But… What if the Aliens Aren’t Friendly?
Carl Sagan might have been a bit too optimistic.
I think we’ve all looked up at the night sky at least once, and wondered if we’re alone in the universe. That’s a staple of the human experience by this point and Sci-fi movies and series have only fueled speculation on the matter.
Reportedly, Carl Sagan used to say that a sufficiently advanced alien civilization would have outgrown the need to wage war, and thus, necessarily, any potential alien contact would be with a peaceful civilization not at all intent on bringing about our destruction.
“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”
— Arthur C. Clarke
Not content in disagreeing with Sagan, I am also going to go right ahead and say that I think Clarke was also wrong. If I do a good enough job of explaining my point of view, by the end of this article you’ll hopefully come to the same conclusion I have: We better hope we’re alone.
Now, this might seem strange given the alarmist tone of this article, but let me start off by covering my bases and exposing my biases: I am a strong believer in the Firstborn Hypothesis. To put it in other words, although I believe alien life is plentiful, intelligent alien life is not. I think we’re alone because I think we’re too early to the party — by the time little green men start appearing we’ll be long gone or, hopefully, so technologically advanced that they won’t pose a threat.
However, I also think that if we’re going to be coming up with ideas and probably policies on how to deal with the possibility of intelligent alien creatures contacting us, we ought to assume the worst and prepare ourselves for a possible extinction event. Because it’s better to have such preparedness and not need it than to need it and not have it.
“The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him.”
— Liu Cixin
Let’s take culture, for example. Culture is everything we do, are, like, and dislike, and it’s the way we see the world, how things affect us — or how they don’t.
And culture is formed, shaped, and turned into what it is at any given time by an absolutely huge number of factors, like geography, historical events, natural disasters, and certain people — among many others. Cultures that use a particular ingredient as a staple food usually do so because that ingredient is plentiful in one way or another; cultures that develop an advanced sense of how to take advantage of bodies of water usually do so because they developed somewhere close to that body of water.
Even what we consider ethical and unethical is based on our culture. We may have developed a common idea that murder is bad, but we’ve yet to come to an agreement on what ‘murder’ even is — death penalties are considered acceptable in some places and unacceptable examples of state-sanctioned murder in others.
So for us to speculate on what a hypothetical alien culture might consider unethical — an alien culture from an alien world — is, well, a bit insane, don’t you think? We can’t possibly even begin to imagine how they developed, evolved, and how their biology even works. If their brains are sufficiently different, they may see killing as an entirely ethical display of strength, which would fit neatly in a culture of brutality brought about by the brains of a creature that evolved in a far more brutal environment than we did, fighting more creatures than we did, and fighting themselves more than we did. Such an alien species might jump at the chance to kill something intelligent that’s not themselves for a change.
But, for the sake of argument, let’s assume that every species gets to a point in its evolution where an “aggressiveness switch” is magically turned off and everyone becomes nice, unwilling to fight unless pushed into it by others.
Out there, somewhere, might exist an alien culture that believes strongly that food should be handled by living beings, from planting to harvest to preparation to serving. It’s a bit hard to train non-sentients on how to do this, so they rely on themselves for producing food, even as they multiply to a point where mechanization would really come in handy; large portions of their society are engaged in the production and preparation of food, even though many of them would rather be out there exploring the stars. Still, it’s not enough.
As they come in contact with us, they offer us the job. Since we already know all about agriculture, they say, we should do it for them. Turns out the work is backbreaking, and most of the day is spent planting, harvesting, cleaning, preparing, and anything else required to feed them, so few people agree.
Faced with the prospect of starvation as they are incapable of keeping up with their own demand, they see our refusal as actively harmful. They see themselves, as “peaceful” as they are, to have been pushed into it by others, namely us.
And just like that, we find ourselves fighting for our survival. Defeat means slavery. And all this would be perfectly ethical to them.
This is where nuclear weapons come in handy — they’re possibly the only thing that saves us from extinction in a scenario like this.
It doesn’t matter how different their culture is, their psychology, their biology, or how advanced their technology is; if there’s one thing that’s guaranteed to be universal, it’s the laws of physics.
If we hit something hard enough, it’ll come apart.
And what’s the hardest-hitting thing we have? Nukes. We need to figure out how to fire them at a target in space, which is potentially useful for asteroids as well.
The bottom line of all this is that our entire policy on aliens, something 65% of U.S. Americans believe is real, relies on some pretty big, baseless assumptions, and our perception of aliens as being “probably peaceful” comes from Star Trek instead of anything that’s actually reliable as a source to be used in policy-making.
And now that we’re working on an official alien contact protocol, maybe it’s time to spread some of that enthusiasm to first contact and collective defense protocols too.
Because the idea of losing a war to small stinky rubbery alien creatures sounds incredibly offensive for some reason.
