I recall an old BBC serial, "A for Andromeda" I think it might have been called, must be nearly 60 years ago. A long radio signal from Andromeda gives DNA sequences. Which the scientists cannot resist growing, with nearly catastrophic results for humans.
From: Jed Rothwell [mailto:jedrothw...@gmail.com] Sent: 24 October 2012 23:09 To: vortex-l@eskimo.com Subject: Re: [Vo]:Aliens Favour Romney <mix...@bigpond.com> wrote: There's a nice little SciFi short story about this (sorry, can't remember title or author). The basic theme is that trade is in concepts rather than objects, since these are readily exchanged, and of value to many. Exactly. Concepts, and the templates for replicators. (Replicators are universal production machines that can make anything.) I doubt we will ever be able to communicate with an alien species enough for practical purposes, but if in the distant future people colonize other stars, I can well imagine a stream of data between the other stars and our solar system. It would include things such as: News & gossip Scientific research Patents and intellectual property Replicator templates for everything from new machines and recent works of art, to new kinds of food, ready-to-eat meals, and possibly new species or important people. If another Einstein is born on Alpha centauri they may send us a copy of him. Novels, movies Pornography! It is a little difficult to imagine how we might pay for this kind of "trade." How could this be a commercial transaction in any sense? Do you wire transfer money to people you can never have physical contact with you? I assume that a spaceship will take decades or centuries to reach even the closest star. What is the point of sending valuable physical objects or currency to someone's great-great grandchild? Would you fax them a check? How would they cash it, with what organization? Who would keep track of the balance, and why? Would you send them a barrel of currency? Why not send them one dollar in a replicator template and tell them to reproduce it. Actually, cash money will soon be rendered useless and ridiculous by replication machines here on earth. Within a few centuries we will be able to make perfect copies of currency, and probably diamonds or even gold coins, if we learn to transmute elements. I have heard that a good computer scanner and printer can already make a counterfeit dollar bill that fools a change machine or a MARTA ticket machine. Anyway, such "trade" will be useful for stars within ~30 light years. After that, the new technology will be old, and the news will be history. See chapter 10 of "Profiles," "Space, the Unconquerable" Quote: "[Interstellar] space can be mapped and crossed and occupied without definable limit; but it can never be conquered. When our race has reached its ultimate achievements, and the stars themselves are scattered no more widely than the seed of Adam, even then we shall still be like ants crawling on the face of the Earth. The ants have covered the world, but have they conquered it -- for what do their countless colonies know of it, or of each other? So it will be with us as we spread outward from Mother Earth, loosening the bonds of kinship and understand-ing, hearing faint and belated rumors at second -- or third -- or thousandth-hand of an ever-dwindling fraction of the entire human race. Though Earth will try to keep in touch with her children, in the end all the efforts of her archivists and historians will be defeated by time and distance, and the sheer bulk of material. For the number of distinct societies or nations, when our race is twice its present age, may be far greater than the total number of all the men who have ever lived up to the present time." - Jed
