How Much Is Space Travel Worth?

[Divada]

Just a simple What If question: a highly advanced alien species makes contact and offers humanity the technology and know-how for space travel (Star Trek-Mass Effect level) but the cost is that they want one million civilians for experimentation in their science division. It's a one-off amount, and a one-off opportunity for trade. Reject the deal, they leave and that's that. Accept the deal and start colonizing space within ten years.

Would it be worth the cost?

[lockblock]

Do the million get to come back after being thoroughly anal probed?

[Deleted]

Yes if we only send volunteers/death/lifetime sentence prisoners. If they are so advanced why do they need 1mil of us? This sounds like a scam, better back out.

[Arrashi]

Just a simple What If question: a highly advanced alien species makes contact and offers humanity the technology and know-how for space travel (Star Trek-Mass Effect level) but the cost is that they want one million civilians for experimentation in their science division. It's a one-off amount, and a one-off opportunity for trade. Reject the deal, they leave and that's that. Accept the deal and start colonizing space within ten years.

Would it be worth the cost?

Why would they need 1 milion people ? Wouldn't it be easier to get all the data they need from...internet ?

[ItachiZaku]

Of course I'd take the deal.

[Adam Jensen]

Yes if we only send volunteers/death/lifetime sentence prisoners. If they are so advanced why do they need 1mil of us? This sounds like a scam, better back out.

Give them ISIS, Al-Qaeda, the Westborough Baptist Church, etc. We can find enough scumbags to fill that million quota.

[Archonite]

Morally i would be against it. Realistically im pretty sure enough people would be crazy enough to consider themselves chosen in some way to serve a higher power and thus volunteer, with the rest provided for by nations who want to get rid of criminals, minorities or something of the like under the excuse of human progress.

[OneTripleZero]

What a totally random scenario.

But yes, it would be worth a million people. Get as many volunteers as you can, then if you're under cap you fill the rest with death row inmates, then lifers without parole, then murderers. From all countries, split evenly. You'll have a million by the end of day one.

A star trek future is easily worth that. It's easily worth ten times that. This is one of those "who would win, Uncle Ben or the Hulk?" type questions. One is an eight foot green colossus, one is a guy who's already dead. A better question would be if you had to be one of the one million.

[Deleted]

Trust?

Do you realize how advanced they would need to be in order to visit us and to grant access to interstellar travel just like that? The fact they offered it instead of nuking our entire planet with a small object moving at 30% of luminal speed or completely enslaving us shows they are benevolent. With their technological advances it's guaranteed they know enough about us to be sure we accept and use the expendable losses (inmates), and they also have to know how much this offer will tell us about them.

If they would offer an amazing piece of technology to advance us, it means they are very, very advanced to not be afraid of us. Civilization advanced this much could hijack humans without us even spotting them. They could probably just do their experiments virtually in emulation, which even humans already do to produce accurate biological models and scientific theories.

So I would ask what they plan to do with us, why are they testing us if they already know our morals and our answers, and why they need us to have interstellar travel. Maybe they would uplift those people we offered them or volunteered and just bomb the rest as unworthy instead.

If I am looking into it too much then I think it's a good trade for humanity to be secured to not all be wiped out by a cosmic event that can happen at any time without us having any means to survive it without interstellar travel. Smaller scale was during medieval times when people in a sieged city burned their corpses (a very serious offense at the time) so that the entire city didn't die.