Alien Philosophy — About Outer Space and Aliens.
We should start thinking in Alien philosophy. If we contact Aliens, can we expect to dialogue with them in existential terms? What are our own flaws? And how can we overcome these flaws? In other words, is life just a series of tragic or heroic struggles?
Does any “common ground” exist?
Unfortunately, in the real world, humans and Aliens would find each other -indeed- completely alien, that is, foreign. Not only would our values be radically different, but our sensory experiences and cognitive structures would also be (very) different.
That said, there is still a vast range of forms that the aliens might take and a real chance that they could mimic our own. This means that our conversations with them, especially in a one-to-one context, might be rather different from the way we talk to each other.
Can we imagine the one-to-one human/Alien encounter in which the alien truly looks upon us and sees us for who we truly are? But then what does it mean to say that this alien “sees” us? Or can we try to recognize the other in the same way? How are we to react?
It’s an existential moment. We may encounter an Alien with whom we could have a one-to-one conversation — but what does it mean to communicate with a species with which we have no common ground? This may be a meeting with an alien from a future that will appear alien to us — but that is not the same thing as saying that we are “alien to each other.” If anything, the fact that we have no common ground means that we have a tremendous interest in understanding each other — and a tremendous need to do so!
What might be considered a realistic opening gambit? What are our various negotiating options?
Perhaps the first thing we could do is to carefully go through and catalog all the various ways that we have interacted with Aliens and Aliens since the dawn of the Space Age. There is a wealth of anecdotal evidence and even some substantial examples of serious research to support the fact that we have engaged in extraordinary and often rather violent interactions with Aliens.
Based on our own case studies, I would suggest that the minimum point at which we might be prepared to interact with Aliens is at the threshold of space. I have not seen much evidence to suggest that we have managed to do so, but it is still a possibility.
At this point, Alien encounters have tended to occur at a conference table. Thus, if we wish to negotiate with the inhabitants of Mars, they may well look at us and wonder: why are these humans so eager to start talking to me?
What makes successful negotiations possible? Here the scenario becomes ever more interesting.
What we must be wary of is getting drawn into a negotiating regime where we play their game. Here, we could fall into the trap of the “zero-sum game.” One person on Earth might offer accommodation with another, while the other is making demands — or, conversely, offering concessions to the first party.
Remember the Alien simulation in the movie Contact?
This is a situation that happens in science fiction and the Alien simulation movie Contact is a good example of how this can happen. That is, in this case, the initial encounter with an Alien was a bit of a storm in a teacup. The spectator of Contact will know that we have advanced as a species and that the universe is full of extraterrestrial civilizations, not all of whom are friendly.
The high points of the exchange came when the alien, sitting at a table with humans, attempts to get us to divulge all the information about ourselves that we do not wish to reveal. We respond that we have no interest in knowing about your culture. Indeed, we are quite incapable of learning about your culture.
That is a highly entertaining sequence of exchanges, but is it the sort of exchange that will lead to a successful outcome to a negotiation with an alien species?
The objective of a successful negotiation is to change the terms of the game. If you are negotiating with a belligerent species that is armed to the teeth with weapons and war machines, then the terms are going to be clear in your favor.
You are, in effect, negotiating from a position of power. Conversely, a scenario where you are attempting to make your first contact with a species that has not developed its own defense capabilities or even a primitive form of communication, will not lead to a successful negotiation.
The encounter will not be a negotiation. The objective is to have the greatest possible satisfaction of an alien, and a successful negotiation will not deliver that.
This demonstrates that negotiation theory does not recognize the presence of mutuality in action. It simply operates based on fixed relationships between the parties.
Rather than seeing ourselves as occupying fixed positions relative to each other, the result of a successful negotiation is mutual satisfaction.
When the encounters happen on the galactic scale, this does not apply, as they are not seeking mutual satisfaction. They have other things on their mind.
This may well be the best that we can hope for, but it is not going to be a situation where we trade jobs, exchanging a little bit of the technology for a much greater contribution of some kind.
That is not going to be the case. It will be a situation where we take the technology and so much else that they have to offer, and a battle will be fought — a battle of ideas, but a battle of weapons. Perhaps it is already being fought. Perhaps it is already a situation where the battle is being fought for influence in the cosmic community. Maybe this will work out. Maybe we will be lucky.
However, it is going to take a lot of effort and effort that we can ill afford if we are to survive as a species and find our way into this solar system.
Exploration of space will begin slowly and then, after better research of space/time travel, it will grow exponentially. Maybe this explosion of space-traveling will lead us to better understand what to expect in outer intelligence communications. Perhaps we will be able to engage with aliens in more technological ways. Perhaps we will receive telepathic messages and, in doing so, learn to create sound recordings that would transcend our human limitations and could someday lead us to achieve contact. Perhaps we will finally and ultimately be able to study and understand the origins of life itself. Of course, the keyword there is someday.
Let’s go back and reframe things. What if, someday, humans discover that they have not just one intelligent species in the universe, but many intelligent species? Some of these are robotic. Some of these are human-like. Some of these are our next-door neighbors. What do we do? Do we engage, try to befriend, and work with these other intelligent life-forms? Or do we send military forces in to fight with them?
Science fiction imagines humans having this exciting new way of interacting with other civilizations that is relatively stable over time and place. But maybe what we find is that the interaction is not as stable or as predictable as we would want it to be, for a variety of reasons. In fact, maybe what we find is that space exploration is a constant state of both increasing rewards and decreased rewards and that every time we do encounter something new, we may find that it does something unexpected, or that something unexpected happens to the human species, and that humanity reacts in a completely unexpected way. We are humans, after all. Life is unpredictable.
I do think that this new “twilight of humanity” is going to be an interesting episode in the life of humanity, that it will play a part in the first chapter of the story of humanity’s existence on Earth. I think it is going to be an exciting episode. The existential threat will have been mitigated, and that might be a good thing. There might be other existential threats down the line, but I think that the worst thing we could do in this stage of our development is to try and contact something and then be surprised by what it does.
