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As Stephen Hawkings and Neil deGrasse Tyson have quipped, in Earth’s history, any time a more technologically advanced civilization has come across a less techn

As Stephen Hawkings and Neil deGrasse Tyson have quipped, in Earth’s history, any time a more technologically advanced civilization has come across a less technologically advanced civilization, it has never ended well for the less technologically advanced civilization. Any hypothetical which places a group of extraterrestrials capable of interstellar travel on Earth is fundamentally a catastrophe. It’s a lot like discussing an imminent asteroidal impact. There is absolutely no reason to believe any human-extraterrestrial contact would end well for humanity. If anything, I’d expect it to be like playing a chess game against an AGI where the loser gets “terminated”. Anyway, the basic human need to expediently file away all low likelihood ideas into the deep recesses of the brain, never to be examined; the proliferation of general con artistry rooted in financial desperation; and the immense social stigma attached to the pursuit keep people from contemplating the potential of extraterrestrial intelligence. None of those are an especially good reason.

zhdc1 5y ago
> ...any time a more technologically advanced civilization has come across a less technologically advanced civilization, it has never ended well for the less technologically advanced civilization. This assumes resource competition, which isn't a guarantee. Colonialism was driven by the need for open markets, resources, and vanity satisfaction from a declining class of European elites. It's very likely that we don't have anything that a technologically advanced civilization would actually need. In this case, the situation would be more akin to Amazon coexisting with brick and mortar coffee shops, and less like Netflix competing with video rental shops.
- atweiden 5y ago
  > This assumes resource competition, which isn't a guarantee. Colonialism was driven by the need for open markets, resources, and vanity satisfaction from a declining class of European elites. What about enslavement? Here Hawkings / Neil deGrasse Tyson make another interesting point: any civilization which could peacefully colonize a galaxy is not the kind of civilization that would colonize the galaxy at all. The very act of wanting to colonize self-selects for violence/exploitation. > It's very likely that we don't have anything that a technologically advanced civilization would actually need. In this case, the situation would be more akin to Amazon coexisting with brick and mortar coffee shops, and less like Netflix competing with video rental shops. Surely any civilization advanced enough to master interstellar travel would be better than we are at gathering intelligence and predicting humanity’s next move, which for all we know might threaten their interests. If extraterrestrials are silently monitoring humans, isn’t it more likely to be for intelligence gathering purposes than for altruistic reasons? If the monitoring were intended to be altruistic, where’s the proof of the altruism?
  - throwaway316943 5y ago
    What would be the point of a galaxy spanning civilization enslaving other species? We’re single planet savages and we’re getting close to building universal robots that can perform all of our labor, at the most it will be another half century. At that point any non bioengineered organism will be slower, weaker, less durable and less replaceable. It’s much more likely that we just don’t have anything they want.
    - zhdc1 5y ago
      I don't even know if we can argue that there is an economic point to enslaving other humans (look at rates of industrialism in ex-slave owning regions).
      - krapp 5y ago
        There are more people in slavery now than there were during the transantlantic slave trade. It's a multi-billion dollar trans-national black market economy. Neither the Industrial Revolution nor abolition have even slowed it down.
        adrianN 5y ago
        You should adjust your numbers for population growth.
  - zhdc1 5y ago
    > If extraterrestrials are silently monitoring humans, isn’t it more likely to be for intelligence gathering purposes than for altruistic reasons? Why? The Gulf War showed that a gap of ~eleven years of advancement was enough to lead to arguably the largest one-sided victory in the history of warfare. There is no need for an advanced civilisation to silently monitor us for nefarious purposes. All they have to do is show up. > If the monitoring were intended to be altruistic, where’s the proof of the altruism? If we are being monitored, the fact that we're not aware of it is likely sufficient proof that their intentions aren't inherently malicious. Whether or not this means that their intentions are altruistic is another argument. However, if we are in fact being monitored, it's far more likely that we're supporting a bunch of intergalactic Ph.D. theses - and maybe a documentary or two - than putting ourselves in the sights of some malevolent conquering race.
- adrianN 5y ago
  We have a planet that is quite suitable for carbon based life forms. Those might be worth something to interstellar intelligences.
  - throwaway316943 5y ago
    Unlikely if you can just build your own habitat. Who wants to live at the bottom of an annoying gravity well on a filthy rock with uncontrollable weather and geological processes that’s infested with non-engineered microbes? Maybe for a weekend camping expedition but you wouldn’t want to live there.
    - adrianN 5y ago
      Maybe you can't and all you do is send semi-autonomous drones containing DNA and sophisticated 3d printers.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 5y ago
  I think it's more likely that any sufficiently advanced civilization capable of monitoring earth, relatively undetected, has evolved beyond the types of problems that compose the way we view everything. Assuming that mundane explanations have been systematically and thoroughly refuted I'd posit we're the curiosity of the extraterrestrial version of something along the lines of a zoologist, student, or voyeur.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
smcl 5y ago
I have one counter-example for you - North Sentinel Island. This is a small island in the Indian Ocean where people live who are completely isolated from the rest of the world and as such are probably the least technologically advanced civilization on earth. They're able to remain this way because it's generally been agreed that we should leave them alone (you can't go within 5 nm, of the island) but India does try to keep an eye on them from afar, presumably in case some catastrophic event occurs that would otherwise result in their demise. So while I agree that the most likely outcome of a technologically more advanced alien civilization encountering us would be a pretty nasty one ... there's a remote possibility that we would instead be a curiousity to them and that they might treat us as we now treat the Sentinelese. Note: there has been contact between the Sentinelese and the outside world, some peaceful (I found something about Indian expeditions in the early 90s) some a little less so (the British kidnapping six islanders). But it didn't result in their extinction or being colonized, and they remain isolated.
- e-master 5y ago
  This reminded me of the book ‘Hard to be a God’ by the Strugatsky brothers.
- epilys 5y ago
  Very interesting. I wish there was a way to share basic medicine etc to improve their life quality without further damage to their existence. It's a shame to have means of reducing suffering and not share them with your fellow beings.
  - smcl 5y ago
    Yeah it's gotta be hard to figure out where the line is between helping and interfering. A few accounts of the Sentinelese suggest they don't want any help but I think some of the peaceful exchanges in the past show that they don't mind contact and are happy to receive packages of food and bits of iron for tools. All I know is that I'm not gonna be the one to reach out, an American preacher repeatedly tried to do so a few years back and ended up killed as a result. It was 100% his own fault, on one of his attempts a Sentinelese kid fired an arrow at him that struck his bible which if I was religious I would have taken as a sign to GTFO ...
bloak 5y ago
I don't think it makes sense to compare interactions between, on the one hand, different groups of primitive humans on Earth and, on the other hand, interactions between interstellar intelligences, which might be (and in my opinion probably would be) some kind of distributed AI which does not think or behave like a living organism, the product of biological evolution. My guess is that an extraterrestrial intelligence investigating the Earth would be very stealthy, for two reasons: firstly because, like scientists, they want to observe life on Earth without disturbing it, and secondly because they will naturally suspect that other extraterrestrial intelligences are also lurking around the Earth and will also want to observe those, if possible, and will understand that they'll have a better chance of spotting those other extraterrestrial intelligences if those other extraterrestrial intelligences don't spot them first and take evasive action. So my conclusion from all this is that it's quite plausible that multiple extraterrestrial intelligences are already lurking around the Earth, with their probes disguised as tiny insects, for example, and probably they are not all aware of each other's presence. They may be observing you now!
- throw1742 5y ago
  Maybe Nikola Tesla was on to something when he fell in love with a pigeon...
- throwaway316943 5y ago
  I still find this notion that all alien civilizations will be meek little wall flowers pussy footing their way around the galaxy as completely unsupported by evidence. Most of the argument appears to be based on a not very good sci-fi novel. If our own history is any guide then civilizations will continue to run headlong into each other with little regard for consequences even when they know better, the motivations driving expansion and exploration are so strong that they overpower any cautions from the sideline. If life is common in the galaxy then it’s probably saturated every star system and all the space between by now and the reason we don’t see it is because we’re still having trouble figuring out how to spot the pebbles in our own neighborhood that might bump into us and wipe us out. Thinking we’d obviously see the aliens first if they were there is like expecting Montezuma to discover Spain.
YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
I think you're saying "how do we know that aliens aren't already here? Because we are still here". If so, good point.
yosito 5y ago
It really depends if the two civilizations are competing for resources. In that case, the less advanced civilization is obviously going to have a bad time. There were cases in human history where human civilizations connected for exploration, trade and research and weren't competing for resources. Not all of those ended badly. Many of those that did end badly, ended badly because of disease. In the case of alien life, the risk of communicable disease would likely be low since any alien life would probably be a significantly different species that microbes would have a hard time jumping between.
TrispusAttucks 5y ago
This is true when the other side is a physical equal and of a similar species battling for resources. I don't think this holds true when one side is far superior to the other, of a different species, and doesn't really require the same resources as the inferior species. Example: I'm not out to destroy the squirrels in my woods, even though occasionally they do something that inconveniences me, because they are not a threat and I want nothing of their acorn or walnut resources. They can be very entertaining to watch however.
- wccrawford 5y ago
  It isn't always about actively attacking the lesser species. For instance, bees. We don't want to hurt bees. But we've certainly done a lot of stuff that's been harmful to bee populations. There are many other species that are endangered because of humans and their changing of the environment, too.
  - mbg721 5y ago
    The Dilbert take of "Wanna play another game of Hide The Pellet?" comes to mind.
  - ErikVandeWater 5y ago
    We endanger bees largely because we occupy their spaces to live. It does not seem like aliens want to move in, if they are visiting already.
  - TrispusAttucks 5y ago
    I agree. But I don't think your example has any parallels too the parent discussion. Unless an alien species is currently modifing the earth's atmosphere without our knowledge. It seems pretty apparent that we humans are the ones doing the modification.
bluesign 5y ago
"Any hypothetical which places a group of extraterrestrials capable of interstellar travel on Earth is fundamentally a catastrophe." This is not totally correct, if you assume they have to survive countless conflicts (in which such advanced technology, it means aggressive ones would destroy themselves), you may end up with extraordinarily peaceful species.
krapp 5y ago
With all due respect to Stephen Hawking and Niel deGrasse Tyson, the reason humans fight other humans for resources is that we all live in the same resource-constrained environment, and we have developed various cultural and religious imperatives which prefer hegemony, exploitation and colonization over cooperation. But resources are abundant in space, and there's nothing that can be found on Earth (barring life, specifically) that can't be found in orders of magnitude greater quantities elsewhere. It's like our entire solar system is a buffet but we're the only dish with flies buzzing it. If you're looking for a meal, you wouldn't even bother with that.
Mizza 5y ago
That sounds nice, but is it true? Weren't the Vikings, later Normen, far less advanced than the places they raided? They absorbed the technology, the land and culture and used it to conquer and form what is present-day England. Maybe we'll beat the aliens with our savagery.
- williamstein 5y ago
  Or diseases.
  - rnd0 5y ago
    Why not? It worked in War Of The Worlds
- staticman2 5y ago
  A species capable of intersteller travel could bomb us and we'd have no ability to bomb their homeworld back. There would be no way for humans to win.
- JPLeRouzic 5y ago
  There is a funny Sci-Fi book by Poul Anderson on this topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Crusade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Crusade
bashwizard 5y ago
While true, we as humans can't even fathom how an alien lifeform would reason if they came here. To base how aliens would act if they came here on how we as humans have acted throughout history is kind of stupid in my opinion.
chmike 5y ago
This reasoning is excessive extrapolation. Any civilization that master interstellar space travel must be far more intelligent than us. The rules followed by such civilizations may not be the same as the rules we know.

zhdc1 5y ago

> ...any time a more technologically advanced civilization has come across a less technologically advanced civilization, it has never ended well for the less technologically advanced civilization. This assumes resource competition, which isn't a guarantee. Colonialism was driven by the need for open markets, resources, and vanity satisfaction from a declining class of European elites. It's very likely that we don't have anything that a technologically advanced civilization would actually need. In this case, the situation would be more akin to Amazon coexisting with brick and mortar coffee shops, and less like Netflix competing with video rental shops.

atweiden 5y ago
> This assumes resource competition, which isn't a guarantee. Colonialism was driven by the need for open markets, resources, and vanity satisfaction from a declining class of European elites. What about enslavement? Here Hawkings / Neil deGrasse Tyson make another interesting point: any civilization which could peacefully colonize a galaxy is not the kind of civilization that would colonize the galaxy at all. The very act of wanting to colonize self-selects for violence/exploitation. > It's very likely that we don't have anything that a technologically advanced civilization would actually need. In this case, the situation would be more akin to Amazon coexisting with brick and mortar coffee shops, and less like Netflix competing with video rental shops. Surely any civilization advanced enough to master interstellar travel would be better than we are at gathering intelligence and predicting humanity’s next move, which for all we know might threaten their interests. If extraterrestrials are silently monitoring humans, isn’t it more likely to be for intelligence gathering purposes than for altruistic reasons? If the monitoring were intended to be altruistic, where’s the proof of the altruism?
- throwaway316943 5y ago
  What would be the point of a galaxy spanning civilization enslaving other species? We’re single planet savages and we’re getting close to building universal robots that can perform all of our labor, at the most it will be another half century. At that point any non bioengineered organism will be slower, weaker, less durable and less replaceable. It’s much more likely that we just don’t have anything they want.
  - zhdc1 5y ago
    I don't even know if we can argue that there is an economic point to enslaving other humans (look at rates of industrialism in ex-slave owning regions).
    - krapp 5y ago
      There are more people in slavery now than there were during the transantlantic slave trade. It's a multi-billion dollar trans-national black market economy. Neither the Industrial Revolution nor abolition have even slowed it down.
      - adrianN 5y ago
        You should adjust your numbers for population growth.
- zhdc1 5y ago
  > If extraterrestrials are silently monitoring humans, isn’t it more likely to be for intelligence gathering purposes than for altruistic reasons? Why? The Gulf War showed that a gap of ~eleven years of advancement was enough to lead to arguably the largest one-sided victory in the history of warfare. There is no need for an advanced civilisation to silently monitor us for nefarious purposes. All they have to do is show up. > If the monitoring were intended to be altruistic, where’s the proof of the altruism? If we are being monitored, the fact that we're not aware of it is likely sufficient proof that their intentions aren't inherently malicious. Whether or not this means that their intentions are altruistic is another argument. However, if we are in fact being monitored, it's far more likely that we're supporting a bunch of intergalactic Ph.D. theses - and maybe a documentary or two - than putting ourselves in the sights of some malevolent conquering race.
adrianN 5y ago
We have a planet that is quite suitable for carbon based life forms. Those might be worth something to interstellar intelligences.
- throwaway316943 5y ago
  Unlikely if you can just build your own habitat. Who wants to live at the bottom of an annoying gravity well on a filthy rock with uncontrollable weather and geological processes that’s infested with non-engineered microbes? Maybe for a weekend camping expedition but you wouldn’t want to live there.
  - adrianN 5y ago
    Maybe you can't and all you do is send semi-autonomous drones containing DNA and sophisticated 3d printers.
Red_Leaves_Flyy 5y ago
I think it's more likely that any sufficiently advanced civilization capable of monitoring earth, relatively undetected, has evolved beyond the types of problems that compose the way we view everything. Assuming that mundane explanations have been systematically and thoroughly refuted I'd posit we're the curiosity of the extraterrestrial version of something along the lines of a zoologist, student, or voyeur.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

smcl 5y ago

I have one counter-example for you - North Sentinel Island. This is a small island in the Indian Ocean where people live who are completely isolated from the rest of the world and as such are probably the least technologically advanced civilization on earth. They're able to remain this way because it's generally been agreed that we should leave them alone (you can't go within 5 nm, of the island) but India does try to keep an eye on them from afar, presumably in case some catastrophic event occurs that would otherwise result in their demise. So while I agree that the most likely outcome of a technologically more advanced alien civilization encountering us would be a pretty nasty one ... there's a remote possibility that we would instead be a curiousity to them and that they might treat us as we now treat the Sentinelese. Note: there has been contact between the Sentinelese and the outside world, some peaceful (I found something about Indian expeditions in the early 90s) some a little less so (the British kidnapping six islanders). But it didn't result in their extinction or being colonized, and they remain isolated.

e-master 5y ago
This reminded me of the book ‘Hard to be a God’ by the Strugatsky brothers.
epilys 5y ago
Very interesting. I wish there was a way to share basic medicine etc to improve their life quality without further damage to their existence. It's a shame to have means of reducing suffering and not share them with your fellow beings.
- smcl 5y ago
  Yeah it's gotta be hard to figure out where the line is between helping and interfering. A few accounts of the Sentinelese suggest they don't want any help but I think some of the peaceful exchanges in the past show that they don't mind contact and are happy to receive packages of food and bits of iron for tools. All I know is that I'm not gonna be the one to reach out, an American preacher repeatedly tried to do so a few years back and ended up killed as a result. It was 100% his own fault, on one of his attempts a Sentinelese kid fired an arrow at him that struck his bible which if I was religious I would have taken as a sign to GTFO ...

bloak 5y ago

I don't think it makes sense to compare interactions between, on the one hand, different groups of primitive humans on Earth and, on the other hand, interactions between interstellar intelligences, which might be (and in my opinion probably would be) some kind of distributed AI which does not think or behave like a living organism, the product of biological evolution. My guess is that an extraterrestrial intelligence investigating the Earth would be very stealthy, for two reasons: firstly because, like scientists, they want to observe life on Earth without disturbing it, and secondly because they will naturally suspect that other extraterrestrial intelligences are also lurking around the Earth and will also want to observe those, if possible, and will understand that they'll have a better chance of spotting those other extraterrestrial intelligences if those other extraterrestrial intelligences don't spot them first and take evasive action. So my conclusion from all this is that it's quite plausible that multiple extraterrestrial intelligences are already lurking around the Earth, with their probes disguised as tiny insects, for example, and probably they are not all aware of each other's presence. They may be observing you now!

throw1742 5y ago
Maybe Nikola Tesla was on to something when he fell in love with a pigeon...
throwaway316943 5y ago
I still find this notion that all alien civilizations will be meek little wall flowers pussy footing their way around the galaxy as completely unsupported by evidence. Most of the argument appears to be based on a not very good sci-fi novel. If our own history is any guide then civilizations will continue to run headlong into each other with little regard for consequences even when they know better, the motivations driving expansion and exploration are so strong that they overpower any cautions from the sideline. If life is common in the galaxy then it’s probably saturated every star system and all the space between by now and the reason we don’t see it is because we’re still having trouble figuring out how to spot the pebbles in our own neighborhood that might bump into us and wipe us out. Thinking we’d obviously see the aliens first if they were there is like expecting Montezuma to discover Spain.

YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago

I think you're saying "how do we know that aliens aren't already here? Because we are still here". If so, good point.

yosito 5y ago

It really depends if the two civilizations are competing for resources. In that case, the less advanced civilization is obviously going to have a bad time. There were cases in human history where human civilizations connected for exploration, trade and research and weren't competing for resources. Not all of those ended badly. Many of those that did end badly, ended badly because of disease. In the case of alien life, the risk of communicable disease would likely be low since any alien life would probably be a significantly different species that microbes would have a hard time jumping between.

TrispusAttucks 5y ago

This is true when the other side is a physical equal and of a similar species battling for resources. I don't think this holds true when one side is far superior to the other, of a different species, and doesn't really require the same resources as the inferior species. Example: I'm not out to destroy the squirrels in my woods, even though occasionally they do something that inconveniences me, because they are not a threat and I want nothing of their acorn or walnut resources. They can be very entertaining to watch however.

wccrawford 5y ago
It isn't always about actively attacking the lesser species. For instance, bees. We don't want to hurt bees. But we've certainly done a lot of stuff that's been harmful to bee populations. There are many other species that are endangered because of humans and their changing of the environment, too.
- mbg721 5y ago
  The Dilbert take of "Wanna play another game of Hide The Pellet?" comes to mind.
- ErikVandeWater 5y ago
  We endanger bees largely because we occupy their spaces to live. It does not seem like aliens want to move in, if they are visiting already.
- TrispusAttucks 5y ago
  I agree. But I don't think your example has any parallels too the parent discussion. Unless an alien species is currently modifing the earth's atmosphere without our knowledge. It seems pretty apparent that we humans are the ones doing the modification.

bluesign 5y ago

"Any hypothetical which places a group of extraterrestrials capable of interstellar travel on Earth is fundamentally a catastrophe." This is not totally correct, if you assume they have to survive countless conflicts (in which such advanced technology, it means aggressive ones would destroy themselves), you may end up with extraordinarily peaceful species.

krapp 5y ago

With all due respect to Stephen Hawking and Niel deGrasse Tyson, the reason humans fight other humans for resources is that we all live in the same resource-constrained environment, and we have developed various cultural and religious imperatives which prefer hegemony, exploitation and colonization over cooperation. But resources are abundant in space, and there's nothing that can be found on Earth (barring life, specifically) that can't be found in orders of magnitude greater quantities elsewhere. It's like our entire solar system is a buffet but we're the only dish with flies buzzing it. If you're looking for a meal, you wouldn't even bother with that.

Mizza 5y ago

That sounds nice, but is it true? Weren't the Vikings, later Normen, far less advanced than the places they raided? They absorbed the technology, the land and culture and used it to conquer and form what is present-day England. Maybe we'll beat the aliens with our savagery.

williamstein 5y ago
Or diseases.
- rnd0 5y ago
  Why not? It worked in War Of The Worlds
staticman2 5y ago
A species capable of intersteller travel could bomb us and we'd have no ability to bomb their homeworld back. There would be no way for humans to win.
JPLeRouzic 5y ago
There is a funny Sci-Fi book by Poul Anderson on this topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Crusade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Crusade

bashwizard 5y ago

While true, we as humans can't even fathom how an alien lifeform would reason if they came here. To base how aliens would act if they came here on how we as humans have acted throughout history is kind of stupid in my opinion.

chmike 5y ago

This reasoning is excessive extrapolation. Any civilization that master interstellar space travel must be far more intelligent than us. The rules followed by such civilizations may not be the same as the rules we know.