• teft@startrek.website
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    1 year ago

    Him stating that they would need money to get here is why I called him a capitalist. It’s an incredibly asinine thing to say when we know zero about aliens let alone if they would even have a society like ours. For all we know aliens could have a society like ants and have no need for money.

    • Davel23@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      In this context “money” is shorthand for resources. He’s not talking about literal coins and banknotes.

      • teft@startrek.website
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        1 year ago

        So then he, an astronomer, has a basic misunderstanding of the amount of resources the universe holds. I’m guessing that isn’t the case and he means money.

        • snooggums@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          He is trying to word a message that can be understood by people who don’t know enough about science to understand how much energy it takes to move a tiny bit matter to lightspeed, or that we still don’t have a theory for faster than lightspeed travel that doesn’t break the known properties of the universe.

          He wasn’t speaking literally about money.

    • norbert@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Ant-like species seem unlikely to develop meaningful interstellar travel. To advance to the level of research and resource processing likely required to reach Earth, or even just communicate with other species seems like it would’ve developed commerce at some point, even if it’s a utopian collectivist society, they need some sort of resource allocation methodology and would need to agree to focus finite resources on free developing the kind of tech necessary for interstellar travel.

      I mean yeah, interstellar bugs might be a thing but contact with them would be far less exciting than contact with a truly intelligent spacefaring race.

      • teft@startrek.website
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        1 year ago

        You’re making assumptions about alien life. It’s an unknown unknown. We have no way to conceive how any hypothetical alien society is arranged. You don’t know how they might allocate resources. Therefore to say something so silly as “it would take a lot of alien money” requires just as absurd of a reply.