Timeline for the intelligent extraterrestrial gift of a single question
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
8 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| May 15, 2015 at 20:44 | comment | added | adrian | @Murphy this question is not about them its about whats best for humanity in a human's opinion | |
| May 15, 2015 at 13:09 | comment | added | Neil | So the world's population would grow faster before we have the capacity to feed all these people. I don't know if that is necessarily better. We may have inadvertently created a global illness that is even more efficient than smallpox or cowpox without the capacity to deal with it. It's difficult for us to know what would have been best, and we know our history. How difficult would it be for an alien species to do when they don't know our future? | |
| May 15, 2015 at 12:49 | comment | added | Murphy | If I was benevolent and interpreting "technology" liberally, personally I'd probably send back a how-to on smallpox vaccines(cowpox pus) as it's the highest utility thing available at their tech level I can think of worth hundreds of millions of lives. I can imagine someone from 2500 having something similar that they could think of. | |
| May 15, 2015 at 12:48 | history | edited | Murphy | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 22 characters in body
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| May 15, 2015 at 12:38 | comment | added | Neil | Possibly, though if you truly wanted to help someone from the 1500s, you wouldn't show them how to build a telephone but rather you'd share with them better argicultural techniques, most of which might already be known, but simply not applied because most farmers were too poor. | |
| May 15, 2015 at 12:36 | comment | added | Murphy | @Neil I agree to an extent but if they also know those reasons then they would know the constraints put limits on the usefulness of the item. anyway. I'm willing to take that risk. If someone from the 1500's had asked me that question and I answered honestly I don't think I'd have given them a diagram of a plough even if it's really useful to them. There's just too many other things that I can think of that would have been more useful to them. | |
| May 15, 2015 at 12:33 | comment | added | Neil | Not necessarily. What if they provide us instructions by which to use to produce a solar panel? Technically that may be the most beneficial technology to use right now, yet we have other reasons why we don't use it. It also wouldn't necessarily provide any information about their tech level. | |
| May 15, 2015 at 12:28 | history | answered | Murphy | CC BY-SA 3.0 |