This is just a short, easy-to-read paper I keep in my bookmarks and go back to occasionally. It explores, qualitatively, the various outcomes that contact with alien intelligence might have. I think it’s a really cool 25-page exploration of possibilities that are fun to think about. Some choice quotes:
ETI (extraterrestrial intelligence) might attack us not out of selfishness but instead out of a universalist desire to make the galaxy a better place.
perhaps ETI make contact with Earth to welcome us into the Galactic Club but only after we complete a set of required bureaucratic tasks
They may be interested in incorporating us into their civilization so they can sell us their products, keep us as pets, or have us mine raw materials for them.
if ETI place intrinsic value on lives, then perhaps they could bring about more lives by destroying us and using our resources more efficiently for other lives
My favourite section is the “unintentional harm” outcomes, which suggests the possibility that they just might squish us by accident.
One non-biological physical hazard that we could face from direct contact with ETI is unintentional mechanical harm. For example, ETI might accidentally crush us while attempting an unrelated maneuver.
Can’t for the life of me find where I first heard of this, but I just wanted to share it for being fun and fairly silly yet still officially worked on by NASA.
But can we fuck them
Uhhh. Is that a solution to problems on Earth? Or avoiding the global catastrophe that is the lack of alien sex? So maybe.
It is a horrifying catastrophe that I am not balls deep in xenomorph cheeks
Yes there is a splash zone
a.k.a. The Kirk hypothesis.
Holding out for Ice Planet Barbarians.
perhaps ETI make contact with Earth to welcome us into the Galactic Club but only after we complete a set of required bureaucratic tasks
Earth being the Ukraine of space NATO would be funny
Space Biden: “We will fight Xenu to the last earthling.”
Space John Bolton: “WE HAVE TO NUKE YAKUB! JUST LET ME NUKE YAKUB!”
I thought of more “paperwork” tasks at first. ET but he’s really into making sure your Space Tax forms are 100% correct. You didn’t forget to get a permit for that Ion Cannon did you?
This has always been a favorite topic of mine to speculate on. I’ve especially wondered what a hypothetical contact event would mean on the later development of leftist thought and praxis. I’d think that for any political/economic tradition it would be the black swan event to end all black swan events.
Me too, I think it’s very interesting to think about ‘What If?’ bigger picture scenarios and what they say about our current priorities and thought processes.
For leftist political theory I suppose it would so wildly depend on the nature of the intelligence. Their history would certainly at least give serious ideas as to what may be a more ideal end-results and revolutionary processes than we’re currently conceiving.
I guess an immediate thought of mine would be immediately being afraid that the capitalist power start a new arms race for the tech they get out of that situation. It might have a similar impact on geopolitics that the discovery and proliferation of nuclear weapons had over 80 years ago.
I have to agree that the nature of the intelligence will matter. Such an intelligence could have gone down a different development path according to the material conditions it lived in and not arrived at communism at the end. That could be a possibility despite all of us here wishing for the former outcome.
Ultimately, I think leftist thought might be the most immune to the culture thought of aliens deciding to show themselves (or us finding them). Liberals would crash the market instantly and turn on each other on an international level (Every one of them would want THEIR nation to be first contact) and fascists would use it to justify a one world fascist government. Religious but philosophically dead freaks would break down mentally (IE most american christians simply are not ready for the idea of intelligent life off world).
Aliens don’t inherently mean anything to leftist ideas. Sure a overall “good” future leftist government(s) could botch contact real bad. But if Lenin knew there were little green men 10 million light years away that couldn’t even talk to us, would it have changed anything?
Ultimately, aliens existing doesn’t mean anything to the material conditions on earth, unless they can directly effect us (IE, give us tech, destroy us, etc etc). Hell even if we learned that the aliens were Space Hitler, it still wouldn’t mean much. It’d be concerning, and liberals and fash would use it to say we should follow their lead, but it’d be pretty irrelevant to humans by itself (unless they’re in orbit but that’d be another concern).
their first exposure to humanity is through hexbear
they decide we’re all a bunch of libs and impose a cordon sanitaire around the solar system without ever making contact
It is also plausible that nearby ETI simply have no desire to communicate with us … Perhaps ETI actually do inhabit nearby star systems and detect our radio leakage … They may be unimpressed with the quality of our broadcasts
“Picking up the Earth scans now…”
“New directive: Contain the 
s”“Earth must be contained to avoid further destruction of the galaxy”
pretty sure we are living in a zoo. it’s the only scenario that logically makes sense.
Earth is a laboratory. Every few million years the galactic powers that be accept a new grant proposal from an alien postdoc. That lucky researcher then gets exclusive rights to transform the planet for their experiment. The first such experiment was the Cambrian Explosion. The dinosaurs were another. Extinction events are when they wipe the planet for the next researcher.
The latest experiment got a little out of hand when the apes invented nuclear weapons and risked irradiating the whole laboratory.
Or maybe we are just one tiny well in an a virtually infinite multiwell assay, each containing a planet with slightly different experimental conditions and they are trying to synthesize a conscious lifeform that doesn’t destroy itself eventually. Maybe they are restarting humanity over and over again to see if we’ll finally figure it out. We are experiment ᜁଡ଼👋ޑଋ🏰ᆅᐏᅝᐊெᇜᒈ😝Nj̸๐♄🎉כჿ😊ᗀඦĘ๓🏭ۼ out of ℵ1 experiments.
You just wrinkled my brain.
They do explore the Zoo hypothesis in the paper. I don’t personally think it’s very likely, but it’s possible.
There’s still some weird implications and assumptions though. Either galactic civilization must not be highly developed b/c we’d notice all the megastructures, or they put a planetarium around our solar system (paper mentions this). But how the hell would that work? The answer is just
indistinguishable from magic. Same thing with hiding infrared emissions.
They could absolutely help us by conquering our pathetic capitalist civilization and teaching us communism, which is the only mode of production capable of interstellar travel.
Contact would probably harm humanity. If they tried to help humanity, the Americans would never allow it, as it would unseat their hegemony, they would almost certainly attack any aliens that come to help and start an interplanetary war that we have no hope of winning.
One of the interesting parts of a lot of western Xenobiology is this weird insistence on aliens being exactly like American capitalists, they cannot imagine another state of being, they can’t imagine that in order to reach the stars, a species needs to have outgrown selfish and short-sighted behaviour like capitalism. They just assume all aliens will be ultra capitalist and harvest earth for resources.
For sure a scary and possible thing. If we had that kind of benevolent contact we’d have to put faith in the aliens to understand that America is just… America, and we’re still a diverse world.
In regards to the western viewpoint, I think perhaps that’s what I appreciate most about this paper - it totally considers a large range of outcomes, and actually does the same, criticising those that do like you say and consider only a very narrow possible window of existence.
many discussions of this question assume that contact will follow a particular scenario that derives from the hopes and fears of the author.
Unfortunately, … previous work tends to be quite narrow in the sense of only considering one or a small number of possible contact outcomes. There appears to be a tendency to jump to conclusions on a matter which remains highly uncertain and for which a broad range of outcomes are within the realm of possibility
we have reason to believe that a sustainable ETI is less likely to be harmful than an unsustainable, exponentially expansive ETI.
ie if your modus operandi was exploit everything to the max like a capitalist, you wouldn’t get very far in space.
