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Notes -
Some hard science news, that nevertheless became part of culture wars.
As you probably heard, third recorded interstellar object is on the way. It stands out of sample of three, just like the previous two.
The usual suspects, most prominent Avi Loeb and John Brandenburg of ancient nuclear war on Mars fame sound an alarm to warn from incoming alien invader.
Mainstream science dismisses the concerns and sees the object as ordinary red colored D-type asteroid.
< tinfoil hat> well, what are they supposed to do? </tinfoil hat>
Not that "we" as mankind could do anything if ayys were really here. See just Avi Loeb's proposals.
Nah. I cannot imagine better way to ensure Earth's swift destruction than to introduce aliens to United Nations. Compared to this plan, doing nothing at all is the superior alternative.
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.
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
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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.
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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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