Paying them wages probably means we either have to force them to adopt our economic system, or steal all the shit they value in order “pay” them wth it.
I was going to posit a hypothetical where the intelligent beings are not technological (like dolphins, maybe, 'cause they have no hands).
They have an organ that contains the cure for cancer in humans. (Or the cure for aging. Whatever.)
I would expect to see all kinds of rationalisation for enslavement/alien cattle ranches.
This is an excellent point. One reason that slavery is on its way out in modern times has more to do with technology and economics than morality. When cotton farming is automated, you don’t need an army of slaves to pick and process it. When one guy with a tractor can move more dirt than a thousand slaves, you need a few skilled operators and not a mass of unskilled labor.
To play devil’s advocate, though, I think we can come up with plausible scenarios. If the natives are already perfectly adapted to their environment, you’ve got a ready-made set of skills and capabilities that might be difficult to reproduce. Truffles come to mind. Not only have we failed to grow truffles like a crop, we still can’t beat dogs or pigs for finding them. Even if future tech can do anything biology can, the process of R&D takes time and resources.
As for reversing trends: In less than 200 years we’ve gone from “slavery is the just and proper natural order of things” to “slavery is morally wrong.” Do you really think it couldn’t go back the other way in another 200 years? Especially when you consider how pervasive slavery has been in human history. Even in “slave-free” modern times, millions of people have died in government labor camps (Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, North Korea, Khmer Rouge Cambodia and so on) and millions are still illegally trafficked for sex and labor.
Also keep in mind that many historical slaves were not the race-based, life-long slaves of the Americas. History is full of systems of slavery where, for example, a slave works off a debt and is freed after a period of years and many of those systems masquerade under other names, like indentured servitude and the company town.
I don’t know about 200 years, but at the point of interstellar travel being routine, I do think it’s unlikely, for at least these 2 reasons:
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I don’t believe that the social trends that have got us where we are are just “fashion”. I believe in many cases they are a function of an educated populace, living longer, experiencing more, starting to see progress within our own lifetimes etc. These things influence things like how widespread knowledge of injustices are, and how we value life.
I just can’t see us having the wealth and knowledge to move en masse to another world, with all the exciting prospects that brings, yet regressing to dog eat dog. -
I don’t think humans will be humans by that time.
Our understanding of the brain is starting to really accelerate now.
I think long before we’re star trekking we’ll have augmented our minds, and why not? If we really knew how to diminish base instincts that were useful but threaten our survival now, like tribalism and raw aggression, I think it’s just a matter of time before we do it. At the same time note that understanding the brain will likely mean we can greatly enrich our experiences, not just our abilities.
So I don’t personally find arguments of “boys will be boys” very convincing – not extrapolated into the far future.
And if they had been genetically engineered to be emotionally dependent upon a “master”–i.e., an altered infant bonding instinct, that requires them to have an owner, or go mad?
Depends on whether the aliens can whip our asses, and how easily they could do it. Unless we the humans have a massive armada capable of conducting a prolonged military campaign, I think we would step very carefully indeed. The logistics tail required for an operation of that magnitude, that far from home (I am assuming another star system), would be prohibitive.
Besides any campaign of slavery or extermination would probably unify the aliens and force them to fight back. We might lose all the kryptonium and tylium and whatever other crap we were hoping to get from their planet.
A wary cooperation and some sort of trade ties, even with relatively primitive alien races, is probably the right way to start. This can slowly progress to economic slavery and divide-and-rule type conquest over time. Contact the British government for details.
I see that you’re an optimist. 
On point #1, never underestimate denial and rationalization. “Those people” always need a strong hand to keep them under control. We might redefine “those people” along behavioral lines (say, criminals, addicts, the mentally ill) and we might redefine what we’re doing to them (say, rehabilitation)
On point #2, that may be true. But I wouldn’t bet on it. You’re one of those people who believe that holodeck in Star Trek was developed by scientists for learning and personal development, right? Because we all know that no one would sneak in there to run porn scenarios or to torture small animals. (And if you respond with anything containing the words “those people” I’m referring you back to point 1 )
Anyway, I don’t want to say that you’re wrong and that I think humans will automatically enslave aliens. However, I think we fail to understand our own species when we think that we’re so easily separated from our baser instincts.
It seems unlikely that we will encounter species with comparable technology to our own.
Humans have gone from arrows to atom bombs in 1000 years. Meanwhile the universe has been around for billions of years.
So, if we’re anything to go by, it would be astronically unlikely for a random pair of sentient species to be at the same level of development.
Given that, Earth-like trade and war scenarios seem unlikely.
I think there is sort of a built in default safety in that any civilization which is going to be a dick to another alien race probably won’t have its shit together enough on its own planet to be able to band together and unite enough amongst itself to figure out the scientific and resource gathering methods needed for feasible interstellar travel, unless some sort of peculiar and particular cultural crucible specifically orients them from the very beginning to the idea of an astronomical manifest destiny.
I think the bigger issue is that even assuming we are generally biologically compatible, we will face the same situation with them that we do with other species on our own planet. There are maybe two or three that might possibly be sentient / sapient, but what does that really mean in practical terms if they can’t/don’t make tools/technology to demonstrate the fruits of their intelligence/awareness and don’t have a written symbolic language with which to communicate effectively (ease translation) with us?
You can say it isn’t their fault - either their particular biology (lack of grasping appendages) makes tools difficult to work with, or they just don’t have a need for them, they are so successfully integrated with their biome that they are “peacefully at one with nature”.
But still, it makes it difficult to tell the difference between a true wild animal, and an intelligent alien who is just really well integrated with her environment.
So forget slavery, we could just as easily think they are animals and use them for ranching or food.
If they were able to communicate with us effectively, though, I don’t think we would enslave them. It is likely though that we would unintentionally abuse or take advantage of them in ways similar to the ways people from different cultures inadvertently do the same thing to each other through misunderstanding or different relative weaknesses.
It’s not optimism, I’m just trying to take account of all the changes that will have happened by the time we’re an interstellar species.
If you were to ask me: Will there be a World War III? I don’t know; maybe we have several world wars ahead of us.
But, for us to be interstellar we can’t still be at the mad max phase. We must be at the “much more advanced than 2013’s technology” phase, however we get there.
AI, neuroscience and neural interfaces are technologies that really seem to really be picking up speed right now. Genetic engineering and VR also have the potential to turn our world upside-down.
If you want to bet that none of these things advance significantly by the time we’re interstellar, go for it. You will get very good odds.
Actually, no, the very opposite.
Humans will use holodecks, or whatever the equivalent is, to live out whatever fantasy we like. Which, for the most part, will be a good thing because it will be an outlet. Everyone gets what they want and fewer people try to screw over the real world trying to get it.
Some further thoughts on VR:
Some people say we’ll never be happy with VR, as it will be a poor facsimile to reality. But actually, VR may eventually feel more real than reality.
As a trivial example, your vision is never completely clear because for one thing light must pass through a layer of cells. But if you had a neural interface creating virtual realities, there is no such limitation: so it would appear less grainy than the real world.
I can easily imagine a world, particularly with replicators commonplace, where most people exist in VR most of the time. Going into the real world will be like going into Control Panel; having to do the ugly stuff from time to time to keep the game going.
This is a tangent from the OP though, hence the spoiler box.
Oops, I mean…you’ll get long odds. A good payoff if you’re right (and alive to collect).
Co-exist. Slavery is uneconomical. Machines can do it a thousand times cheaper and better. We might accidentally exterminate.
You should try and take in to consideration the possibility of a religious excuse for alien slavery.
Do you honestly think that humanity will continue to progress technologically without any regression, because if we do have a medieval type of period in the future than after it runs its course we could still manage to explore the universe but without having developed very much in the AI, neuroscience and neural interfaces departments.
It may be too expensive to haul robots several light years when there is a local labor force.
Pretty much, yes. We are leaving so much information/evidence around about everything we know – more than we can destroy even if we wanted to. So a mad max / waterworld scenario would be pretty brief in the grand scheme of things. We won’t need to reinvent the microchip, let alone the wheel.
As long as we don’t make ourselves extinct, progress is inevitable.
I don’t follow this reasoning. Why should one technology progress (literally) light years ahead of all others? Especially when that other tech are things that look far more feasible/tractable right now.
Whether we have a “medieval type period” in the middle is irrelevant.
Why do you think that people will always act rationally and logically in all the decisions they make, it really wouldn’t be a surprise if the development of certain technology was not allowed to advance on moral/ethical grounds.
I don’t.
None of us can predict the future. All we can say is what is what looks likely, based on our understanding of the past and present, and current trends.
It’s a pretty safe bet that neuroscience, neural implants and/or AI will advance significantly, to be “game changers”, long before we are star-hopping.
I can think of three large-scale (as in tens of millions of dollars), brain-mapping projects active right now, plus obama’s proposal of a $100 million project. All this is happening because it looks like it’s really opening up for us now and real progress is being made.
In the field of AI, no-one would bet against AI that can understand natural language in real-time, because so many projects look so close. This didn’t look feasible 10 years ago. Other parts of AI have also seen exciting progress.
Rockets to alpha centauri…I have a book from the 70s, and the analysis they put is still accurate today. And for interstellar travel to become feasible it’s not one tech that needs to progress, it’s hundreds. Hundreds of technologies that don’t look at all feasible right now.
If/when humanity is able to colonize a foreign planet, our technology will be so advanced that slavery is as obsolete as buggy whips. We are supposedly about 20-50 years away from fully functional bipedal robots, and they will be very affordable not long after they hit the market (technology takes 10-20 years between when the early adopters get it vs when almost anyone can afford it).
So there is no incentive to enslave the people there. Our robots will be cheaper, faster, stronger, more reliable and have no risk of rebellion. Plus we will have no moral qualms about using our robots as slaves as opposed to pre-existing aliens.
As far as exterminating them, I don’t know. If the governments did, they’d have to wage a huge propaganda campaign back home to hide this fact. People aren’t going to look too well on that kind of thing.
If we were desperate, and needed the land (possibly because earth was dying), I could see us doing what we did with the Indians. Taking their land and moving them onto reservations. But I don’t see mass extermination being likely. Most of the extermination we did with the Indians was due to disease, not an intentional holocaust.
Robots are heavy. Boosting them to distant solar systems isn’t as cost effective as using native workers.
That’s how the annunaki did it and it worked fine for them.