To paraphrase host Morgan Freeman on a recent episode of Through the Wormhole, “many scientists today believe our first contact with extraterrestrials visiting Earth is more likely to be aggressive than peaceful.”
Certainly, such an encounter would not be like our opponent bringing a knife to a knife fight, or even bringing a gun to a knife fight; it would be like them bringing a cache of ICBMs to a snowball fight. So, let’s hope aggression coupled with super-intelligence is not common in the Universe.
So, do the odds really favor super-intelligent beings being aggressive and also motivated to visit Earth? I think not, for a few reasons:
· We’re agressive, they must be too: fallacy. The point was made that humans have advanced to the point of putting a probe on Titan, and we’re still a war-like society (implying that evolved intelligence does not preclude aggressiveness, which is a self-evident point). I think this is a red herring. An intelligence that has harnessed interstellar or intergalactic travel will be an order of magnitude more advanced than one only able to shoot a probe to a nearby moon, so it’s not an apples to apples equivalency.
Tired tropes to the contrary, it’s safe to say that humans are the most intelligently advanced species on Earth and also the most empathetic. It’s a short road from empathy to altruism. It’s equally apparent that lower intelligences on Earth, arthropods for example, exhibit no empathy—trigger an orb weaver’s vibratory sensory nerves and he’ll wrap, tenderize and drink you with no remorse, even if you’re his mate (we’re assuming, in this scenerio, that you’re a spider, not a human with some type of arachno-fetish :)).
Advance the intelligence quotient to mammalian proportions and we start to see examples of empathy. I believe accounts of porpoises saving humans, humpback whales protecting seal pups from orcas, and even orcas saving seal pups that are in distress* are clear examples of inter-species altruistic behavior (not fully developed, but at least embrionic, with potential to grow). So, at least with regard to life on Earth (which could very well share the same type of nucleotide template with all life in the Universe), it appears that advancement in intelligence not only goes hand-in-hand with advancement in technology, but also with advancement in compassion as a species. As a species whose intelligence has advanced only to we-can-put-a-probe-on-a-nearby-moon level, it’s not surprising that we’ve still got a lot of aggression to evolve away from. But, as John Lennon may have sung it, *“you have to admit it’s getting better, a little better all the time”. *When (if) we, as a species, reach we-can-travel-to-the-next-galaxy level intelligence, I think it’s a safe bet we’ll treat other species even better than we do now. I think low intellegence favors absolute aggression; human-level intellegence favors a mixture of aggression/non-aggression and super-intellegence favors absolute non-aggression.
·Aggressive civilizations may not survive long enough to threaten us. With our still, admittedly war-mongering and luke warm-environmentally sensitive natures, if humans possessed truly planet-destructive weapons or resource-depleting machines, given enough time, we’d probably use them and never reach the level of technology necessary for us to threaten any extra-terrestrial civilization. We’ll kill ourselves before we can kill them. The same rule applies to them.
·Would they really come all this way for inorganic resources? You’ve got to figure, super-intelligent civilizations, if they exist, are probably dispersed pretty far and apart throughout the universe—not star systems apart, but galaxies apart. I’m confident that intergalactic travel, no matter how advanced the technology has evolved, will always be an expensive trip. Surely, any civilization from another galaxy will be able to find whatever inorganic material they need much close to home.
·Would they really come all this way for organic resources? What, they’re going to travel all this way just to eat us? How would they even know we taste good or don’t cause indigestion? It would be like booking a first class flight from LA to Paris just to order your first plate of escargot (i.e. stupid idea: they have snails in LA; you may not like snails; foreign snails may give you the runs; French people are odd and don’t like you). You’ve got to figure a super-intelligent civilization has harnessed the technology to grow food domestically, or at least find a planet of dumb life-forms to eat much closer to home. Travel all this way to make slaves of us? Again, synthetic slaves (e.g. robots) would be much cheaper.
·Would they travel all this way to find a ready-made habitable planet? This, I believe, is the most compelling argument to envision an aggresive extra-terrestrial civilization visiting Earth. In this case, the risk/benefit ratio may favor traveling far for a big payoff. But, still I ask, at that level of technology, wouldn’t it simply be more cost-effective to terraform a local planet for those aggresive civilizations with the know-how?
Conclusion: I’m not arguing that super-intelligent civilizations, if they exist at all, are necessarily all non-aggressive and benevolent in nature, just that there should be proportionally more of them than those with aggressive natures. And, even if there were equal portions of both types, it would be the benevolent ones who’d be more likely to travel far distances to visit us. A civilization seeking only resources would be motivated to find them close to home, as cheaply as possible. But, pushing the frontier, visiting as many civilizations as possible, would be the sine qua non of an advanced benevolent civilization bent on a mission of intergalactic good will. Perhaps they would even be extra-motivated to reach us first, ahead of any world-conquering campaigns their advanced reconnaissance get wind of, to champion our excistance and act as our protector.
Debate?
Bonus Question: On the same episode or TTW, they discussed ways in which an advanced extra-terrestrial civilization could send a message that we would successfully receive. They mentioned the limitations of a couple obvious methods (e.g. broadcasting any type of electro-magnetic signal would only be intercepted by us if we were listening at the exact moment the signal passed Earth; any type of hard evidence left on Earth before we were around would most likely be irretrievably decomposed and buried by now). But one scientist proposed a very novel method that could have been used to leave us a “you are not alone” type message long before we even evolved into humans: manipulating the nucleotide bases in non-expressed areas of our DNA into non-random sequences. Since large parts of our DNA are non-vital and passed on through speciation, this would be a harmless, virtually permanent method of contact. Question-1: is this, or is this not one of the coolest ideas you’ve ever heard? Question-2: do you think our DNA contains a message? If so, what do you think it is? My guess is something along the lines of, “don’t take any wooden nickels.”
*I recall a documentary from a while back showing a pair of orcas “playing catch” with a seal, flipping him high in the air, whale nose to whale nose, till dead, then they ate him. Certainly, from a human perspective this was a mean-spirited act of torture…and, who knows, maybe it is from a whale’s perspective, too. Days later, they filmed the same pair of orcas come upon a seal pup in distress, miles off the patch of ice from where he originated. The orcas took turns gently nosing the pup back to his ice flow, then carefully nuzzled him onto terra firma, into the waiting flippers of the wee pup’s tear-stricken mom…(ok, I embellished that last part for effect, but, you get the idea). Orcas appear to be in lockstep with humans with regard to their agression/non-aggression evolution. Gentle brutes.
