé wise men of Israël relocated to act as advisors in Babylon. The Romans were furious when archimedes was slaughtered in the sack of Syracuse. And the British empire used Indian soldiers extensively.
No, it hasn't. Taking slaves has generally been a method of offsetting the costs and risks of war, not a primary war aim at the civilization scale. Babylon conquered Israel because Israel refused to submit to imperial power and/or violated suzerainty. The Romans were not sacking Syracuse to capture Archimedes, but to subdue the polity. The British Empire was not in India to gain Indian soldiers, they were there to secure value and resources for the homeland. Indian soldiers made that cheaper from the perspective of the homeland.
The sepoys enabled British control over east Africa, and fought the empire’s wars broadly. They weren’t just a local skirmisher force.
The Romans used Greek slaves for intellectual tasks so extensively it was a standard trope; they also used the levies of conquered peoples to capture more territory.
‘Having others to boss around’ is the entire point of an empire. Putin originally wanted to capture Ukraine intact, before that proved impractical and he started turning cities into grozny. The default historical empire has been ‘pay me, send your best and brightest to contribute to my economy and your troops to fight in my army, other than that just stay quiet’.
But sepoys for controlling east Africa weren't the reason for invading India either, which is the rather more important distinction for Britain's motives for going into India.
We've enough of the historical record recorded to have pretty unambiguous rationales for the East India Company's conquest of India, and 'to get forces to control east Africa' wasn't one of them. The British Empire might have cared about capturing markets for the sake of captive markets, and it absolutely engaged in slavery/don't-call-it-slavery in the process, but it just as definitively did not approach its empire building with the mindset of a Paradox strategy gamer prioritizing pop accumulation. No particular part of the empire was set up for maximizing population value from a government-utility advantage, which is one of the kinder things to say of the British Empire.
As with most imperialist states, hefty cultural chauvenism on the part of the conqueror broadly squandered potential population contributions from subjugated people, as opposed to any real policy of cultivating and extracting, well, high-value human capital.
There was no single 'invasion' of India, in any case, but control of India's europeanized human capital was part of the motive for direct British control over the subcontinent; that's why it happened after the sepoy revolt.
British culture was(and is) legitimately better at everything that matters compared to Hindoo culture; many castes performed close enough to Imperial par when properly anglicized.
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I don't think Indian soldiers count as "human capital" exactly, and either way we are already at the point in the tech tree where meat soldiers are starting to get obsoleted by drones. As for the other two examples, the Archimedes one seems like a fairy tale, and the Bible "record" does not seem particularly compelling either given that it was written by Israelites as part of a larger book singing the praises of their own wise men, so they would have all the motivation to make up a story to make them look good. Compare the wall of modern fiction where audience/author avatars get abducted by foreign cultures and placed in in improbably influential roles (like the waste heap of isekai manga), or older ones such as Marco Polo's fanciful claim about being made a government official by Kublai Khan's court.
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