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I have one counter-example for you - North Sentinel Island. This is a small island in the Indian Ocean where people live who are completely isolated from the rest of the world and as such are probably the least technologically advanced civilization on earth. They're able to remain this way because it's generally been agreed that we should leave them alone (you can't go within 5 nm, of the island) but India does try to keep an eye on them from afar, presumably in case some catastrophic event occurs that would otherwise result in their demise.

So while I agree that the most likely outcome of a technologically more advanced alien civilization encountering us would be a pretty nasty one ... there's a remote possibility that we would instead be a curiousity to them and that they might treat us as we now treat the Sentinelese.

Note: there has been contact between the Sentinelese and the outside world, some peaceful (I found something about Indian expeditions in the early 90s) some a little less so (the British kidnapping six islanders). But it didn't result in their extinction or being colonized, and they remain isolated.

This reminded me of the book ‘Hard to be a God’ by the Strugatsky brothers.

Very interesting. I wish there was a way to share basic medicine etc to improve their life quality without further damage to their existence. It's a shame to have means of reducing suffering and not share them with your fellow beings.

Yeah it's gotta be hard to figure out where the line is between helping and interfering. A few accounts of the Sentinelese suggest they don't want any help but I think some of the peaceful exchanges in the past show that they don't mind contact and are happy to receive packages of food and bits of iron for tools. All I know is that I'm not gonna be the one to reach out, an American preacher repeatedly tried to do so a few years back and ended up killed as a result. It was 100% his own fault, on one of his attempts a Sentinelese kid fired an arrow at him that struck his bible which if I was religious I would have taken as a sign to GTFO ...

>on one of his attempts a Sentinelese kid fired an arrow at him that struck his bible which if I was religious I would have taken as a sign to GTFO ...

If I was religious I'd have interpreted it as God protecting me, like in the tales of bibles stopping bullets.

Oh funny, I didn't think of it that way but I guess it's about where you imagine the bible was. I visualized him waving the bible around when an arrow pierces it as if to say "god has no power here, this is your only warning, there won't be another"

But if it was in his shirt pocket, then yeah that could indeed be interpreted the other way round!

This reminds me of the allegory of the cave, and one observation I've had, or maybe stolen?, of it.

Who is anyone to invade another's life, uninvited, and tell them how they're living wrong?

Would their subjective life experience really be better if they were chasing the next iPhone, pickup truck, opium den, bonus, or sexcapade?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave

It would be awesome to hear their stories and myths regarding the external world. How do they explain boats and planes, how do they tell the encounter stories, etc

This is true when the other side is a physical equal and of a similar species battling for resources.

I don't think this holds true when one side is far superior to the other, of a different species, and doesn't really require the same resources as the inferior species.

Example: I'm not out to destroy the squirrels in my woods, even though occasionally they do something that inconveniences me, because they are not a threat and I want nothing of their acorn or walnut resources.

They can be very entertaining to watch however.

It isn't always about actively attacking the lesser species.

For instance, bees. We don't want to hurt bees. But we've certainly done a lot of stuff that's been harmful to bee populations.

There are many other species that are endangered because of humans and their changing of the environment, too.

The Dilbert take of "Wanna play another game of Hide The Pellet?" comes to mind.

We endanger bees largely because we occupy their spaces to live. It does not seem like aliens want to move in, if they are visiting already.

I agree.

But I don't think your example has any parallels too the parent discussion.

Unless an alien species is currently modifing the earth's atmosphere without our knowledge. It seems pretty apparent that we humans are the ones doing the modification.

I don't think it makes sense to compare interactions between, on the one hand, different groups of primitive humans on Earth and, on the other hand, interactions between interstellar intelligences, which might be (and in my opinion probably would be) some kind of distributed AI which does not think or behave like a living organism, the product of biological evolution.

My guess is that an extraterrestrial intelligence investigating the Earth would be very stealthy, for two reasons: firstly because, like scientists, they want to observe life on Earth without disturbing it, and secondly because they will naturally suspect that other extraterrestrial intelligences are also lurking around the Earth and will also want to observe those, if possible, and will understand that they'll have a better chance of spotting those other extraterrestrial intelligences if those other extraterrestrial intelligences don't spot them first and take evasive action.

So my conclusion from all this is that it's quite plausible that multiple extraterrestrial intelligences are already lurking around the Earth, with their probes disguised as tiny insects, for example, and probably they are not all aware of each other's presence.

They may be observing you now!

Maybe Nikola Tesla was on to something when he fell in love with a pigeon...

I still find this notion that all alien civilizations will be meek little wall flowers pussy footing their way around the galaxy as completely unsupported by evidence. Most of the argument appears to be based on a not very good sci-fi novel. If our own history is any guide then civilizations will continue to run headlong into each other with little regard for consequences even when they know better, the motivations driving expansion and exploration are so strong that they overpower any cautions from the sideline. If life is common in the galaxy then it’s probably saturated every star system and all the space between by now and the reason we don’t see it is because we’re still having trouble figuring out how to spot the pebbles in our own neighborhood that might bump into us and wipe us out. Thinking we’d obviously see the aliens first if they were there is like expecting Montezuma to discover Spain.

> ...any time a more technologically advanced civilization has come across a less technologically advanced civilization, it has never ended well for the less technologically advanced civilization.

This assumes resource competition, which isn't a guarantee. Colonialism was driven by the need for open markets, resources, and vanity satisfaction from a declining class of European elites.

It's very likely that we don't have anything that a technologically advanced civilization would actually need. In this case, the situation would be more akin to Amazon coexisting with brick and mortar coffee shops, and less like Netflix competing with video rental shops.

> This assumes resource competition, which isn't a guarantee. Colonialism was driven by the need for open markets, resources, and vanity satisfaction from a declining class of European elites.

What about enslavement? Here Hawkings / Neil deGrasse Tyson make another interesting point: any civilization which could peacefully colonize a galaxy is not the kind of civilization that would colonize the galaxy at all. The very act of wanting to colonize self-selects for violence/exploitation.

> It's very likely that we don't have anything that a technologically advanced civilization would actually need. In this case, the situation would be more akin to Amazon coexisting with brick and mortar coffee shops, and less like Netflix competing with video rental shops.

Surely any civilization advanced enough to master interstellar travel would be better than we are at gathering intelligence and predicting humanity’s next move, which for all we know might threaten their interests.

If extraterrestrials are silently monitoring humans, isn’t it more likely to be for intelligence gathering purposes than for altruistic reasons? If the monitoring were intended to be altruistic, where’s the proof of the altruism?

What would be the point of a galaxy spanning civilization enslaving other species? We’re single planet savages and we’re getting close to building universal robots that can perform all of our labor, at the most it will be another half century. At that point any non bioengineered organism will be slower, weaker, less durable and less replaceable.

It’s much more likely that we just don’t have anything they want.

I don't even know if we can argue that there is an economic point to enslaving other humans (look at rates of industrialism in ex-slave owning regions).

There are more people in slavery now than there were during the transantlantic slave trade. It's a multi-billion dollar trans-national black market economy. Neither the Industrial Revolution nor abolition have even slowed it down.

You should adjust your numbers for population growth.

> If extraterrestrials are silently monitoring humans, isn’t it more likely to be for intelligence gathering purposes than for altruistic reasons?

Why? The Gulf War showed that a gap of ~eleven years of advancement was enough to lead to arguably the largest one-sided victory in the history of warfare. There is no need for an advanced civilisation to silently monitor us for nefarious purposes. All they have to do is show up.

> If the monitoring were intended to be altruistic, where’s the proof of the altruism?

If we are being monitored, the fact that we're not aware of it is likely sufficient proof that their intentions aren't inherently malicious. Whether or not this means that their intentions are altruistic is another argument.

However, if we are in fact being monitored, it's far more likely that we're supporting a bunch of intergalactic Ph.D. theses - and maybe a documentary or two - than putting ourselves in the sights of some malevolent conquering race.

Splitting my response into two comments.

> any civilization which could peacefully colonize a galaxy is not the kind of civilization that would colonize the galaxy at all. The very act of wanting to colonize self-selects for violence/exploitation.

This isn't necessarily true. Colonizing is simply the act of moving to a different piece of land. Violence and exploitation occurs when colonists are engaged in resource competition. It's not hard to imagine that, given high enough levels of technological development and the overall size of the universe, a colonizing civilisation can pre-select and coexist with existing occupants.

To put it another way, two hundred years ago, if I wanted to move a bunch of Europeans to what are now Addis Ababa or Bangkok, I would have to "colonize" the area. Now, all I would have to do is buy (multiple) apartments, or a plot of land or two and build a gated retirement community.

We have a planet that is quite suitable for carbon based life forms. Those might be worth something to interstellar intelligences.

Unlikely if you can just build your own habitat. Who wants to live at the bottom of an annoying gravity well on a filthy rock with uncontrollable weather and geological processes that’s infested with non-engineered microbes? Maybe for a weekend camping expedition but you wouldn’t want to live there.

Maybe you can't and all you do is send semi-autonomous drones containing DNA and sophisticated 3d printers.

I think it's more likely that any sufficiently advanced civilization capable of monitoring earth, relatively undetected, has evolved beyond the types of problems that compose the way we view everything. Assuming that mundane explanations have been systematically and thoroughly refuted I'd posit we're the curiosity of the extraterrestrial version of something along the lines of a zoologist, student, or voyeur.

"Any hypothetical which places a group of extraterrestrials capable of interstellar travel on Earth is fundamentally a catastrophe."

This is not totally correct, if you assume they have to survive countless conflicts (in which such advanced technology, it means aggressive ones would destroy themselves), you may end up with extraordinarily peaceful species.

With all due respect to Stephen Hawking and Niel deGrasse Tyson, the reason humans fight other humans for resources is that we all live in the same resource-constrained environment, and we have developed various cultural and religious imperatives which prefer hegemony, exploitation and colonization over cooperation.

But resources are abundant in space, and there's nothing that can be found on Earth (barring life, specifically) that can't be found in orders of magnitude greater quantities elsewhere. It's like our entire solar system is a buffet but we're the only dish with flies buzzing it. If you're looking for a meal, you wouldn't even bother with that.

That sounds nice, but is it true?

Weren't the Vikings, later Normen, far less advanced than the places they raided? They absorbed the technology, the land and culture and used it to conquer and form what is present-day England.

Maybe we'll beat the aliens with our savagery.

Or diseases.

Why not? It worked in War Of The Worlds

A species capable of intersteller travel could bomb us and we'd have no ability to bomb their homeworld back.

There would be no way for humans to win.

There is a funny Sci-Fi book by Poul Anderson on this topic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Crusade

It really depends if the two civilizations are competing for resources. In that case, the less advanced civilization is obviously going to have a bad time. There were cases in human history where human civilizations connected for exploration, trade and research and weren't competing for resources. Not all of those ended badly. Many of those that did end badly, ended badly because of disease. In the case of alien life, the risk of communicable disease would likely be low since any alien life would probably be a significantly different species that microbes would have a hard time jumping between.

While true, we as humans can't even fathom how an alien lifeform would reason if they came here. To base how aliens would act if they came here on how we as humans have acted throughout history is kind of stupid in my opinion.

This reasoning is excessive extrapolation. Any civilization that master interstellar space travel must be far more intelligent than us. The rules followed by such civilizations may not be the same as the rules we know.

I think you're saying "how do we know that aliens aren't already here? Because we are still here".

If so, good point.