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Comment by caymanjim | Hacker News Reader

I don't think any sophisticated intelligent beings could evolve without their primary social interaction being cooperative. You can't build a spaceship if you don't learn to get along with others. You wouldn't evolve complex thought or even language without social pressure. This doesn't necessarily automatically translate to cross-species cooperation, or even intra-species, as evidenced by our own history of wars and subjugation, but in the grand scheme of things, our baseline is trending towards more peaceful existence. I expect the same pressures that would make aliens follow the same form factor as us would also drive them towards similar social constructs.

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I have a somewhat less optimistic view about your points of view. The humans and most of the successful creatures on Earth are terrific natural born killers.

Cooperations in humans has emerged only as a way of better milking of resources from otherwise dangerous environments for one individual-at-the-time endevour of surviving.

The evolution of complex thought on Earth had a lot to do with other species competing with humans for food, and simultaneously hunting humans as a food source.

I share your opinion about not automatic cross-species cooperation, but baselining to peace is not what's happening on our society of speaking predators, most of the order (in the whole planet), of the apparently peaceful society, is being continously kept by sheer force or menace of inmediate violence retribution (nation-states, others).

I.E. You could turn-off the lights of big city for a couple of days and few will have doubts about a tragic outcome.

As we are the only society of intelligent species (at least, we are speaking folks), we know, we should be carefully analyzing those facts when hypothesizing about alien intentions.

Indeed, all we can do is conjecture, there's not much evidence to go by. And given a practical question like "should we try to make first contact with unknown aliens?", best to not take the risk. But while we are just conjecturing, it seems intuitive that society and intelligence could in general lean toward peace and kindness. With intelligence comes empathy, and increased understanding - although it's born out of a ruthless and cutthroat evolutionary process, it seems to have its own goals that you can't easily equate to that of other species in the animal kingdom (mammals might show kindness, and empathy even to creatures outside of their species but it's a little easier to see the evolutionary benefits than some very unevolutionary human behaviors).

Turning the lights off in a big city will revert us back to our base/evolutionary goals - so perhaps we better hope these aliens aren't too desperate!

> You can't build a spaceship if you don't learn to get along with others.

We literally built rockets and started spacial exploration out of a pissing contest. It has been clearly on mankind history that we don't need to cooperate as a unified peaceful race to advance technological progress.

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