Talk:Jimmy Rex/@comment-27517770-20170510024911

Most popular alien movies and books have as an underlying premise the idea that we will have at least some basic level at which we will be able to understand the motivations of the aliens, i.e. they are here to destroy us because they are hovering over our cities with their spaceships and blowing stuff up. In other words, at least some of their motivations will be proximate enough to the kinds of motivations we have for us to be able to understand them based on the patterns of their actions at least.

But that is not necessarily how it will be.

Just like an amoeba cant even being to comprehend what a human being is, how a human thinks and why a human does what a human does even if the amoeba is crawling on the human's skin, it is perfectly possible for there to be an alien species out there that is so profoundly different from us, so much more advanced that we can't even become aware of its existence, can't even begin to imagine or work out who they are or how they operate.

There could be things happening out there that we cant even find the entry point to.

Like ants crawling near a highway. The ants just have no clue, no idea that there is this man-made megastructure right next to them (or what it even means for something to be man-made), ferrying millions of people to and from "work" in "cars".

It's a scary thought.

What if one day weird shit just starts happening.

Gravitaty starts to fluctuate or physical laws start to break down and we have no clue wtf is happening or why and it's because something so big and advanced is "interacting" with us the way we "interact" with ants when we dump a bunch of cement on them to build a highway. What if that is the form that an alien encounter takes rather than something more proximate to human experience, such as spaceships landing on Earth...