This is a must read. It's about evolution. And spiders. And war. Essential reading.

Baen Books. Furay: The Menace from Lydia: The Social Spider as Alien Invader.

So if evolution so often reuses these successful strategies, might we expect something out there like social spiders? We might find a remix of traits accompanied by a modicum of technology discovered and maintained through simple behaviors. Remember that our own brains function on bundled nerves with a binary response, yet collectively those nerves think about building enormous particle accelerators. Spiders are well known for problem solving abilities, and coming to Earth would be a laudable problem.

First they have to find us. Or at least they have to find suitable sites to establish new nests, presumably rich, wet worlds like our own Earth. The drive for spiders to expand territory results in exploratory threads sent out at random. If strands stick, spiders investigate.

Imagine a technology that mimics what spiders know from biology. Von Neumann probes scattered to space might carry explorers who evaluate new nodes, new planets. Each planetfall expands a web work across space of increasing complexity and shifting connectivity. Communication vibrates along the connection points like a hum across the galaxy, with the spiders focusing on attractive worlds. The fact is, with expansion following their ancient ethological roots, they might eventually visit every world in the Milky Way.

Those species that do not fight the spiders' invasion, instead remaining quiet and discovering some way to blend with the spiders, get swept up into the advance across the galaxy. Subservient species of overrun worlds become tolerated, allowed to live with their spider overlords in coexistence, if not dominated and eventually domesticated through dependence. If a few individuals are harvested during difficult periods, that would be a small price to circumvent annihilation and participate on the great march across the galaxy ...

...When they arrive here, they will not care about individuals. They will seem pitiless in the way they advance. There will be no opportunity for prisoner exchange. No quarter given or expected, indeed no conception of such a thing. We will likely not understand them and they can't even try to understand us. We will see a campaign of conquest, but should realize the intellectual emptiness of evolution's moral compass.

This short article reminds me of The Mote in God's Eye by Pournelle and Niven ...one of the first novels I read that explored how very different an alien species ...a superior alien species ...might be. And how vital our reaction, and reaction time, must be (if we're to survive as a species). Very thoughtful -very thought-provoking.

And scary.

Very scary.

So was "The Mote" [scary] btw (2nd link to Amazon). I don't think I ever really stopped thinking about that novel; my mind returns to it whenever I re-consider the "out there" and the First Contact scenario.

I haven't been sanguine about it since.

Posted by: fairwhether at 01:16 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 488 words, total size 4 kb.