Quote:
Originally Posted by Xellos-_^
i seriously doubt it.
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Because you have no idea about the level of technology that is necessary for interstellar travel, it has the potential to destroy worlds. If you consider that potential, you'ld see that such space traveling society must be very advanced in morals and ethics, otherwise it would have wiped out itself long before it was able to do meaningful interstellar or even more complicated intergalactic space travel.
If they learned anything about evolution in the process, than that diversity is far more important than specializing for survival. Especially if we speak of artificial/technological/societal evolution, where the boundaries between species fall.
If humanity at its current society/morals level had the technology to do intergalatic space travel, we would have completely wiped out our world in a few days or hours (and thats a best case assumption).
Quote:
Originally Posted by synaesthetic
You assume much. The easiest example here is a collective consciousness--if an alien race is of a single integrated mind, one member of the species harming another would be tantamount to a human cutting off their own hand. They may not be violent toward each other for this reason, but what would stop them from being violent towards us?
What if they saw us as an unstable element, a vicious and bloodthirsty race, a potential danger to them and their peace? Surely many conflicts of our own have been caused by one group feeling threatened by another, even if no overt hostility has occurred.
What you're talking about are humans. In order for humans to achieve that true projection of power and technology required for conquering the stars, we would indeed have to work together as one, put aside our differences and come together in union.
But an alien species that evolved as a union? They may be incapable of violence toward their own, but due to their shared consciousness, they might never have learned to deal with outsiders.
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A hive mind or single mind species is too specialized to reach a meaningful technological level. Lets assume individualism to be a sorts of artificial mutation that is necessary for technological advance (I am not going to prove that thesis here). Then the lack of individualism means there are no mutations that are required for evolution to work.
By this logic, your hive mind never had the chance to reach that technological level (even though it might have survived it).