Yeah, but in that situation, you’re really just picking up exotic pets. All very well and good if that’s your thing, but hardly worth the effort, to me.
Sure. I didn’t say Bronze Age-equivalent was also an upper limit, I think the more advanced is definitely the better.
I was going to bring up uncontacted peoples as well. The base ethical issue isn’t science fiction, and current consensus is to leave them alone.
~Max
That’s people where contact has been attempted, and have indicated by behaviour (and arrows) an unwillingness to proceed. Obviously, if we get that from our hypothetical aliens, we should respect that too. But we should nonetheless make the initial attempt (as has been done with “uncontacted” peoples)
That may appear to be the case on Sentinel Island, but it does not undermine the argument that those people have the right to self-determination. Uncontacted peoples include peoples without a first contact. If you make that first contact, the choice is gone. They can’t just decide to forget about us.
~Max
I take it you don’t say “hi” to your neighbours when you move into a new building?
I don’t knock on their doors to introduce myself. I realize some people do and that may be a difference between me and others. I will introduce myself if I see them though.
But that’s much less of a grave thing than introducing some culture to modern society.
~Max
Again, you appear to be flat out assuming that a) we would be the “more tech-advanced culture” because we’d have specifically space flight, no matter what sort of technology the other culture had in other areas and b) that being “technologically advanced” by our definition of technology is the same thing as “more developed” and that the “early” culture would agree with us about that and move “forward”.
I mean, they might. It’s a really big universe, and there might well be people out there who’d agree with you; and/or people who we’d just run over like a steamroller (and not have them pop back up behind the steamroller, either right away or generations later, with defenses and/or attacks which we hadn’t thought of). But maybe they’d have developed in a different direction, think that we were an “early” culture for not having done so, think they were the “more developed culture”, and think that we should “just adopt” their culture, instead of us adopting theirs.
Or maybe they’d think we should each keep developing in our own fashions; with or without trading some specific bits of goods or info that each of us thought particularly useful or amusing, but that each society could take without turning into the other.
They might still in any of those cases want to learn about us; though it might be in order to present us as a bad example to their equivalent (if they had such) of teenagers. Or it might be in the same way as I read the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog – ‘wow, can you imagine that there are people who want that!’
When I moved into a new house many years ago I went over to the immediate neighbors and introduced myself. I heard years later that my proactive introduction had been much appreciated.
But: I am in favor of an isolationist policy with respect to less-developed alien civilizations who we may perceive as benefiting from our “help” – I am in favor of leaving them alone for all the reasons that I and others have stated. So obviously your analogy is flawed.
If you think saying “hi” to a new neighbor is equivalent to a first encounter with undeveloped aliens, or the first Europeans saying “hi” to the Native Americans, you are greatly mistaken.
So were those Native Americans who mistook these early hellos to mean “hey, you live on one side of the ocean, and there we were living on the other side. We’re neighbors! How about that!”
Well, sometimes, it just accelerates the contacted culture’s development to a fantastic, hyper-energized degree, to the point where they become a legitimate threat to the contacting culture within a couple of generations…
Luckily, as field tests indicate, you just need to drop a couple of fission bombs, and things will just as quickly quiet back down, and all you’ll have to worry about is a trade imbalance and contactee cartoon tentacle porn.
Dear aliens:
Please allow me to introduce myself; I’m a man of wealth and taste.
Yours, Earthman
It is also the case in the Amazon.
Self-determination is not synonymous with ignorance.
Sure. But they *could *also want to be contacted, and even fault us for not contacting them, and desperately be trying to reach out but in some way we can’t perceive (see: SETI)
So basically, they’re Schroedinger’s Aliens, and I say their right to self-determination only manifests after the box is opened.
They’re not helpless animals to be protected, they’re intelligent beings who deserve to be offered an *informed *choice.
And if they have post-contact regrets, we can Neuralize them, we’re the Space Gods after all.
A thought provoking post to me. The discovered civilization could be relatively primitive in technology but vastly superior culturally or politically. Maybe their anatomies never required them to develop sophisticated medical technologies and so they never developed the affiliated drive for computers and space travel. Maybe their political systems developed without violent competition and they never had the need for advanced weaponry.
I wonder if we’d be smart enough to recognize the learning possibilities from study and contact with them or are we too far down the rabbit hole to turn ourselves around in?
They could, or they could not. It’s a wash and I think tie goes to non-contact.
I recognize no such right.
Admittedly, if we can do that, go ahead and contact whoever you want.
~Max
Naah, tie goes to doing what *we *want.
Who said anything about rights?
You may want to contact isolated tribes and less-developed alien civilizations, but I don’t. If they reach out, by all means let’s greet them with open arms. But if they do not, why bother them?
I had interpreted you as saying intelligent beings have the right to be offered an informed choice. I don’t differentiate between deserving and having a right to. Maybe I misread you - I have a habit of doing that.
~Max
And you’re free to *not *contact as many aliens as you’d like. But *my *spaceship will be doing so.
Several reasons have already been given in this thread. My primary ones are because it’s truer to the IDIC principle and because it’s what I’d want for humans if the situations were reversed.
No. It would just be shitty not to. Rights indicate some sort of legalistic moral framework, I’m just talking about empathy.
A strategy some advanced civilisations might follow is to select certain members of a more primitive culture for special contact, and introduce those individuals to aspects of their own (more advanced) culture. So you could take an individual, or select group of individuals, into your spacecraft/landing craft and show them some of the advantages of your technology. Basically a kind of benign abduction. Eventually it might be possible to allow these privileged individuals the choice about whether full contact should be made.
Captain Cook had a well-established procedure for exchanging gifts with local populations, donating small artifacts such as iron nails, knives, fabrics and lenses. He would often get interesting artifacts in return, and sometimes he’d trade these local artifacts at the next island, as a demonstration of his capacity for local trade. He would also take selected individuals back to England to show them European culture; often this would encourage those individuals to adopt European cultural traits, and take these traits back to their compatriots when they returned. Sometimes with mixed results.
I’m particularly interested in the contact strategy suggested by Ursula Le Guin; her ‘mobiles’ are the exact opposite of an abductee, in that they are members of an advanced civilisation that ‘go native’ and live among the locals, adopting their customs and appearance while still responding to questions about their own culture. This approach allows the ‘mobile’ to appreciate the local culture more completely, and often demonstrates that the local culture has strengths and characteristics that are intrinsically worth preserving and even worth adopting elsewhere.
I’m guessing that if we do find a planet that has an earthlike or class M environment, we will want to put a colony there because those are probably very rare.
So it probably wont go well.
I am not so sure. Most planets with an Earth-like environment will probably be covered in alien biology, which will quite likely be poisonous or at least indigestible to us. Any colony on such a world will be filled with biologists and behaviourists rather than farmers, hunters or miners.
I predict that hostile alien biologies will go extinct as fast as humans can manage to tame wild but usable planets. Of course, such biologies could leak Earthward and clobber humankind instead. We can stay SciFi-ish and posit that this has happened before. Will cockroaches supplant humanity yet again?