Now, the bit about chaos on earth if we do find others... Yeah, that's scary.
Not a fan of extrapolating from single data points, but it's the best we've got for now.
Then think about how we human treat much lower life forms. For example, a plant. We have no ethical issue mowing down a paddock of plants because we don’t see them as equal life forms. We have mostly no ethical issue of killing millions of cattle/sheep for mostly the same reasons.
When there’s a large intelligence differential, the smarter one might not even try and communicate
Plenty of humans treat animals with respect. I see people like spiritual leaders as being far more conscious than political leaders or sociopath CEO’s.
I don’t think this increased ethics is some weird quirk of spiritual leaders, but rather a deep feature of true intelligence.
It would take a lot of energy and computional capacity to make it all the way across deep space. I don’t see how a species could do that if it were fighting itself at home.
If it’s not fighting itself at home, why? Dictatorships are unstable because there’s always someone else who wants to be on top. The only way I can imagine a stable societ with that much reach is if the society contains individual members who care ahout each other.
A house divided against itself will not stand, and a social network at war with itself can never reach the stars.
If you imagine how different humanity would have to be for us to get out that far, we’d have to all be concerned with the welfare of all humans. Once empathy reaches critical mass, the bodhisattva vow becomes an obviously correct moral imperative. I think of it like a schelling point for sufficiently introspective intelligent minds.
Once you’ve expanded empathy to all humans, you can’t stop there. He only way to truly care about all humans - in all their myriad forms and oddities - is to care about all beings.
If it ever got to us vs them, we haven't evolved past choosing us first.
I have an easy time buying it.
Look at the intelligent life we know about on earth. Elephants, dolphins, whales, primates, dogs, etc...
How do we treat those life forms? By and large: Like shit.
How are we, as a species, going to handle "new" life forms... intelligent life forms... advanced life forms... that can "bite back" if we try to treat them like our own earth bound life forms?
I would say, as a standard answer, hope for the best but prepare for the worst.
Humanity... has a large contingent that embodies the worst.