Why it makes sense for aliens to be kind - and more so the more advanced their civilization
There is absolutely no reason for aliens to be hostile. The aliens in Carl Sagan's Contact are kind and so are the aliens in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 a space odyssey. They seem far more plausible than hostile aliens based on our own progression.
As a civilization we are developing towards sustainability and biorespect and stopping / reversing biodiversity loss.
Also - hostility is primitive. If you saw
One ET civilization where they were killing each other in wars and invading other planets and destroying species and other civilizations
Another ET civilization that has no more warfare only competitive sports and things like that and foster biodiversity and help other species advance with sutainable development throughout the galaxy
Which is the more advanced civilization? The one without war obviously. If they are still killing each other in wars and killing other species, they can't be very advanced.
Maybe sometimes ETs lose those qualities. They might perhaps have intelligence without being responsible, sympathetic, compassionate, loving etc.
But if they have lost those capabilities they might have a lot to learn from us - though at our stage sadly, also lots of bad things they could learn from us also.
We are a species with much kindness
Dalai Lama : "love and compassion predominate in the world. And this is why unpleasant events are news, compassionate activities are so much part of daily life that they are taken for granted and, therefore, largely ignored.."If we were ever to find a civilization that has somehow lost its way and lost its capacity for kindness then we'd have lots to offer to help them.
But the main reason we know that we are safe from hostile aliens is that if there are any aliens out there and they wanted to enslave species like us - then why wait for us to develop a civilization first?
Why wait for us to develop missiles, nuclear bombs, subs etc? Of course these would likely be nothing to them - but why wait at all if they wanted to enslave us or to capture Earth.
But an advanced ET would have robots and machines to make everything it needs so it wouldn’t need slaves.
It would be able to set up a home anywhere in the solar system From Heppenheimer in 1972, chapter 2:
The first answers they came up with indicated there was more than a thousand times the land area of Earth as the potential room for expansion. They concluded that the surface of a planet was not the best place for a technical civilization. The best places looked like new, artificial bodies in space, or inside-out planets.
The classical science-fiction idea, of course, is to settle on the surface of the moon or Mars, changing the conditions there as desired. It turned out that there were several things wrong with this, however. First, the solar system doesn’t really provide all that much area on the planets—a few times the surface area of Earth, at most. And in almost all cases the conditions on these planets are very hard to work with.
Our Earth is perfect for us. But it’s not likely to be what an alien species needs. The biology is highly unlikley to be exactly compatible. Most likely there is little they can actualy eat because they are not likely to use the exact same amino acids as us, and some things that we find tasty may be poison to them and vice versa.
See my
. What Food Can You Share With An ET?
Why try to take over Earth when they can set up space colonies with thousands of times the land area of Earth and configure them to have whatever gravity, atmosphere, biology etc inside them? And they could build them right out to Pluto just with solar power. (page 175 of . Space settlements: A design study )
"At all distances out to the orbit of Pluto and beyond, it is possible to obtain Earth-normal solar intensity with a concentrating mirror whose mass is small compared to that of the habitat.”
But they would surely have fusion power and the entire Oort cloud would be available to them - way way beyond Pluto, thousands of large icy bodies with everything that would be needed to make habitats.
So they wouldn’t have any shortage of places to live if they got here and they wouldn’t need Earth to live here, or to get slaves.
IF THE GALAXY WAS FILLED WITH AGGRESSIVE COLONIZING ALIENS THEY WOULD BE HERE ALREADY AND WE WOULD BE ALIENS - SO NO - IT IS CLEAR IF THERE ARE ALIENS FILLING OUR GALAXY THEY HAVE TO BE SUSTAINABLE IN HOW THEY USE THE GALAXY
If aliens are here then they have surely been watching us for thousands of years, would be an absurd coincidence to just get here now.
I say that because our galaxy has been habitable for life like ours for at least 10 billion years or more. 1000 years out of 10 billion is like half a minute out of a century, it's a tiny time compared to how long the galaxy has been habitable to our form of life. And they would fill the galaxy in a million years, at a tenth of the speed of light, equivalent to 50 minutes out of a century.
So if the galaxy was occupied by an aggressive colonizing enslaving alien species that evolved before us, it should have already taken over the Earth and the solar system long ago.
Why would it wait for us to evolve our civilization first?
We would already be aliens.
Since we aren't aliens that invaded our planet thousands or millions of years ago, surely if there are any advanced civilized aliens out there they are kind.
I talk about those ideas here in my "dark forest" debunk:
And as I explain there we are moving towards more kindness, more sustainability, more respect.
For the Russian war - most ordinary Russians as everywhere are kind most of the time.
And this is my debunk about why we don't need to fear an alien invasion:
If there are aliens in our solar system one main reason not to be scared of them is there is no evidence even of them setting foot on the Moon or Mars and no sign of their presence anywhere in the solar system. The very opposite of an invading ET.
With the timescales involved, it's absurdly unlikely they get here just now. There is no reason for an alien living around another star to evolve at the same time as us. E.g. there is a solar twin four billion years older than our one. Also evolution took 4.5 billion years on our Earth. It is absurdly unlikely another alien reaches the ability to get here at the exact same time we develop technology.
So, an alien civilization is likely to be very old. If aliens are here already, most likely they have been here for millions of years.
So, if aliens are here, and been here for millions of years, they must have a strict non interference policy and erase all traces of their presence and are so hidden we can't see them.
Not only that, they make no use of the abundant resources in our solar system - there are no tracks of them on the moon, on Mars, no abandoned mines, nothing on Europa, or the surface of Titan with its atmospheric pressure, methane / ethane atmosphere, 1.5 times that of Earth - with oceans of petrochemicals.
Also we see no alien space settlements made of materials from the asteroid belt, no city domes on the Moon or Mars, no light reflected from their spaceships as they travel through our solar system.
Our spacecraft have flown past every planet, including the distant Pluto, also the two largest asteroids, Ceres, and Vesta, looked at all the larger moons close up, flown past a Kuiper belt object, Ultima Thule, no sign of them anywhere.
We could miss a small space settlement for sure but not large scale activity on those bodies.
ALSO LOOK AT HOW FAR WE’VE COME IN JUST A COUPLE OF CENTURIES
And look at the direction we have moved since the nineteenth century before the Geneva conventions and indeed even since WW1 and WW2. Even since the Vietanam war. In this war even Russia isn’t using firebombing, napalm (which was used by the US in the Vietnam war) or chemical weapons. We have moved on to the extent that even people who do may horrid things according to our standards don’t do more horrific things that were considered normal and civilized just a few decades ago.
So now project that forward 1000 years. Where will we be headed? I doubt that we are still using warfare to settle disputes between countries in the year 3000.
Also look at our work on sustainability and on biodiversity. E.g. the outcomes of COP15.
Just over a century ago nobody paid any attention to the risk of making the passenger pigeon extinct until it was too late.
. The Extinction of the Passenger Pigeon
Passenger pigeons became extinct because of determined hunting even as the numbers got lower and lower they caught vast numbers of them at once and they were very easy to catch. They moved around in large flocks, and this was just after introduction of the railroads making it easy for hunters to race around the US whenever a flock was reported to kill them all and they also killed the young in nesting season time. Just killing everything they found and putting them in barrels. The early days of environmentalism came too late.They could easily have saved it at any point, but just went on killing them faster and faster, the fewer there were left for all the hunters to find.
. Video about the extinction of the passenger pigeon - and the very last passenger pigeon martha
They were estimated to be a quarter of the total bird population in the USA originally in flocks of over a billion birds.
Even as the pigeons’ numbers crashed, “there was virtually no effort to save them,” says Joel Greenberg, a research associate with Chicago’s Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum and the Field Museum. “People just slaughtered them more intensely. They killed them until the very end.” Why the Passenger Pigeon Went Extinct - and whether it can, and should, be brought back to life a century after it disappeared.
That is never going to happen again. It lead to the very first legal protections on migratory birds and we have moved on and on since then.
The work on stopping extinctions which I go into here, so much we are doing.
Surely ETs would go through similar stages.
Similarly with COP27 where one of the big outcomes is more support for weaker economies for a green revolution - and support for local communities, indigenous peoples and working together in coalitions to save the rainforests.
. There were lots of good outcomes from COP27 for climate and the environment
And the many things we are doing to tackle global warming - and already our successes with DDT and with the ozone layer and the green revolution for agriculture.
And the way the COVID pandemic has lead to far greater awareness of the importance of global health not local with vaccine capacity now for the COVID vaccines for the entire world.
NO MATTER WHAT AN ALIEN’S PHILOSOPHY, POLITICS, IDEAS - IF THEY ARE FORWARD LOOKING THEY WANT TO PROTECT NOT JUST THEIR PLANET BUT THE GALAXY TOO
And - if you look at where we are going on longer timescales of multiple decades and centuries. you'd expect aliens to be sustainable respect biodiversity, respect human / alien rights etc.
It makes sense for them, no matter what their situation if they are forward looking, then they want to protect not just their planet but the galaxy too, and a natural outcome of that is a low impact almost invisible presence. If they can expand to fill the galaxy - that is not a sensible thing to do unless they can do it low impact and confident it's not going to come back and harm them, and so , confident that their expansion isn't going to harm others also in the galaxy.
Our galaxy isn't filled with some alien that is expansionist or they'd be here already and we'd be aliens already. Because an expansionist non sustainable alien would fill our galaxy in less than a million years and that means every nook and cranny through exponential growth, that's clearly not happened.
This is about how as we spread into space we need to protect our home, the pale blue dot, and that the easiest way to understand the fermi paradox is if aliens do the same. There may be a mix of many reasons but if there are other aliens here and we aren't first, then I think this sustainability solution is one of the main ones - it doesn't get so much publicity because it is low key and not scary. But I think it makes a lot of sense, and I've expanded it a little by incorporating the idea of galaxy protection.
SEE ALSO
. Robert Walker's answer to Would a very advanced alien race see humans as we see insects?
. What Food Can You Share With An ET?
. Our pale blue dot - are there other homes for us in our galaxy? (preprint)
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