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The last thing I would want for an alien life is to be humane. We have not really been great in our interactions with other cultures throughout history and they were of the same species as us.

I put humanity in quotes because I didn't really know what else to name it when talking about some other form of intelligence. I guess I'm talking about that part of our society that craves peace and stability, that has enabled our continued development up to this point. Certainly throughout history we've seen unimaginable cruelty inflicted on "less civilised" societies by colonial and imperialist societies. Hopefully any intelligence which has reached the development of an interstellar society would have those same qualities, frankly I don't see any other way for it to sustain itself.

Imagine we came across anew form of intelligent life on Mars, would we exploit and enslave it? I'd like to think living in a global society would prevent such atrocities, at least in the modern era, and hopefully beyond. And I think any society in an interstellar context would behave the same

We probably wouldn’t exploit it as long as access was hard. Once space travel becomes more common though, I think we might have a situation like Star Wars where the far away worlds are basically left to their own devices since it would be a huge pain for an earth centered society to enforce laws...

I think you're not interpreting the word "humane" correctly. It's possible for humans to behave in an inhumane manner. In fact it happens a lot to this day. That doesn't mean GP's definition of "humane" is wrong.

I am aware of this.

I am not a native speaker, so the dichotomy between the sense of this word and our most common behaviors as a species has always felt unsettling to me.

I kind of like this word, I would love to live in a world where this is a perfect descriptor for our species.

Back to the topic at hand, while it would indeed be marvelous to find benefactors from the stars, all the other possibilities are chilling. From cosmic horror to simple warmongering, there are so many ways it could go irremediably wrong.

As a counterpoint, I'd argue that conflict can act as a "force multiplier" of sorts.

Every large war in our history has caused leaps in technology. Even on a smaller scale we treat conflict and competition as a good thing that promotes innovation.

Life as we know it "craves" and thrives on conflict. And if that's a universal truth, then any other civilizations we meet could as well.

Excellent point. Wars have (albeit morbidly) allowed for drastic changes in all aspects of human society as well. But maybe a war based society can only progress until it invents planet destroying WMDs. After that the cost of war becomes intolerable to progress

You might be entirely right, but the universe is a big place. Estimates of the number of stars (called Sagan's Number[1]) are on the order of the 3 x 10^23 (300 sextillion[2]). Even if only a tiny fraction of a percent of them had worlds with intelligent life, there'd be a lot of it out there. The bad news, though, is that it's still hard to travel, or even send transmissions, so it's just as likely we're doomed to stay lonely.

(I tend to share your optimism about the odds of other intelligent life being good-natured; we've come a long way in the last 2,000 years, by the time we're out in the stars, I'd like to think we'd all be Bodhisattvas).

1: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Sagan%27s_number

2: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2010/12/01/131730552...

What if intelligent life is rare because at some point some other intelligent life set up a systematic process of keeping the universe clear of it?

People are fixated on that, but it's not the only solution to the Fermi paradox

You've been playing too much Mass Effect 2 :^)

I've actually never played any Mass Effect...

Then we'd certainly have evidence of this genocidal society no? They'd definitely be actively looking for other intelligent life forms, and if they were systematic in eliminating it, they'd have to have the infrastructure to do so which we'd be able to detect. After all you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, any life form like that would have the interest in finding and eliminating intelligent life before it becomes to big to be a threat, which would probably lead them to coaxing other intelligent life forms into making contact. No, I don't think this is feasible in reality, nor is there any evidence beyond "but what if" for that possibility.

Maybe the only cosmic infrastructure required would be listening stations and the ability to steer big rocks to sources? The listening stations would be hard to pick out. They could run a 'reverse' fermi equation of sorts and figure out how fast you need to detect and extinguish signals to keep the universe clear. Would the extermination look anything more than unfortunate random collisions? Do we actually have enough data to calculate if collisions are above some noise floor of random happenstances?

It doesn't matter. No matter how convincing your argument is, we can't afford to risk the entire world on you being right. The stakes are too high.

And I think you are very wrong. Aliens don't need to be anything like us. Don't anthropomorphize them. They might have nothing like our morality or care for other sentient life forms. And just see us as a pest and potential future competition to snuff out.

Or if they do have morals, they could be completely alien. When the Europeans discovered the New World, one of the first things they did is try to forcibly convert the natives to their religion. They justified conquering and ruling over the natives to stop their savagery and impose their values and laws on them.

One Important thing to note was that while religious undertones certainly existed the main goal of colonizers was economic. So I wouldn’t be surprised if the first alien ship to arrive on earth would be an exploratory mining ship trying to basically mine earth for water/minerals and would wipe out anything inconvenient such as existing life.

But the society need not be based on internal oppression, to be an adversary to us: I don't think the kingdom of Castille in 1492 necessarily was a beacon of stability and lack of conflict; yet it financed an expedition westwards.

That is true, but I don't think fair parallels can be drawn between a southern European empire in 1492 when humanity was still discovering itself and it's place within the universe to an interstellar society. Society matures in much the same way as an individual does, albeit on much longer, slower time spans. Can you seriously imagine an interstellar society (which I truly believe would be a democracy, as I see no feasible way an imperialist dictatorship would be possible with that sort of decentralization of society) having the same ambitions as a pre-enlightenment imperial society? I think the goals, desires, hopes and pursuits of that society and the individuals that compose it would be fundamentally opposed to that sort of expansion and enslavement.

Democracy isn’t something that automatically makes you a space faring civilization, neither is it necessary. The Roman Empire got pretty far while enslaving millions of people. It’s not a stretch to think that the Age of Science could have happened under Roman tutelage had it not met its unfortunate demise

On the flip side, the conditions required for life to reach interstellar technology are so rare that life-bearing worlds like Earth are highly coveted.

A planet where you can set up a city and not have to worry about micrometeoroids, radiation, atmospheric composition? Just sleep out under the stars without a suit repair kit handy?

That’s worth killing for!

If you can make the trip you can probably survive in space definitely. I'd be surprised if truly space faring civilizations really like gravity wells. Getting up and down them isn't cheap (although with plenty of effort it can be made cheaper). Everything is all stuck together, if you can find an asteroid of the material you want mining it and moving it for sale/manufacturing should be so much cheaper than dealing with moving a bunch of unrelated materials away under gravity.

In space you'd be able to move arbitrarily large objects with just an accelerator, map of the solar system and a transponder. In a gravity well you need a lot more and way more $$$ if you want to get it up the well.

Then again I have no training in the subject.

Wiping earth clear of humans and still having a habitable planet left over would require far more resources, risk, lives of your own and time then simply building a few colonies on planets like Mars.

Pfft! Smart aliens just send a couple of stealth probes, figure out our biology, and in short order program a simple virus that is dormant but highly contagious for about a year and then when incubation is over kills within 24 hours.

Ironically it’s not far off what was done to the Americas.

War is only an option when the sides are more or less evenly matched. We would not be anywhere near evenly matched with an interstellar civilisation.

Rare per-star or per-planet, but in our galaxy there are an untold number of stars. In the "universe" as a whole, whatever numbers you throw at the Drake Equation the answer is billions of civilizations.