From: Technotranscendence (neptune@mars.superlink.net)
Date: Thu Nov 07 2002 - 14:05:01 MST
On Thursday, November 07, 2002 2:27 PM Walter Kehowski
walter.kehowski@gcmail.maricopa.edu wrote:
> Your comments reminded me of Larry Niven's
> "Known Universe" that is only now becoming
> hospitable to intelligent life after a "Slaver War"
> a billion and a half years ago wiped out all
> intelligent life in the galaxy.
To you and Spike, I've read the Niven stuff -- and the spin offs from
it. It's fanciful, but one of my points* in broaching this issue was
bringing up the possibility that what intelligent beings do might alter
the universe in some nontrivial way that exterminates them and perhaps
all life. Imagine, e.g., as in some of the ecological disaster
scenarios -- all of which seem extremely unlikely; I'm just using them
to illustrate a point -- that humanity sets off some natural process
that turns the Earth into a snowball -- sets off an extreme cold
condition -- in a few decades. Chances are, humanity and most
terrestrial life would not survive the event. Likely, even if humanity
survives, human civilization would not.
The Slaver War and other such scenarios are basically wars that wind up
exterminating everyone but without introducing anything that
fundamentally alters the universe. (Even the snowball example above
only alters the climate of Earth. Imagine something the resets the
value of Planck's constant...)
BTW, for the record, I'm more with Eugen here: "Lack of existance[sic]
is a far more trivial explanation to
the apparent sterility."
> BTW, Niven's puppeteer race is one of the
> most imaginative non-humanoid beings I've
> come across in all of my sci-fi reading.
[snip]
> Anyone have any other examples of interesting non-humanoids?
I don't know. I think Niven has come up with some imaginative stuff,
but there're many good portrayals of aliens in science fiction, from
Olaf Stapeldon's encyclopedic _Star Maker_ to the relatively more
mundane stuff by C. J. Cherryh in her _Pride of Chanur_ series to the
truly _alien_ aliens of Stanislaw Lem's _Fiasco_. I'm not trying to
belittle Niven here, but I think all these writers excell in their own
way at creating aliens -- and this is a list to which I could add many
more names.
Still, these are fictional portrayals. We won't know unless and until
we actually run into aliens what they're really like. Here I suspect
Lem will be correct.
Cheers!
Dan
See more of my rantings at:
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/
"You wanna get high?" -- Towelie from "South Park"
* The other was to distract from the political infighting on the list.
(All your political views save for mine are incorrect.:)
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