If you don’t believe in the UFO phenonmenon, or believe that intelligent beings are visiting this planet, please do not respond.
For those that do,
how could an intelligent being from another place build such a sophisticated space craft that can stop on a dime and accelerate at ridiculous speeds on their own without government?
Do you really believe they come from a civilization that does not have a government (organization that can steal from others)?
How could it be possible to be so advanced and build projects so large scale without government?
Seriously, is this a joke? You’re basically asking how complex production can take place WITHOUT government. Just read this. This is, of course, assuming that the aliens are autonomous and have a cognitive architecture similar to humans. If they don’t, it’s meaningless to analyze their production structure with praxeology, and further meaningless to discuss ways in which they economically function.
Something like space travel is super complex requiring so many different people to work together.
More than that…there are no real benefits to the first years of trying to reach space. Why would so many different people come together when there is no benefit…at least not for many many many many years. I’m sure it took them quite a long time to reach space travel…who in the world would use up their resources on something with no immediate benefit? Except government of course, because they can force people to do whatever they want.
People save money for retirement, despite there being no “immediate benefit”. In fact, the time between the first government space flight and when Virgin and other companies began investing in paid space tourism is less than 50 years, about how much time you plan ahead between when you start working and reaping the rewards of your pension saving.
The whole productive part of the economy is built upon their being no “immediate benefit”. More than this, there is also a lot of risk that the future benefit may never happen. And yet venture capitalists still invest vast sums of money into uncertain projects in third world countries where the government could at any time turn on them and steal their stuff.
“Something like space travel is super complex requiring so many different people to work together.”
That’s an argument for free markets and the division of labour. Because of the calculation problem and the difficulties of central planning on a large scale, this is precisely why government cannot be anywhere near as efficient as private enterprise. I don’t really understand your post. In the same breath you give arguments for free markets, and then ask how it is that these things could be accomplished without government meddling. Hence probably why the previous poster asked if this was a joke.
We’ve got optics experts, materials scientists, mechanical engineers, computer engineers, electrical engineers, manual laborers… and that’s just to get manufacturing. We still have marketers, accountants, executives, etc…
Thousands of companies get involved in co-ordinating a project like this. All to mass-produce some small electronic components that sell from about $50 - $1000 to the consumer.
It’s a double standard:
Private firm produces microprocessors. No one asks “How would a private company do it?”. They know that the company does it, and it’s a very complex process which they’ll never learn. They put faith in the market to produce such things.
Government provides roads. Everyone then asks “How would a private company do it?”. If you are not able to answer this question immediately, then the person assumes it cannot be done.
So if the government were to be the sole producer of microprocessors, would people assume that private industry couldn’t do it because of the fact that they don’t already do it?
“I don’t really understand your post. In the same breath you give arguments for free markets, and then ask how it is that these things could be accomplished without government meddling. Hence probably why the previous poster asked if this was a joke.”
that’s a good point.
Perhaps, these civilizations are free from government. Thus, they were able to evolve quicker. Perhaps, early on, their aim was not to create spacecraft fit for easy space travel. Maybe instead, as they progressed without the burden of government, they merely advanced to that stage. As maybe we could have done.
Perhaps they might have the added benefit of telepathy, which would work towards increasing their productivity and probably help to keep any governments from forming.
The theorems of praxeology apply not only to humans but to every form of purposeful acting. The only creatures the state is capable of satisfying are rocks.
As does almost any engineered product. Moreover, it requires a complex network of capital, which governments do not foster.
Conjecture. The aliens could have had a neighboring inhabitable world, or a planet or moon that contained a resource that was scarce to their own. The idea that human space exploration has no immediate benefits is the result of it being monopolized by government towards research approved by the government, rather than a by firm who wants to expand their interest towards outer space. In fact, space exploration, at least in our immediate solar system, can be very beneficial, in terms of communication systems, research, energy, etc. The government crowds out and even outright prevents a lot of research from happening in the private sector with its regulations.
The theorems of praxeology apply not only to humans but to every form of purposeful acting. The only creatures the state is capable of satisfying are rocks.
And metals, gasses, liquids, plants, arguably bees and ants as well. I don’t think the borg work in a praxeological way.
Problem is very simple: over the course of the past sixty years or so popular opinion has been led to believe that “aliens” would be pretty much like us. This came about mainly through the writings of various self-appointed “contactees” who described “aliens” behaving in very human-like fashion. For example the crews of the 1897 airships behaved very much like the crew of a steamer: they had a captain, officers, engineers etc. They even looked just like humans and asked for very mundane items (cold chisels, grease etc) which they paid with very earthly money (dollar bills and coins). The infamous UMMO case even detailed a very complex society which, in the end, was nothing more than a gadget-obsessed, hyper-puritanical version of a Western democracy. I am not going to point fingers here but it seems like these alien “societies” are nothing more than mirror versions of what we have here on Earth.
Having said that there’s nothing we can say for sure about “aliens” physiology, let alone how an eventual society of what we would call “intelligent beings” would be organized. For example little is known that starting from the ‘70s biochemists have put forward hypothesis about “RNA worlds”, worlds where the leading nucleic acid for genetic storage, replication etc is not DNA but RNA. From a technical point of view this absolutely feasible, since the only difference between RNA and DNA is the hydroxyl group on the 2’ RNA carbon atom which is replaced by hydrogen in DNA. But the implications for evolution of life would be enormous and have been little explored. All of this because of a single oxygen atom. That’s pretty astounding.
In other words, only an expropriating agent can afford to build projects with no apparent purpose. Sometimes, such projects turn out to have real-world applications in retrospect but these applications are rarely, if ever, the object originally aimed at.
The Egyptian pyramids, the Pantheon and the Apollo program are all great examples of such pointless demonstrations of phallic grandeur that would be impossible in the absence of well-organized expropriation.
Well, among other things, without government, they’re probably not wasting hundreds of millions of spacebucks on bridges that go to nowhere, so I’m sure that’s a good start.
This is somewhat akin to going back to the the year 1000 (or earlier) and asking how the Wright brothers could’ve invented a flying machine without it being a huge project of some lord, king, emperor, or what have you.
That was the first UFO flap of the modern era (not the 1947 “Phantom Rockets” of Sweden as often erroneously reported). That’s history in the making. Would like to write more but I don’t want to hijack the thread.
“The Egyptian pyramids, the Pantheon and the Apollo program are all great examples of such pointless demonstrations of phallic grandeur that would be impossible in the absence of well-organized expropriation.”
thank you Clayton…well said.
another great example would be the Easter Island Heads…these people literally used all the resources they had to build these heads…they ended up starving and in bad shape because of all the resources they used building these heads.
come on…there is too much military testimony from good men who are now on their death beds confessing that the rosewell incident involved craft from somewhere else…they have nothing to gain…only peace of mind.
"Something like space travel is super complex requiring so many different people to work together. "
People perhaps. You’re talking about aliens. What if they are so much smarter that they are able to solve the problems of space travel individually? And what if they live in such an advanced society that getting the resources to build spaceships is cheap and easy? You’re making a broad assumption of similarity in circumstance. As far as using up resources with no immediate benefit…see the evolution of travel, refrigeration, electronics, etc. Nobody goes around saying “I’m going to use up all my resources trying to go into space” when all they have is a lump of coal and some shoe string. The first thing they’re going to do is get that coal burning so they can keep their feet warm while they waste resources trying to invent the shoe. Production in the private sector is a gradual process, which has the happy effect of fixing problems along the way. In the public sector, money is thrown at a project with little regard to feasibility, and no real plan once the money runs out, other than taking more from other people.