There is one defining difference between us, and aliens that visit earth.
They managed interstellar travel, we did not. That inherently puts them at an advantage to us. Definitely a technological advantage. Hence it makes sense to assume (with medium confidence) that such aliens will be better at science than us. Assuming that they will therefore be more rational than us is not much of a leap.
Agreed. This makes me wonder if a purely rational species is something that can even survive evolution. A lot of irrational behaviors we exhibit are likely the result of traits that have helped us survive in the wild.
If those traits helped us survive in the wild, they WERE rational. The point being, a fictional species that was able to widely remove once-rational but no longer rational things is the important bit. It's evidence that they have the capability, and either through a "better" society, or an extreme but likely stable authoritarian system that prioritized scientific endeavors like visiting far star systems and meeting the creatures there with no intention to harm, are able to make changes to themselves to make things better.
That is not a feature we share. We only occasionally make things better for all of humanity.
I don't want to actually even imagine what sort of hell an proper interstellar empire timekeeping is. Just ignore different planets having different orbital and rotational characteristic.
Just the basic relativistic effects even with some type of instant transfers would make most communication and so on massively painful mess.
At least, we have a well-defined second. Assuming that humans make interstellar travel and/or colonization happen before being visited first, it's not entirely unreasonable that space-borne vessels will maintain the time and calendar system developed on Earth. It's convention, after all (we fudge it _just a bit_ here on Earth, too).
Perhaps extrasolar colonies will have to develop a system that makes sense for whatever planet or moon they settle on, at which point they'd be converting between Earth time and local time for correspondence.
Problem isn't that second isn't well defined. Just that the rate of seconds passing in well defined way depend on location of observer. We already average bunch of clocks around the globe. But doing the same thing light years from each other...
> They managed interstellar travel, we did not. That inherently puts them at an advantage to us.
It means some species that is/ was out there has an advantage. The species that actually visits us could be less intelligent than us but just intelligent enough to operate the equipment they dug up.
They managed interstellar travel, we did not. That inherently puts them at an advantage to us. Definitely a technological advantage. Hence it makes sense to assume (with medium confidence) that such aliens will be better at science than us. Assuming that they will therefore be more rational than us is not much of a leap.