Lynn of Reflections in D Minor wonders how Earth folk would react to a visit from friendly space aliens.

Spear Shaker of Shaking Spears wonders if space aliens could be among us.

Which brings up the question: assuming sentient life exists on other planets, why would they visit Earth?

The big problem with space travel is that it's time-consuming. Big distances plus a universal speed limit of 186,000 miles per second means it'll take a few years to get to a new solar system.

So let's say - just for fun - that it's possible to teleport things at faster than light speeds. Relativity doesn't forbid the existence of particles that travel faster than the speed of light (tachyons) and never go slower. I can imagine a "jumpgate" where matter is converted to energy, the energy produces a tachyon signal that's transmitted to a light-years-distant receiver, the signal is interpreted and then local energy is used to replicate the original matter.

It's analogous to how a telephone converts local sound (which travels at about 700mph) to electricity which travels at light speed to another telephone and is converted back to sound.

But even with this technology, the problem is that you STILL have to physically travel to a destination planet to build the first jumpgate. Once it's set up, all future travel to the planet is cheap, easy, and instantaneous, but there has to be something on the new planet that's valuable enough to justify the initial set-up cost.

Which brings up the question: What does Earth have that couldn't be created better, faster, and cheaper closer to the aliens' homeworld?

I don't think it would be anything physical. If their technology is sufficiently advanced to create jumpgates, surely it's advanced enough to construct whatever material they want, sub-atomic-particle by sub-atomic-particle.

So if they don't want our stuff, what DO they want?

Our stories.

TV, movies, books, maybe even our blogs.

*waits for laughter to die down*

Yeah, I know, but here's my reasoning: all sentient beings have one thing in common - the continued struggle for existence. Whether death comes from old age, disease, murder, or even the impersonal accidents of nature, it still comes. So if an alien risked death in an effort to better secure his future existence, he'd surely derive some psychological joy from the accomplishment (well... except maybe on Planet Goth).

The importance of stories - the timeless classics that Earthers enjoy so much, wherein a good person struggles against harm and emerges better off than when he started - is that even a vicarious experience of success provides a person with a touchstone of hope. An image to be recalled in times of darkness that life can be good, and that things will get better.

If you've ever struggled through a black patch of despair in your life, you've probably had one thing that you've clung to that helped keep you going. For some people, it's the image of a heroic figure in a story. Whether the story is true or not doesn't matter. It's the vision of hope that the story provides that makes it important.

So what's this have to do with aliens?

They can create an infinite supply of goods, but visions of hope are finite. Earth is a fresh supply of success stories written from a perspective that the aliens can't replicate with a machine. The tales are new, and different, and they can't be found anywhere else.

And considering that a single movie can make upwards of a billion dollars on one planet, imagine the revenue potential across a Galactic Federation.

THAT might be worth making the trip.

By the way, I'm officially denying any rumors that I've signed a book deal with Intergalactic Press, so just ignore anything you hear along those lines.

Posted by: Harvey at 10:18 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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