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.
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.
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.
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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?
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.