Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to How humans think about aliens

Nice camo
Robert — (archived)

A person would have to have known you for a long time to recognize the barb sliding in under the Space board radar. Well done.

I'm familiar with a lot of SF in which trade is a theme, from clan trade-ships to trading empires like the Polesotechnic League. Generally, though, those stories come from a bygone era, before common sense kicked in and it was realized that interstellar trade is ridiculously inefficient in hard economic terms.

This observation that trade is not a viable enterprise on large scales suggests that the notion of trade as an essential part of life may be rather provincial, something that can work only on small scales, in the local neighborhood. Just as small isolated populations may evolve many strategies to survive, civilizations that might arise on isolated planets may develop resource allocation algorithms very different from the human free-market capitalism. There's quite a bit of anthropomorphism involved in asserting the universality of one's economic ideology.

Quite whimsical, too, to imagine that the unique contribution that humanity might make to galactic culture is advertising (though if I'm correct that it's a peculiarly human failing, it may indeed have novelty value). You're not seriously saying that you think that advertising is the finest flowering of human civilization and should be the way that we represent ourselves to the galaxy in our first intentional directed broadcast? And representing us as yellow-triangle-chewing monsters at that?

Surely you jest.

Log in or register to post.

The whole thread (54 posts)