Imagine, for a moment, that Gene Roddenberry was right and that the galaxy is chock-full of humanoid alien cultures, many of which have faster-than-light travel. Imagine further that there’s a big honking deposit of dilithilium crystals in the Marianas Trench.* Let’s further say that the galaxy needs dilithium, so an alien corporation comes to Earth and establishes mining operations. A mother ship establishes itself in orbit and sends down shuttles or whatever to set up a mining platform; once that’s set up, the extracted dilithium ore is teleported up to the mother ship. Note that they don’t ask permission; they just announce their presence and get to work.
Now the aliens aren’t monsters. They do their mining in an environmentally resposible way, releasing neither greenhouse gases or mass-murdering kaiju; they handle any toxic byprodcuts of their operation before we’re ever aware of them, and they don’t massacre the deep-sea life or whatnot. But for all that they’re not interested in sharing either their tech or the dilithium with us, even though the combination of the two would be the solution to many of the world’s problems; nor do they pay any terrestrial government a penny in royalties for their mining operations.; and they plan to take every bit of dilithium they can get, then leave. Forcing the mother ship out of orbit or disabling the mining platform is not an option; both have force shield technology we haven’t a prayer of cracking. Likewise interfering with the transporters is beyond our capability. They don’t interact with us at all; they have their own food supplies and so forth, and think humans are too stinky to boink.
Nonetheless the UN protests to the mother ship, which dutifully passes on the complaint to the galactic federation. A week later we get a response in which the galactic federations asks us to explain why we have greater moral right to the dilithium than they do.
What answer should we give?
*Only once, just for twenty minutes, blah blah blah.
You’ll have to cook up an answer. I’m gonna be busy figuring out how to blow the fracking mothership out of the sky. Or dying in a glorious attack on the mining platform.
I think you’re confused. I didn’t ask why the alien corporation says they should mine; their answer is obviously going to be, “Because we can.” I’m asking what moral or ethical justification you are going to wan tot give the Interstellar Diet for insisting that Dilithium Inc. pay royalties or otherwise compensate the Earth’s peoples for what it’s doing.
Maybe official policy in the Diet is that whatever is good for Dilithium Inc is good for the galaxy. But there’s a large minority who thinks this is immoral, and they want to use Earth as an example in pushing through legislation to prohibit what’s happening. What argument will you make?
Excellent point! Imagine that the UN starts getting revenues independent of its member states. That’s the start of a slippery slope to One World Government, I tells ya.
Of course, an intergalactic government would probably insist on that anyway…
And let’s say they respond like this:
*
Look, we’re not monsters. We have Tasmanias and Trails of Tears in our own history, and we’re ashamed of them; we spit on our version of Andrew Jackson. So we’re not going to massacre you or enslave you; we categorically state that we have no right to kill a single Earth sentient or to intervene in your politics. But we regard property rights as something that a civilization must be capable of exercisingn to claim. You guys didn’t know about the dilithium. You have no planet-wide government. The trench is in no nation-state’s territory. Force shield, teleporter, and interstellar drive tech all require unobtainium, of which there is exactly bupkis on Earth; hell, so does the mining plaform. You were never, ever, going to be able to get to the dilithium, much less use it. Dilithium Inc is goin gout of its way to make sure they don’t hurt you, and they haven’t; if they do they’ll be arrested. It is against our laws to harm you in any way; we have taken down bigger companies than DI for violating it. But why should we pay you for access to territory no Earthly nation owns, and whose resources you guys have no hope of ever utilizing?*
But though that’s the position of the current Galactic Premier, it’s not universally held. His party holds about 40% of the seats in the Diet. The people who think that the argument above is crap have about 40% their ownselves, and the rest are undecided…and there’s an election coming up. What argument doyou offer the dissenters to help them persuade the undecided, feckless wankers?
I imagine that’s part of the reasoning. If the dilithium vein were in Texas or Ukraine or New Zealand, Dilithium Inc would have had to negotiate for the right to mine there. But no nation has any real claim to the Marianas trench.
I side with the aliens. Fuck us. We’d do the same to them if we could. We’d even do worse. I saw a documentary about human mining operation on another planet. That planet had a shitload of unobtanium, but it was underneath this giant tree where a bunch of blue aliens lived. The aliens wouldn’t moved, so the humans just carpet bombed the shit out of them. So why should the aliens give us anything?
I still haven’t seen it, though I bought the blue-ray the other day. I realize this isn’t CS, but if y’all wouldn’t mind not spoilering it I’d be grateful.
I don’t think it’s possible to come up with any argument from our own interests that doesn’t boil down to “we deserve it because we said so!” An argument which appeals, in some measure, to the interests of the alien society is the only possible valid one, so if there is an answer I think it must be along those lines. Can we argue that the state of galactic culture would be improved by increasing diversity among the high-technology societies, so technology (and therefore the capability to exploit the whatsitanium) should be shared with us? If we can make that a popular cause among the galactic rank and file, we might have a chance.
Aside from that, I think that in all questions of morality we must realize that bitching is purely academic. The Athenians in the Melian Dialogue said it best: “Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
I’ll concede the aliens have a point, as well as a strong negotiating position, and I’ll hope that the necessity of vaporizing Oakminster and a few others won’t tick them off so’s they change their attitude toward the rest of us.
I would make an argument based on the aliens own inferred culture. We know that there is a federation, we’ve seen beings from different worlds, and we know that they trade. Presumably there is a process for gaining membership. While i wouldn’t make a petition for Earth to join, I would argue that Dilithium Inc’s actions are tantamount to total exile of the human race from interstellar travel. Since Humanity has begun intersolar system space flight, and the Federation recognizes us as a sentient race it would be unfair to relegate us eternally to our own system. We realize that Earth does not possess the necessary materials for their technology, but we DO have Dilithium, A much needed resource. Therefore they ought to trade us the dilithium for unrefined unobtanium and let us make our own progression to the stars. When we figure out how to invent the tech needed, we can join and trade other resources for the fuel.
I would assume they’d give us the alien equivalent of $24 dollars worth of blankets, mirrors, beads and other trading goods just to buy us off and keep us from making too much of a stink.
(Galactic parliamentary politics aside…)
You can’t know for certain that we will never, ever get this dilithium. Merely the act of taking all of Earth’s supply of it makes that a self-fulfilling prediction. Even without the help of you aliens, we are an ever-progressing civilization. If technology that needs dilithium can exist, we humans will eventually discover it, but not if you take it all away.
We’re still the ones sitting on this pile. We’ll need it later, I assure you. (Especially now that we know such technology exists. Look how much technology vital to civilization was only invented once, then copied.) Sure, you can take it if you want, but don’t assume it’ll be easy (read that as “cost-effective”) if you don’t have our cooperation.
Being an enterprising species, however, we’d certainly be willing strike a deal. The payment you offer has to be of real value to us. None of that trinkets-for-Manhattan bullcrap we pulled on ourselves. No, we want technology, and whatever materials beyond dilithium we need that we don’t have as much of. Medical technology would be nice, but only if it’s adaptable to our physiology. Weapons tech that we can use to deter other factions of aliens from not dealing economically with us would be useful.
Since this is now a planet-wide issue, I hope that you don’t mind that we take this opportunity to finally form that world government our stunned populace now realizes is necessary. It might take a little bit of planning, so can you hold off for a few years? Thanks.
They have the force field tech. (I’m assuming that DI, being a private organization, is not allowed BFGs & such.) Even if they had negotiated a license, they’d be idiots to let the force fields down; my cite is human history.
