- Recon Number 54
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- Master Forum Ninja
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Well, here we are. I guess that it was destined to come to this.
Since the most likely form (at least based on the history of life on this planet) is going to be microbial, I don't know if subjugation would be an issue or question.
I suspect that (with that sort of single cell life being most likely) we would attempt to isolate, examine and do our best to understand precisely how it differs from us and where it and we are similar. Then, using that understanding, we would (as we have done before) look for ways to utilize that knowledge to produce new technology that we think would "improve our lives". And if that involved "using" non-terran life? I don't think that we would have much pause, other than the fears of us being compromised and overcome by "mutating alien diseases and/or parasites that we didn't understand as well as we had assumed".
If "intelligence is a spectrum" and we are a point on that spectrum here on Earth, with single-cell protozoa at the "null or near null" of the progression and chimps, whales and us at the other end, I would imagine that there would be other worlds where "our top level of intelligence" might be closer to the middle of another world's "graph". In which case, we would likely be beneath their notice and possibly incapable of recognizing THEM as being at the top of their scale or even registering as life to us.
The idea that there would be nearby (reachable via physical transit) life that just happens to be (in these particular hundred or so years that we've been cognizant and looking at the stars in this way, the idea that nearby life capable of making the trip would be at a similar stage of development as we..... well, that'd be like a bullet hitting a bullet when each one is fired light-years away. Or rolling 2 dice (both multi-billion sided) once a year and expecting them to come up "matching doubles" sometime soon.
If those of us who are "looking up and looking out" are anticipating anything close to a mirror image? They haven't clearly thought things through and multiplied the events involved in life's billion year progression and current state (not final conclusion) of us (which is a spec in the timeline) and then multiplying that by interstellar distance... Or, while enjoying Star Trek, Doctor Who and Star Wars, they missed the fact that the aliens in those shows looked human because they/we ARE human.
[Edited on 11.30.2012 9:46 AM PST]