Lets say that in the future intelligent life forms are discovered on planets that humans are planning on colonizing, what do you think humans would do, enslave, co-exist or exterminate them?
In the 21st century most governments are trying to have a world where all people have at least the basic human rights but it seems so likely to me that if intelligent life was found on other planets the rights of those beings would not be respected and the first thing people would do is repeat the actions of their ancestors.
There are so many factors to consider. The culture of man has varied a lot through the centuries we’ve already seen. 500 years ago, enslaving people was often justified as being for their own good. Today, we’d have a lot of people who would insist that we should do nothing but observe.
That’s to say nothing of the aliens themselves. Just how smart are they? What level of technology? Are they united politically, or can we play one faction off against another? Do they already practice slavery themselves? What resources do we want from them?
My guess, overall, is that you’d see something more subtle than slavery. I’m thinking things like indentured servitude. Or the new American dream (which is no longer to work hard and be successful, it’s to rack up debt and merely look successful). We’d show up and say “Here’s your new mortgage, and the first year is at 0% interest.”
I think a lot of this depends on the economics of the situation. When Europeans reached the new world they wanted slave to grow cotton/tobacco/whatever so they could sail the grown product back across the Atlantic and sell it. (Well, a few centuries later that was the case.) So one might hypothesize a situation in which this alien planet has some commodity which is valuable, and which the natives can produce, and thus there is economic incentive to enslave the natives to force them to produce this product, so we can transport it back to Earth and sell it.
But does that really make sense? What’s our transportation technology from Earth to this planet and back? How cheap or expensive is it? How much energy does it use up? Seems awfully unlikely to me that we end up with technology such that it’s cheap enough and quick enough to travel to other planets and back that trade of farmed or mined commodities makes economic sense, withOUT having technology allowing us to just replicate or reproduce that same commodity in some other non-slavery-involved fashion. In other words, once we actually CAN travel to other worlds quickly and cheaply enough to make large scale trade possible and profitable, we probably don’t need large scale commodities, as opposed to art/information/plant samples.
And that’s solely addressing the trade aspect of it, not the slavery aspect of it. If in fact space travel is super cheap and if in fact the residents of Rigel 7 can farm a particular type of super caviar which is the most wonderful food or drug ever and is so ridiculously expensive that all of this would be worth it… how likely is it that the most viable economic model is military conquest and enslavement and forcing them to work in the caviar mines, rather than trading them the equivalent of glass beads? Particularly given that there is at least SOME moral or ethical push to treating them well, given the lingering guilt over how we treated the native Americans, etc.
It’d probably be to our economic benefit to pay this new species slave wages rather than actually enslaving them. Empirical evidence from 500 years ago aside, I would hope that the foundations of the free market will survive long enough that the idea of us paying whatever the equilibrium price is for something will still hold true.
… that is unless of course Space Obama approve a space living wage.
I believe Europeans arriving in the New World is a good analogy. Space travel would be so expensive that another planet could not be chosen, or there may be no other suitable planets that can be reached.
Perhaps the Terrans would select an area to live in that was unoccupied at the time, and a situation like the Indians meet the Europeans would develop. I think warfare is more likely than slavery.
If we are colonizing because we are desperate for some reason, things could get ugly. But if we are colonizing voluntarily the universe should be large enough for everyone. I can’t see even colonizing the same solar systems that we find sentient beings in.
It depends upon how m any we can get to, and the value of what we find. Consider the plot of that movie with the big blue guys and natural superconductors.
Halfway on topic, what was the name of the recent movie on this theme? A big, heavily armed earth warship is investigating an alien planet…and learns that earth is gone, and the crew of the ship are the last humans alive, anywhere. Suddenly, colonizing (invading) seems the only alternative to extinction.
As to enslaving alien species… it could go a number of different ways, but IMO, based on current trends in Humanity, the only way we’ll ever become a star-faring civilization (aside from the technical hurdles) is if we become a single, focused, global entity - a State, if you will (Niven fans know what I mean). If we become a State, then we would have no qualms whatsoever enslaving another race, if not just eliminating them to take their world(s).
I’m a bit of a pessimist, but I don’t think that anything short of a forcibly united human race will ever have a shot at anything close to an interstellar Empire.
People like to imagine scenarios like those that happened in Earth’s history, could play out between alien species, but very few of them are applicable.
If humans are capable of interstellar travel, surely they are capable of making androids with general intelligence (the latter seems much more feasible right now). In which case, what do you want organic slaves for?
This is even if we accept that as a society we suddenly reversed all trends and decided that such a thing would be morally acceptable.
And, the notion some have, of us pillaging worlds doesn’t really add up. Just about any raw material you might desire is available in vast quantities between worlds or on uninhabited planets. The USP of a planet with sentient life, is its sentient life.
Meanwhile scenarios where we:
Need to move to a suitable planet, desperately
The only suitable planet we can find is inhabited with sentient life
The sentient species is less advanced than we are, so we can threaten them
…are extremely unlikely.
But I don’t think even in this scenario we’d Crush.Kill.Destroy. for reasons I’ll elaborate on request.
I can see two arguments there… on the one hand we’ve have no immunity to their microfauna. On the other hand, their microfauna wouldn’t have evolved specifically to parasitize beings with our chemical composition, so might not view us as interactable at all.