[ExI] Why Alien Life Would be our Doom - The Great Filter

[Mike Dougherty]

On Feb 12, 2018 10:57 AM, "Dave Sill" <sparge at gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Feb 8, 2018 at 8:56 AM, Edward Haigh <eh at edwardhaigh.com> wrote:

> When civilisations meet they're rarely peaceful encounters.
>
> If we ever collide with an alien race capable of interstellar space
> travel, my money won't be on trading technologies and textbooks but a
> rather swift end for us.
>

If they're anything like us, yes.  We'd be the native Americans in their
way.

It's imaginable, though, that such technologically advanced beings would
also be more morally advanced. Perhaps following something like Star Trek's
Prime Directive.


Or perhaps it's more like the reptiles at a zoo trying to interact with the
human visitors - even if we think one of them wanted out,  what could we
do? Not only are there social constructs (laws) preventing us from
interfering with the animals,  I'm confident I am ill-prepared to care for
any zoo animals I might kidnap...er, liberate.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20180212/13dcf816/attachment.html>