Sunday Brunch

Your job has gone the way of the buggy whip, your significant other is able and willing to support the family, nothing prevents a radical upheaval of your life.

What do you choose to do?

Sunday Brunch

Which is better, wanting or getting?

Sunday Brunch

There cannot be a "conservative environmentalism" for any recognizable values of "conservative" or "environmentalism."

Sunday Brunch

Can you sense when someone unseen is staring at you?

Sunday Brunch

Longer lives, greater wealth and liberal democracy have killed traditional marriage as the dominant paradigm for organizing our personal lives. What's next?

Sunday Brunch: The Wide, Wide World Of Web

When Cass Sunstein suggested that the web would dangerously narrow the arguments to which people were exposed, I scoffed. Didn't he know that we all read the lefty sites so that we could scoff at them? But now that we've set up an international collaborative of conservative bourgeois individualists, I wonder if he has a point. And yet we do discuss (ad nauseum) issues on which we disagree. The web: home of pornography and viewpoint confirmation, or scene of fertile international argumentation (and pornography)?

Sunday Brunch

We're going to try something new here at the blog that dare not speak its name: a Sunday topic for general discussion not tied to current events, evolution or religion.

Today's topic is a new trope I've noticed wending its way through SF. If we assume that intelligent life is not rare and that faster-than-light space travel is not difficult, then there is likely to be a highly xenophobic space-traveling race. This race will see any other intelligent species as a threat to itself (because it is a threat to any other intelligent species) and do its best to wipe such a race out as early as possible. In other words, our attempts to contact other intelligent beings might be a signpost saying "Hey, kill us next."

I have two questions. First, is this scenario likely assuming, for the sake of argument, that other intelligent life exists? Second, should we change our actual behavior (SETI, space probes with star maps, radiating radio waves, etc.) because of the chance of FTL capable xenophobes?