Aliens: What if we're the advanced species?

[Nocturnal Gentleman]

If there are intelligent aliens I fully believe it would take humanity ages to even realize they're intelligent. They most likely won't look like us, communicate like us, or live like us and we'll probably just assume they're funky looking wildlife and treat them based on this assumption. Hell, look how long we lived with crows and only in recent times do we actually take their intelligence into account.

If they are kind of like us I'd imagine our presence alone would bother them. Let's face it. Humanity is loud, obnoxious, elitist, and stupid. They'd see through the "we just want to be friends" attitude pretty quick and want us gone. Only after being rejected several times and given permission to harvest some of their resources would we leave them alone.

 

[michael87cn]

This is coming from a discussion between a friend and I.

We both believe in "life on other planets" theory, but what I wonder is, what if we're the advanced beings? Hear me out.

Let's just say, we manage to figure out how to travel throughout space quickly and find another race of intelligent life-forms (living in houses, pants, the whole sha-bang), only we're the "freaky futuristic aliens from space" and they're the "less advanced aliens".

What do we do then?

Do we leave'em alone? Watch them to see how they advance? World domination?

What if they're in a terrible state? Wars, hunger, over-population. Do we help them or do we leave them to their fate?

Personally, I'd leave them alone but leave something to monitor them. I'd love to see how another race would advance.

What do you think/ what would you do?

Have you never ever seen an episode of Star Trek or Stargate? They ran into less technologically advanced cultures all the time.

They each had different ideals with the situation.

Star Trek had more political approach. They wouldn't interfere (or at least try not to) with any cultures who wasn't advanced to interstellar travel. If you pop out of the sky with technology hundreds of years if could mess up the natural advancement of a species. Even create problems for them where they could have had peace.

Stargate attempted to help whenever they could; such as giving advanced generators for heat if the planet had terrible winter seasons, teaching medicine, agriculture techniques and so fourth. In return the Stargate team would want to check out the planet for any possible natural resources, one planet had an ore that created a metal lighter and stronger than steel. Or search for anything left behind by advanced aliens a long time ago; the Ancients and Gua'uld liked building secret laboratories/temples all over the universe.

I kind of prefer Stargate's approach. They did create problems for some planets. But at the same time got to help some that were having tough times and even found natural resources that didnt appear on Earth.

Trying a World Domination approach is risky. You dont know if some other advanced race already has "dibs" and is gonna get pissed off by some cockroach trying to snag their claim.

Star Trek and StarGate are fantasy. Real soldiers taking orders from real governments would totally destroy the alien culture to harvest their world. They wouldn't care at all.

Look at the indians, they were human. We did worse.

 

[John Farrell]

I'd compare old alien invasion movies.

 

[Jake0fTrades]

It'd probably look a lot like either Avatar or District 9.

 

[kebab4you]

History shows that we would abuse and exploit them.

I like to think we have evolved a bit since then(even if it was pretty recently) so that we would only observe them and maybe teach them some things so they can survive better on their own.[footnote]Then again we still got people that are die hard religious over here so this will not be the case[/footnote]

 

[Orange12345]

Well I think it would be more situational then just one blanket response

how I'd imagine it would go is that we would go into orbit around thier planet and observe for a bit if they are a very primitive species (no real technology to speak of) then we leave them alone and drop a satelite into orbit to moniter them, if they are at about the level of technology we are at now and detect us in orbit then we just pop in and tell them we mean no harm, etc. Then leave until they can reach space then we open dialoge with them. if they are almost at space travel then we could probably talk, but not before.

Some of the arguments I've heard say that if they are staving or have a plague spreading we should help them, but I don't really see how we could all our medicine is based on humans and our food might be poison to them.

And if they are at war, well who are we to intervine? in not saying we should'nt help, but who are we to decide who's right in a fight for thier planet.

Edit: Ideally anyway, we might just screw them over like every other time one of our civilizations has discovered a less advanced one.

 

[VoidWanderer]

Do not:
interfere
send any messages
scan for petroleum (but knowing us we probably would)

Do:
observe civilization
scan for weapons

If we are scanning for petroleum, when our technology would have gotten past the gas guzzlers we may have bigger problems that looking for even more fuel...

But in all seriousness, For the first few species we would meddle with them, to understand them more, and given human history either screw everything up, or kill/enslave them.

 

[Christopher Dudgeon]

The title of this post has to be the FUNNIEST thing I have read this year!

Thanks for the best and last Laugh of 2011 man!!

(mmmmhhhhhhheheheehehe we're the advanced one hahahahahahahaahaha!)

 

[SonOfVoorhees]

What would probably happen: resource wars.

Or getting are arses kicked for 10 years before having our governments saying "well we have finished doing what we set out to do" just to leave the planet with out looking like a loser. An that is before the aliens become radicalised and start attacking back. I say, if the aliens have a religion, please can we treat them nicely. It would be nice if we could actually learn from our mistakes before making more of them in space.

 

[Wereduck]

My initial reaction was that the OP was trying to start a discussion on the ethics of the Prime Directive but apparently not.
Anyways, I think we'd want to go with discreet observation until they put out the welcome mat with voyager probes & such. Once they start looking for alien life we'd have to respond - any deception from that point on would make future diplomatic relations extremely difficult.
Of course, our policy of observation would probably get thrown out the window as soon as there was any kind of indiginous crisis. Some space-capable private organization would want to intervene for humanitarian purposes and even if they were completely sincere it would probably degenerate into exploitation for labor & resources pretty quickly.

 

[Kinokohatake]

You seen the movie Avatar? I imagine that is pretty much exactly what would happen (minus the happy ending)

You mean happy ending for the adamantium skeletoned giant barbaric cat mutants? Yeah I was all for the humans in that one.

 

[DiMono]

I think we'd end up dying due to the unknown bacteria on their planet if we tried to actually interact with them directly. We'd probably start watching them, get bored, and leave.

 

[The Great Purtabo]

Do not:
interfere
send any messages
scan for petroleum (but knowing us we probably would)

Do:
observe civilization
scan for weapons

... Meh by the point of efficient space travel, humans will have no need for such primitive fuels, we will be either using solar power/fields, or some form of concentrated super-fuel, such as dark matter or the ilk.

 

[Daverson]

Assess their capabilities as a species - is there any benefit incorporating this species into our empire? Is there a niche they fit better than any other species we've encounter thus far (ie, do they possess greater coordination than the 40 fingered Q'phl'tr of F'xxx'v'bn'tgnh, so would make better surgeons), do they possess a form of technology or resource we have no experience with, ie, a method of turning seawater into cheese.

Unless they're sitting on the motherlode of some resource (ie, green-skinned space babes) that we'd quite like, we can ignore if they don't, the risk of interacting with them for shiggles far outweighs any possible benefit. Yeah, you might want to Jesus to the aliens, but they might have supernasty zombie plague they just happen to be immune to, then what? You've got zombies, in space. That's just terrible.

Otherwise, find out the most efficient means of getting them to collaborate. It's most likely they'll respond either to basic trading (ie, if you find 200 members of your species that are willing to join our doctoring department, we'll show you how you can turn all these useless brown rocks you've got lying around into iron, or we'll give you a bunch of laser guns) or just aggression (the old abductaroo. Personally I don't care if we've got tractor beams or teleporters, you can't beat a burlap sack when it comes to abducting!)

 

[Naeo]

I'd want to study (anthropologically) their culture, but do the Star Trek thing and abide by the Prime Directive of "don't mess with their own development". Assuming there were any sort of language we were capable of understanding, I'd absolutely love to study that (as someone studying for my linguistics major). If contact/communication could be effectively established (and because this is an alien species that's developed with no contact whatsoever with humans, it's very likely that there will be very few common traits--they might not use sounds to communicate) it would certainly make for a fascinating exchange of ideas and possibly technology/resources, but that risks exploitation.

However, it's likely that someone would do the Kirk thing and shout "fuck the prime directive" and go fuck the whole planet up. And/or bang all their womenfolk.

 

[him over there]

Well assuming the universe is infinite, there will always be a bigger fish. So be peaceful and attempt to integrate and help them because thats what we want to happen if superiors happen to find us. And if superiors do happen to find and destroy us for resources then we can go out without irony at least, knowing that we're not like them.

 

[latiasracer]

I Don't think we will ever meet them. Why? Because we have about 50 years to build spaceships, before Earth is properly buggered. Like proper spaceships, not gay shuttles and rockets. BIG ASS MOTHERSHIPS!

 

[MajorTomServo]

If I ran the world, I would help the other species advance to our level. Unless they collectively wanted to be left alone.

But since I dont run the world, we'll probably kill/enslave them all and take their planet's resources.

 

[RaNDM G]

Study their speech patterns from afar, send a message, let them know we're always watching them.

Then leave forever.

 

[Grunt_Man11]

I've pondered this a bit. I've also have pondered the question asked by many a skeptic.
"If extraterrestrials do exist then why haven't they made contact?"

One answer is that they aren't technologically advanced enough to do so.

Another answer is fear. They're afraid to make contact.

Why? Because while they have advanced past us in the field of interstellar travel and such, they haven't do so in the field of weaponry.

They see our weapons. They see how destructive, devastating, and overpowering they are.
They see how willing we are to use them, (against each other no less).
They see that despite having weapons so powerful we can level cities and wipe entire islands off the face of our planet, we continue to imagine even more destructive weapons.

They see all of this and say, "if we make contact and mess up, then they might get hostile and declare war. If they declare war their weapons will rip us apart! Stay away from that planet!"

We've come up with "warrior races" like the Klingons in our stories, but looking at our history we're the "warrior race." Hell for all we know we just might wield the most powerful weapons in the galaxy.