Nigel Holmes rocks my world

[richardthinks]

When I run a course on the business of history and the myth of objective reporting I think I'll use a bunch of Nigel Holmes infographics to talk about methods of argumentation. His (slightly slow) piece on the national debt has a delightful Powers of 10 kind of emotive clarity to it.

It also has an honesty about its purpose (while being sneakily

Comments

[jordan179]

Hawking's speculation makes perfect sense to me. A civilization that reached Kardashev Type II status (exploiting all the resources of its whole star system) and went beyond that to the point of using up the resources of its star system would be wealthy to a degree that interstellar travel might well be no more costly to them than outfitting small ships might be to 16th century Europeans (rich people could easily afford it, middle-class people could do it by pooling resources). As to what they would want to take from us, if they were past Type II the answer might be "the matter and energy in our solar system."

The argument about a limit based on lifespans is even sillier. Quite aside from the likelihood that humans will someday become "emmortal" (in Stapleford's turn, meaning "no death by aging"), there is no particular reason why an alien species has to have the same lifespan as ourselves. Furthermore, if they really were nomadic, living out of large starships, they might well define "home" as their particular starship, and hence feel no particular inconvenience from being between systems at any particular moment.

As to why they would do this, "why not?" There's little we could do to resist power and technology on such a scale, and they might value our lives less than the 19th-century British did the Tasmanians. Do we agonize about the effect that farming a field has on small rodents living in that field?

I take exception to your "21st century Americans" comment only because you chose to say "Americans," when in fact it would be more honest to say humans. Consider the way that humans today treat the other great apes and the elephants, despite increasingly strong evidence that they are sapient just like ourselves (just a bit stupider than ourselves, and I mean "just a bit" quite literally: Koko has scored consistently in the 70-85 level on IQ tests, which would make her merely between high moron and dull normal by human standards). And most of the humans who abuse African and Asian mammals are, for obvious reasons, not Americans!

Which is not to say that we wouldn't, if they lived in North America. Our blindness to the moral claim to rights from nonhumans upon humans is species-wide, neither limited to nor absent from any particular nationality.

[richardthinks]

Sorry - I moved the content relevant to this comment into its own post, so this appears orphaned. I'll post a link from there back here.

For once you and I seem to be in broad agreement on all important points. You're right about the cultural chauvinism of "Americans." I've replaced it with the equally chauvinistic but more exculpating term "we."