Hi, NWR.
nwr writes:
I wonder why he is coming out with it now, rather than say 20 years ago. But then maybe nobody asked him 20 years ago.
Why would anybody have thought to ask Stephen Hawking? He's a physicist, not a social scientist. The way the man is honored, it seems blasphemous to say that he's not an expert, but, in this case, he's actually not an expert.
Personally, I'm stuck in the middle on this issue. Expecting that aliens will just be nasty, callous and/or even genocidal is frankly just an overdeveloped sense of pessimism derived from excessively pessimistic focus on the bad things we see in our own society.
On the one hand, we'd like to think that advanced aliens would have learned integrity, charity and responsibility from their superior experience in the realms of science and society; but, on the other hand, science and higher learning has not had as great an impact on the way our society does things as we would like to think it should.
However, even in the early 1800’s, the British Commonwealth outlawed the slave trade and slavery for no reason other than the morality of it, even though they still thought other races as their inferiors for a very long time afterward. My experience with pest control also tells me that people (even the most utilitarian of commercial farmers) are generally concerned about harming the ecosystem, and would use environmentally friendly methods if they could be proven to work.
You have to think that any civilization capable of mastering the social skills required to direct an extensively collectivistic enterprise like science and technology would also have some baseline respect for life. The only is how much value they would ascribe to other forms of life on a practical level based on that basic respect.
Perhaps the best way to get at that question would be to ask ourselves how we think
we would treat an alien species that is less advanced than us. My opinion is that we would be very interested in meddling in their affairs, in persuading them that our societal and governmental systems are superior, in correcting anything in their society that we perceived as injustice, etc.; but I don’t really see us today as trying to conquer, subjugate and/or exterminate them, or trying to ravage their ecosystems.
So, in my opinion, it’s much more likely that any negative effects (and I do think we should expect there to be negative effects) from a more advanced race will be unintentional consequences of well-meaning aliens, rather than plundering by callous conquerors.
-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)
Darwin loves you.
™ Version 4.2
