Sorry everyone. One of those ships of theirs would probably be able to take over the planet on its own. Supposedly these ships have been observed disabling nuclear missile silos. If they were communists, they would probably want to liberate us. They would likewise be able to do so right this moment. But they don't. Therefore, they aren't communists. Facts and logic :expert-shapiro:
How could a non-communist society send ships to other solar systems? It's possible. Something like Breakthrough Starshot could conceivably happen before a communist revolution on Earth. The USA, a fascist dictatorship, sent people to the moon.
If the UFOs are real, I think that they're some kind of automated probe(s) which were actually sent here hundreds if not thousands of years ago. (The earliest recorded UFO sighting was in 1440 BC.) As mentioned on the most recent episode of Guerilla History, UFOs might have been triggered or made more active somehow by the first detonation of an atomic bomb.
The civilization which built them might not even exist anymore, but their technology is evidently still way ahead of ours, which means it could be quite some time before we ever figure out what these UFOs actually are.
Something is definitely going on, though, whatever the fuck it is. The podcast mentions a guy I had never heard of named Ron Westrum. He gave a talk here mentioning how alien abductions probably aren't all in people's heads, since they sometimes happen to multiple people at the same time or are observed by others who are not abducted.
All of this generally shows that in spite of what people tell you, nobody really knows what the fuck is going on.
hmm, abductions? human experimentation? secretive flying vehicles? all seemingly centered around :amerikkka:? i wonder what kind of organization would do such a thing? must be aliens!
One thing I definitely don't buy that you hear a lot of leftists say, including the Chapo boys, is that this whole UFO thing is a US op in order to stir up fear to get more money for the military. Honestly, that just seems ridiculous to me. Like its the US, the military hardly needs something as crazy as UFOs to get increases in military spending not to mention the ratcheting up of tensions with China serves the purpose far better
Yeah. They own the money printer. They don’t need to make up aliens to use it. They already spend all the money on the military, anyway.
It’s just a bizarre and uncritical theory.
Obama rarely sticks his neck out for anything (the only other times were stopping Bernie and the NBA strike) and he got off his ass to push UFOs
but is that less likely than actual aliens here on earth? especially when the us gov promotes nonsense conspiracies like moon landing denial to drown out likely and proven ones like the hundreds of us backed coups and now declassified records of experimentation on both their own citizens and those of other countries, including their allies. Also, its less about convincing the politicians to buy more weapons, their answer to that is always yes. The real reason to bang on the china bad drums or spread a conspiracy is to manufacture consent and give reason why these weapons are justified, less they end up with a massive antiwar movement. In this endeavor, they try multiple approaches, because "china bad" wont land with everyone, even among the "china bad" crowd there are many contradictory reasons meant to resonate with different audiences.
If this were true, I don't think the government would be able to keep something like this a secret for long though.
As opposed to the wee little secret of aliens?
A few victims that remember some of what you did through the drugs are so easily gaslit into believing something fantastical happened to them, then dismissed for the general public as crazy. And theres plenty of examples of heinous stuff being kept a secret for a long time, then becoming declassified once everyone affected is dead, and everyone alive are too far removed from the time to care.
Disagree, space communists would treat us the way communists would treat a tribal society.
Leaving it alone.
that's the opposite of good. letting people suffer and die that didn't need to.
That's moralising. There is no way to know whether the outcome of interference will be positive or negative. But from experience we should have learned by now that forceful interference often provokes SEVERE reaction that often goes badly for communists. The people have to rise up and liberate themselves from within, otherwise it often goes quite poorly.
there are plenty of ways to know. it isn't hard. the reason we had problems in the past is because we didn't have the basic grasp of science and where mostly looking for new mineral rights claims.
Give me a hypothetical FALSC society and put them in L1 orbit and they could safely and reliably advance our society without issue, and would be ethically required to do so. It wouldn't be terribly difficult either. Like, yeah, our politicians would be upset. But if we could visit the space embassy for advanced medical treatment, get some science and philosophy and like cool space tattoos, in like two generations who would want to fuck around working at the coolaid brand corporate office anymore you know?
I don't think that's true when dealing with literal alien species. It's perfectly possible that the kinds of pattern recognition based biology we have might manifest different political issues if, for example, we were completely different biologically.
This obviously sounds a little like a race argument but while that sounds ridiculous when talking about different human beings with different skin colours I think it's quite applicable to literal aliens. They might be completely passive and entirely non-violent like some species of apes. They might be gestalt. They might have strange parasitic relationships with another species on their planet. They might be all kinds of different weirdnesses.
Then there's the entire concept of morals to debate in the first place. They may develop completely different concepts of morality to us.
They might simply be so far above us that we're more like a zoo animal compared to them. Do we intervene in nature where animals kill other animals to stop that suffering? No. Would we consider it? No probably not. We film the fights between animals and stick it on TV with David Attenborough commentary over the time. Why would they do differently if they saw us that way?
They might simply be so far above us that we’re more like a zoo animal compared to them
Or not that far above us but still think of us that way
we take care of zoo animals, and do our best at conservation in the wild. We suck at it, but we are trying. if a deer was being attacked by a mountain lion and we could easily stop it we probably wouldn't. However, if the deer looked at us and said, hey bro this sucks could you help me out here, we probably would. We have people alive today who are fans of pan species communisms. For granting apes and dolphins limited legal rights as intelligent beings. Such a thing would make sense on the larger scale.
I like the indigenous Marxist perspective that capitalism objectifies and exploits all animates, including the land, the animals, the people, and that genuine liberation means liberation for all animates, not just people.
I think that maybe not as much variation as we'd like to see is possible. Obviously things like outdoor cats and lawns would spin differently.
They would still have issues around reproductive rights. At some point in a species development it is going to make sense based on resources to control populations. if they Are a R type reproducer instead of our K type reproduction model it would be different. however, for any given K type species we can expect them to have gone though issues similar to ours. It would be better for the group to have more units, but it is costly to the individual to produce more units. So at some point birth control would be invented. Then a faction would want cheap labor and try to fight against it. What I am saying here is that dialectical materialism is the riddle of history solved, even sci-fi histories.
For fuck sakes don't fall for batshit propaganda. UFO's aren't real, CIA psy-ops do are.
It's literally just Chinese drones mixed with defense contractors scraping the bottom of the fear mongering barrel:
"Look! Aliens! Better order 15 more of our alienproof F-96 '{appropriated Native American name}' fighter jets!"
Imagine being the intelligence controlling the probes, lazily compiling their thesis and hoping the dolphin/octopus alliance proves a more fruitful union than the agricultural ape hierarchies.
The duty of every true revolutionary is to export the revolution! Our extraterrestrial comrades living on faraway planets year for freedom!
imposing communism with Centaurian characteristics could irretreveably compromise the natural development of communism with Terran characteristics! :picard-annoyed:
I fucking swear every single time this damn thing comes up, we have to keep going over this. The prime directive has it's origins in mainly two things, liberals finding out about the horrors of colonialism, and the unpopularity of the korean and vietnam wars. So we have this thing that's created in TOS so we don't have our protags looking like genocidal monsters, which ironically also happens to be broken a lot of the time because our protags are in a situation that would make them look like holier than thou jerkbags if they didn't break it.
And this isn't talking about how stupid VOY and ENT got with it. Especially the latter, where the title ship's doctor decided to just not help a race after actually making a cure for their disease that will make their race extinct in a couple hundred years, all for the horrible crime of he decided at the end that nature should take it's natural course (ENT episode: Dear Doctor).
Honestly, I see the PD more and more used as an excuse to do nothing because you're too afraid of fucking it up badly.
2022: Lights appear in the skies over major cities worldwide. Crafts, strange and impossible, descend and from them emerge humanoids. A small, grey creature suddenly appears on every television and computer screen. It announces, "We are the United Galactic Federation. Take us to Elizabeth Warren. We must discuss plans with her."
All of this generally shows that in spite of what people tell you, nobody really knows what the fuck is going on.
Absolutely agree. I think the government knows less than we think but want the public to keep thinking they know more than they do in order to keep up the appearance that shit's under control. Also agree with UFO's probably being probes, who knows if the civilization(s) are still around or what. From what I've gathered in some of the abduction reports I've read, they range from benign to outright hostile. I really don't know what to think. If this shit is real, aliens are a true wild card scenario.
I think that the kind of mass production and consumption that would have to happen in order to do interstellar space flight can only come from some form of capitalist-driven industrialization. I don't think you can have a communist society that values taking care of its people, where people live the life they choose and the one where everyone has to go work in a spaceship factory because we need another spaceship to just joyride around the universe. If their automation is so good people can be artists and posters and podcasters without having to contribute labor or surplus value to the space project, then why would any of them care? They'd have no stake in it and it would materially affect them if we exist or not.
Sure it's possible aliens have forms of social organization that are unknown to us, and each of those with their own specific historic permutations. Likely even. But I have to go with analogizing it to our own history since I can't predict alien social science. People don't leave a planet that's safe and awesome and provides everything they need. If they've gotten to the point they've used up all their resources and need more, then we have to consider a form of imperialism.
Planets with water and oxygen like Earth seem to be relatively rare, so a spacefaring species which evolved in an environment similar to ours could conceivably want to take Earth for themselves. But then again, if you had the power to send an entire fleet of ships to colonize another planet, why would you even want to? Destroying a planet or a civilization might not be that hard, but colonizing another planet even ten light years away would be an unbelievably massive undertaking, unless you sent like one ship (with a small crew) designed to raise tons of babies on arrival or something (again, assuming the aliens are roughly analogous to us, a massive assumption).
Although communism is supposed to be a kind of horizon none of us can really conceive of, I think that if communism ever actually comes to the human species, at least some people will still want to explore the cosmos, especially if they can find ways of automating all the annoyances involved in manufacturing spacecraft. In one of the Star Trek movie novelizations, they mention that Starfleet was basically made for all the people on Earth and other planets in the Federation who were uninterested in just kind of hanging out and having a good time—people who were instead interested in going on real adventures.
if we ourselves had the productive output to do that. We would have the technological power to live anywhere in the solar system. There is enough matter and energy in our solar system to support a population of humans larger than can be imagined. The only reason to undertake such a voyage would be for the pure love of travel and exploration.
I think people in the communist alien society would still think about space stuff. I just also think that their planet is also beset by the same things as ours. Pandemics, natural disasters, possible climate problems, etc. Also their global society could have enough counter-revolutionaries to make their communism precarious, like ours is. The aliens into space stuff would understand the situation because they analyzed the contradictions of their society and won't ask to consume large amounts of resources for the sake of a mild curiosity. I think we can all agree that traveling several, dozens, hundreds, thousands of light years requires massive amounts of resources.
As I said previously, every bit of technology used for interstellar spaceflight requires significant social organization in order to be produced. It's not as simple as just having the materials on hand to do it. If you travel back in time and decide to invent the light bulb, you can't just do it. You need all the stuff that was around when the light bulb was invented. Everything has an incredible amount of socioeconomic baggage. This is the part of historical materialism where nothing can be examined in isolation. Things can only happen exactly when and where the conditions are right. That's to say that if you remove some part of that chain of history, then it doesn't work out the same way.
Plus even if you do know where and what you need, there are still more than technical problems. There are political problems. If you need tungsten to invent your light bulb but the only accessible bit is under the sacred tree of blue cat people, then that's a political problem. Having all the technological solutions won't help you. You can either do politics or just give up and find another technological path to take. But that doesn't mean Edison could have just invented the LED light if he gave up on the tungsten bulb. LEDs have their own socioeconomic baggage and require a different set of conditions. So just because there are alternatives in retrospect, doesn't mean those alternatives were always possible.
Applying this to the aliens, if they're communist, they may not ever have industrialized or at least not to the degree we would expect. Imagine if the Soviet Union never had to compete with global capitalism. Imagine if Deng never had to liberalize in order to also compete. Imagine there was never capitalism and so communist societies never faced the external pressure that caused them to rapidly industrialize. They would only develop technology as needed to reduce labor and make people in society happier.
If people are happy being artisans and farmers, then they wouldn't need the technology. We know that industrialization alienated people from the products of their labor. That caused dissatisfaction. If the people are satisfied with their contribution to society being a shoemaker, then they would probably not enjoy being automated out of that lifestyle. They only would if they saw an appreciable increase in quality of life due to that advancement. Since this is an alien communist society, they always make sure the quality in life goes up when there's an advancement. So technology then trends in ways that eliminate tedious, hard labor in exchange for a better social life. More time to spend doing what they wanted and less time doing labor. Better food. Better water. More entertainment. Yes some aliens would choose to wonder about space and what exists in it. But humans have been coping with that question long before we could actually answer it. There's plenty of ways to cope without actually doing it.
Soviets were really into science and technology because they were under such pressure to industrialize. They had to produce and because they had to produce there was a cultural coping mechanism in this modernism that Lenin held. The desire for an advanced futurist society achieved through the kind of mass production that ensured their continued survival. Another bit of historical materialism: everything exists in relation to the mode of production. It's all connected.
Under capitalism we do the same thing. A large part of these UFO discussions always comes down to our cultural projections. We value an advanced technological future because that's what capitalism sold us all our lives. Better living through science. Science isn't unique to capitalism but it was definitely formalized and institutionalized under it. The past 70 or so years has been marketing trying to tell us that the future is bright and the only way forward is technological advancement. Because that stuff was attached to huge government contractors after WWII and was a source of profit. If everyone desires this technofuture then consumption increases and that drives production which makes more profit. They were selling room-sized computers under the idea that one day you could have one in your home. And now you do. It's not that they were prescient, it's that the propaganda of techno-capitalism drove desire and that in return demanded consumer electronics. Minor increases in the features of consumer electronics gave a false sense of cultural advancement. Media played up futurism in movies and literature. The future has to be futuristic. It's not a bright future without robots doing everything and self-driving cars and all the things we know has socioeconomic baggage.
What I'm getting at is that aliens don't have to be advanced. They could exist thousands of years in some kind of agrarian society that doesn't prioritize technological development because they never had capitalism. They never had to pay the price we're paying by creating a climate disaster in exchange for all that lovely high-tech production. If the aliens are like that then they won't be traveling here in space ships.
If they do come here in ships, their society has either rapid or slow industrialization. If it's rapid, then what other than the for-profit motive causes that? What causes you to rip oil out of the ground? What causes you to slaughter indigenous aliens for metals? If they never had to do any of that because from the start they were cooperative and purely communist, then I go back to the point that they wouldn't have these huge interstellar ships. If they went through slow industrialization because they were the chronically agrarian society I described, then I say it's unlikely. The longer you exist, the more existential threats you face. Pandemics, natural disasters, etc. So if you face that constantly you're probably going to redirect your resources to countering those things. No society is stable forever. Communism will come with its own contradictions as everything that exists has contradictions. I don't think it's likely they could maintain communism for thousands of years of agrarian society and then through slow industrialization and then to spacefaring. Maybe that can exist, but I don't think the first aliens to visit would be those guys. It would be the Dengist aliens at best.
while we can't predict how alien live might evolve physics is a bitch. No planet will have giant bugs, simply because bugs are too heavy to work at scale. Anything that grows to be gigantic will have proportions similar to a giraffe or elephant. It was the same with dinosaurs, it would be the same thing with another galaxy. Similarly quadrupeds are more efficient than hexapods. So like on earth you would expect to see those. Because energy and matter share the same relationship you would always expect the historical material forces to produce comunism.
depends on oxygen concentration, we had like two meter long bugs before when there was more oxygen, if there was an 80/100 oxygen atmosphere insects could be very big
if there was that much oxygen their lungs would also catch fire occasionally. You are right I was being a bit overly restrictive, but generally speaking material forces shaped our evolution in to a few specific shapes and we would expect to see similar shapes repeated. Especially crabs. I take it back, aliens being giant crabs makes too much sense.
There are still fundamenta limits. So yes, while there can be bigger animals with more o2. There is still an upper bound because of the loading strength of thr carbon atoms. And the molecules that are efficent to make out of them.
If we strip down the exoskelton and add lungs they could exist, then they wouldn't really be bugs anymore. We would expect to see convergent evilution.
For example, with how often crabs evolve on eart, if we don't find space crabs as one of thr first complex creatures I would honestly be terrified at the implications.
There might be one or two cases of some exotic structure developing. However largely would would expect to see things like what we got. If it was vaible to grow cells that peoduced carbon fiber cytoskeletons to make things super durable we would have seen something with it. They are either to hard to make, or don't stand up the chemical soup inside a body.
The range of available chemistry is inversely preportional to the selection pressure of an environmental. Look at extemeophile bacteria. Sure there are halophiles. But most molecules don't stand up that salty an environment so there is a hard limit to their complexity. They are mostly archaea and you wouldn't expect to see a sizable populaton of eukaryotes you know?
they are waiting for humans to die out so they can talk to dolphins without interference
