We leave a monolithe with mathematical equations, directions to earth and instructions to developing certain technology. Then we bounce and never interact with them again for 50,000 years.
@Boco Corwin neanderthals were prehistoric sapiens at the same time humans were. Do you know what we did to their species? It wasn't murder as some people suggest, since our own DNA tells a very different story for where they went. Granted, that case is still nowhere close to equatable with actual alien beings
That would make a great practical joke but it should be noted that monuments like Egypt's people were made by their own people, as evidenced by the fact that they have pyramids
EXACTLY, we traverse the stars to help them make pointless stone things, and the only rule is we must leave literally zero evidence they didn't do it themselves. That would just hurt their self esteem :(
@Boco Corwin Bruh, you think the aliens are going to be hot by our standards? Maybe the aliens who came here are like those people who are into weird shit
I just bombard took a couple of them for "archiving" then colonize, destroy or just live them, sometime I also love a small population and wait for them to advance to see if they take revenge
I indoctrinate them until they, like me, are Fanatical Xenophile Pacifists. Then I uplift them and we all live happily ever after. Space hippies for life!
I recall a TV show episode which had humans visiting a world and finding primitives. They wipe out the primitives to claim the system, but then find out that the 'primitives' were actually a outdoor youth camp for a far more advanced empire, and they (and Earth) get exposed by a alien warship sent to find out what happened to their children. Edit: Found the episode! "Relativity Theory" is an episode of The Outer Limits television show. It was first broadcast on February 27, 1998, during the fourth season.
@@isaacarthurSFIA that episode of futurama where they find a new kind of food on an alien planet only for it to turn out to be omicron persei 8 babies?
Me with each new ‘Aliens’ episode to answer the Fermi Paradox: “Oh, a piece of candy! Oh, a piece of candy! Oh, a piece of candy! Oh, a piece-“ >Gets trapped in a box stuffed with all SFIA episodes until the end of time.
Don't forget the drinks too. 🛀 I like my cold fresh water, It's cheap, plentiful and is generally considered the best drink in existence, after the pan galactic gargle blaster naturally. 👍 Here's to the blaster! th-cam.com/video/KR_6VxoUcjY/w-d-xo.html th-cam.com/video/vWQa05uYTN8/w-d-xo.html And here is for my favorite chemistrical anomaly in the universe (D.N.A, Diogenes and quite a few others come close 😂)which by quite a coincidence happens also to be the second best drink in existence. th-cam.com/video/crjugtkXZN4/w-d-xo.html Ty, gn. ✨️
I’d avoid it just to avoid the moral headaches that comes with contact with someone weaker than us. “ If you break it, you buy it” principal for dealing with primitives
@@Слышьты-ф4ю future humanity is going to have a field day with deciding on which view is best. Do we leave them to their own devices and potentiallyrisk getting trounced by them in 50,000 years, or do we sew them into our haute couture? Decisions, decisions...
@@Variety_Pack The most ecologically important specie on their planet will be good material for baby ear plugs with smell of rotten penises, therefore these aliens will not be considered sentient. And this fact will be perfectly fine in the same head with the fact they are stealing your guns and able to use different tactics, so the war and tax raises last for years.
This whole thing reminded of Neil Asher's Polity book series and his Jain species. They evolved from aquatic lobster creatures that re-produced via death match, with the winner taking the genetic material of the former. This hostility was literally part of them on an instinctual level, so after a few million years of doing that they evolved into tool use and eventually developed technology, which became part of the acquisition process in mating. Eventually they learned to steal knowledge from their opponents, merging into a new being after each challenge. A weird solitary species that grew though violence, takes longer to get to high tech than we did but over very scary.
@@KarlRosner So how did they do well, anything? You might have the knowledge of 10,000 individuals in your brain, but if you have the labor of only yourself available, how do you get anything done with that knowledge? Like for example how do you develop plastics if there is no oil industry? A single individual is also going to build an oil rig, refinery, and chemical factory? Who's going to operate all this? The idea seems like it would break down past stone age tech that individuals can feasibly conceive and build like a spear. If its spoilers don't tell me, but it seems nearly impossible for a species like that to achieve technology, even if they absorb the knowledge of defeated foes. Maybe its just my human bias but I literally cannot imagine a scenario of achieving high technology without cooperation.
The squid example reminds me of the vampires in the "blindsight" universe. Antisocial, territorial & almost incapable of a civilization of their own, but ridiculously smarter than humans and able to dominate us once reintroduced into society. They're tenuously held in check only by a crucifix "kill switch" humanity has.
15:24 Actually xenomorphs can parasitize any animal species that has a circulatory system it can attach to and feed off of. It doesn't have be human, intelligent, or even mammalian. Just big enough to support the embryo without dying too early.
Yeah I don't think I'd be able to long resist either, dropping a techno-optimist into a first contact team probably is setting yourself up for failure if you're a non-interference civilization :)
@@isaacarthurSFIA Go on, yknow you want to! (ps: i'd recommend stellaris if you like your games or olan thoresons Cast Under an Alien Sun book series )
Based on how empty the galaxy looks, I think it's very likely that this is the most likely first-contact scenario. I like to think we would be friends with them.
We all have history books so we know how bad christopher columbus was, i think future humans would be able to look at the past and try not to repeat that, and even if there would be people who would try to abuse the aliens there would be enough people to call them out on their behaviour. Also, besides potential for new pharmaceutical drugs the aliens would have nothing we would need. In order to get to the aliens we would have solved many of the problems that would usually cause us to be warmongering assholes.
If they noticed us we could accidentally ruin they're entire civilization timeline. Bad manners. But I guess if they are hyper horrible to each other it would just help them thinking about better things. Thanks Isaac Arthur for keeping up the greeat work.
@@thezyreick4289 Blame... nah. Not me anyway. We know something must be out there by now anyways. It would crash our imagination land- based- hypes and myths that give some few the authority and wealth to endanger us all on they're whims. Probably.
Ahem.. their whims. Well.. it is not exactly like we are discussing and deciding very much, or at least efficiently as a species the big decisions about what to do about our resources and biosphere. Actually.. It looks like we will be needing an effective and honest playground to do that sooner than later. If we want the coming generations to feel they can be proud of us and also basically get the standard of (or at all) living they deserve to grow up in. Buuuut that is a matter for another day. I'm still waiting to be forty in a couple of months. Decided that it would be best to wait for that when I was 17 years old, before rushing it and ruining the best chance we have to manage our selves.. not having much of the experience whilst doing a big project can lead to unnecessary mistakes and... other "silly" things. Love. Respect. Responsibility. 💕♻️😄👍
To anyone who hasn't read/ listened to children of time and it's sequel children of ruin you really should. It's a very realistic depiction of everything that's been discussed in this episode (especially the sequel) and it's really interesting.
Speaking of that alien squid that is intelligent, but without empathy, there's an interesting parallel with real life monitor lizards, especially Komodo Dragons. Komodo Dragons don't seem to show any compassion to fellow dragons in the wild, but they -can- be quite affectionate to zoo keepers. Whether they interface well with humans or not seems to be dependent on their individual personality. It's interesting to think that they could be universally antagonistic toward their own species (not usually outright hostile, as they do hang out in big groups) but think of human beings as big squishy teddy bears who scratch behind their ears and bring them food.
I think you are overestimating how easy it is to give tech, giving tech to primitive aliens could be like puting an diesel electric generator and some bulbs in a hunter gatherer tribe, they dont have diesel, they dont have spare parts and they are used to going to sleep when its dark so they are probably not going to use it, you need to provide so much support that it takes pretty much colonizing them or thousands of years of intense contact and trade to get them up to par to an interstellar civ and that can hardly be achieved "undercover"
you give tech slowly, first by introducing concepts and mathematics over generations, then introduce them to how wheels and pistons work. You don't give primitive aliens an Iphone XG9 and hope they know how it works, as you said this process of uplifting is gonna be a LONG haul.
Human settler: "Uh, Captain- I mean 'Pharaoh' Jackson? Pharaoh Jackson: "What is it, first mate?" First Mate: "You know these alien primitives, the ones who you tricked into worshiping you as a god?" Pharaoh Jackson: "Yeah, what about them? " First Mate: "Welp, turns out this planet was being watched over by a precursor civilization fifty light-years away. One of their fleets are en route and they do not look happy. " Pharaoh Jackson: "...I'm sure there's nothing to worry about." [Roll credits]
With primitive *sapient* aliens, I think we should take heed. With regards to aliens as primitive microbes, we may want to consider the idea of "Move over, microbe!"
The thought comes to mind; The microbe in my brain. Even if not intelligent, let alone sapient the little microbe still could cause confusion and consternation. Human Exploration Team: Nope, not even intelligent life on *this* planet; feel free to colonize! ~~~6 months later~~~ Yes, brain Bob, the emissary will be leaving shortly with brain Brian, brain Brenda, and brain Boron. (I don't know why someone called their kid Boron or why all infected are called brain).
21:41 "might raise a hazy line between a child and a pet" for many people I think the difference between the two boils down to potential. The kind of person that calls their companion animal a "fur baby" would probably put their pet through school if there was any point to doing that, same as they already sometimes take them to obedience training classes. Perversely, there are also people who treat their kids like pets and don't let them live up to their potential because they enjoy the early years of childrearing more than watching them mature. Point is, there are probably ways to figure out how to mentor someone with different psychology but had humanlike potential for growth, borrowing lessons learned from special needs kids and maybe some veterinary techniques, since that's our only experience raising nonhumans for now.
My fur babies are quantifiably more intelligent than my coworkers. Most pet owners have probably experienced this too. There's definitely overlapping examples we can use from our interactions with other mammals that might as well apply to intelligent aliens. If we get queasy about blurring the line between adopting a child and getting a pet, than aren't pets just slaves? We can't just let all the pet dogs go and expect them to fend for themselves at all (the vast majority wouldn't be capable of self-sufficiency) so we basically are forced to keep the 'slavery' unless we're fine with genocide. It's a moral catch 22. Yeah we're talking about aliens, but also PETA and similar groups. The animal activist extremists who think pets are slaves but also acknowledge that pets CANT just be let go, so they 'rescue' strays just so they can euthanize them. Most people agree that those people are freaking psychopaths and wouldn't trust such a person with their human children. We can also easily draw the parallels of how the "spay and neuter" advice is indistinguishable from eugenics. Should we apply the same morality to an alien species as well? Are we practicing eugenics on species that could one day develop human level intelligence on their own? We could be very well curbing the development and evolution of cats and dogs and be unjustly moralizing it as 'merciful'. If we can do that to fellow mammals than why wouldn't we do the same to aliens on a whole separate tree of life? Discussing the morality of first contact opens up the identical, ugly can of moral worms we can apply to today. Sorta morbid stuff but we can't discuss a topic without first asking the question. I find that scifi topics like this are fantastic for self reflection.
I actually think this scenario is more likely than a visit from a saucer from some super advanced alien race. It will be them looking up at our ships with stark terror. And given our history, the little green men indeed have much to fear.
The thing about that TOS gangster episode is that after everything the only real change they make is to reorganize the mobs to all be one big mob. No changes to how they operate or anything like that, just implement a one world government and every thing is peachy. Never mind that the one world government is run by literal gangsters.
Honestly, if you look at the politics of Gene Roddenberry, it's not surprising that he thought that a one world government run by oligarchs was an improvement. TOS had all sorts of his creepy politics creep into it while he was in charge of Star trek. He even managed to get his anti-sematic tropes thrown into Next Gen with the Firangi. He was the type of Hollywood personality that the Red Scare/McCarthy Witch Trials SHOULD have gotten and it's a shame it didn't. Now, I'm a Star Wars fan first and foremost so I acknowledge my inherent bias, lol. BTW, f*ck Disney. Roddenberry probably would have gotten along great with the one-world-gov technocratic oligarchs running the show at the mouse house nowadays.
You should watch the Star Trek: Enterprise season 2, which is criminally underrated, because it contains an arc that deals with why the Prime Directive was created in the first place and the writers actually put some decent thought into the incidents which occur. It isn't your run of the mill "they might become bad guys in a hundred years", and it's not just shown from the one perspective. It actually backfires on humanity because a species' culture wasn't respected by a crew member.
The prime directive makes sense because you don't want to have species start to turn up to earth like in the movie District 9. One species is a nuisance, so what do you call the 3rd or 8th species that wants to stick around and to be taken care of? I think it would make even the most cosmopolitan person become a bit of upset because the 8th species just turned up & in their minds they'll be wondering if another 8 more to come with some species already demanding we start transforming Mars or Venus for their species.
It’s been a while since I watched the series but isn’t that the episode where Dr Phlox opts not to give a cure (that he had already developed) to an alien race that was dying of a plague because some of them had slaves from another intelligent species? I have no sympathy for slave owners of any form but that seems a bit too genocide-y for my tastes despite technically not being genocide.
@@jazzfan1994 nO THEY WEREN'T SLAVERS. Damn Caps. Anyway it is mentioned that they are treated well and given tasks to do. They had been living like that for thousands of years and were getting smarter. Phlox insisted that if we gave a cure they would never be forced to have true intelligence as they were cared for by the more advanced ones and so wouldn't be forced to evolve through evolution. Made some bullshit argument about neandertals died out so we evolved.
It might actually go better we mining most of our resources in space by then. The biggest danger from us will be tourists, tech and those who have zoos.
There was several episodes in star trek voyager that actually explored later events after a first contact. Like when a backup of the doctor was discovered and activated by a species who thought voyager was a war craft and he had to correct the history.
I can see first contact with an alien race being Walmart showing up in orbit and opening a new outlet on the planet. Those primitive aliens then shape their entire society around shopping at Walmart. A century later, a government ship makes orbit and the aliens are shocked to learn the rest of the galaxy isn't run exactly like their society.
Maybe to commemorate your 50th peer contact, you might establish some constraining contact protocols. But, when you're travelling generations to discover your first, or even your 10th Jurassic World, or Neanderthal protocivilization, you're probably not going to be that picky about who you talk to.
The idea behind the Prime Directive is not that all interference is destructive...it is that before we intervene, we cannot know the consequences of our actions. Star Trek generally would probably argue that not knowing those consequences makes non-interference the best policy in most cases
The Orville did a season 1 episode covering the unintended effect of cultural contamination on a primitive alien species. They also did a followup on that a few episodes ago.
The best novel I can think of that has less advanced, sentient aliens becoming aware of advanced humans -- and from the alien's perspective, no less -- is _A Deepness in the Sky,_ by Vernor Vinge (a prequel to _A Fire Upon the Deep_ ). In fact, it might be the only one I can think of the heavily features the alien perspective ... well, there was that thing by Tchaikovsky with the spiders, but they weren't really aliens. And Tchaikovsky is nowhere near the writer Vinge is.
Oh, that was a good read! I did read them in reverse order but didn't realize until late... both had interesting aliens and motivations. (I didn't understand some of the alien motivation, but then again that helps make it alien.
@@brentmartin6833 - I _really_ wish Vinge would finish those _Zones of Thought_ books, but I'm afraid he's really getting up there in years, and it's probably not going to happen.
What we should do is watch their alien invasion movie and do what what they thought aliens would do. But not for real tho...after it we just laugh and say its a prank bro!!
A great, thought inspiring episode with many questions and on important topics, too. To quote Einstein: "Don't listen to the person who has the answers; listen to the person who has the questions".
Or as I call them the human borgs. They want resistance to be futile. Look at what they tried to do to Eminiar VII, the Halkan council, and the Orgaians.
There's one Trek episode where Worf's adopted brother does something similar-the crew of the Enterprise is very angry and IIRC he might have ended up prosecuted for it. So I'd guess non starfleet citizens that interfere get thrown in jail at the minimum for doing what you say.
1. Do No Harm - Do not kill, steal, lie, or transmit toxic stuff. 2. Do Some Good - Try to leave each situation better than we found it. 3. Ask Permission - Every being, every society, has the right to be left undisturbed. I assume that by the time we can travel beyond the Oort Cloud, our social evolution will include ethical systems that will distinguish our behavior from that of ape troops. Given the ethical postulates (above), "The Prime Directive" is a logical consequence. But there are always trade-offs. "The Prime Directive" can also be viewed as an excuse for "Benign Negligence". If a world is in danger of a catastrophe that we can prevent or mitigate, do we stand back and rationalize that disasters are *natural* in an uncaring universe? It is worth noting, that Earth does not seem to have been meddled-with ... even though, mathematically, it most likely might have been. Perhaps the formation of the Earth-Moon system was an act of 'gardening' by some billion-year-old civilization that existed when our solar system was just forming. Gardening encourages interesting plants to live by tweaks to the natural system.
There is no way you can use mathematics to conclude earth was intentionally "gardened" by some advanced species or claim that it's likely that happened. I see similar arguments used by theists to justify God. In fact, the opposite is true. It's the same as a lottery winner. Was it lucky that a lottery winner emerged even though they had such a small chance of winning it? No, since the chance might be 1 in 10 million for a single person but 10 million people participated so it would be improbable that there weren't any lottery winners. There are a 1-10 trillion estimated planets only in our own galaxy. It would be unlikely a planet supporting intelligent life wouldn't pop up here and there and lo and behold Earth was one that won the "which planet can support life" lottery.
We should probably avoid interfering with any primitive aliens that we might find unless they are about to go extinct, and we should be very careful even in that scenario.
We will just treat them as animals as we do with other lifeforms here on Earth. We'll see their habitats as zoo and won't really interfere. Just observe from distance. And other alien civilizations can mingle with them. We'll observe them too. Its like when a Tiger hunts a zebra in the wild. We generally don't interfere with any of them, we just observe. I think most of the advanced civilizations act this way.
Culture answer: Gradually fold the alien civilization or sentience into your own civilization by use of incentives and cultural pressures. All life gets subtle love and care. When spaceflight is achieved or negotiated, any alien / uplift individual has the option to culturally accommodate with others or further uplift itself, with the incentive of a passport saying they're safe to traverse your society and may become citizens. Citizens get all of space so long as they don't harm others, they respect public spaces, and they share certain over-ethics. Sure, the polite trans-sentiences who most easily qualify for passports and citizenship inherently comprise a diverse hedonistic machine civilization... but at least the full range of posthuman expression stays available in physical and virtual space. I'd love an episode on the ethics (and pitfalls!) of hegemony of the uplifted or cultured.
Relax the nearest star is 40,000 years away if we left now. We pretend to be advanced however a not insubstantial number of us are burning excrement for fuel. The number of us that understand, let alone use General relativity, quantum mechanics, plumbing or electricity to build tools is tiny.
I find it worrisome that you lumped Darwin in with major world religious figures/icons. We know without any doubt that darwin existed, contributed to science, and was a flawed guy but real. We can't say that same about the others.
Jesus certainly existed though and other cultures even mention his involvement in history. Who was Darwin? I don't recognize his existence in that case.
Bruh... I tried to read David Brin. I really did lol. Maybe it's the VA? My experience was listening to a directionless, plotless exposition piece as dry as the Sahara and rambling in a mode that makes our friend Peter Hamilton seem positively taciturn. In like 7 1k page volumes. Some cool concepts in there though. Liked the aliens with biological wheels.
Re: David Brin. Some of his work can be rambling. But I encourage you to give him another try. Check out "The Postman." (It's short and the classic of post apocalyptic fiction)
What if the aliens come in a medieval spaceship made of wood and iron (they just happen to be naturally immortal and resilient against cosmic radiation)…
@@lomiification The idea is just that they’re technologically less advanced than we are, rather than a thousand or a million years ahead as is usually the case in SF…
I swear there is a book about this. It's about some aliens comming to conquer earth, but they have wooden space ships and muscets, because they have some other amazing piece of space travel tech that simply abolished the need for them to invent anything else. Humans kicked their ass with basic Nowton.
I'm reminded of Jerry Pournelle's novel 'A Spaceship for the King' (also known as 'King David's Spaceship') though I must admit to not having actually read it. However, it's hard to imagine merely getting into orbit around a presumably Earth-like planet with 'medieval' technology, much less reaching stellar escape velocity, and even slightly reasonable interstellar speeds...
@@stardolphin2 One could move the whole thing a thousand years into the future so they can be more or less where we are are now, rather than needing medieval (or, say, steampunk) space travel to work… and maybe interstellar speeds needn’t be “reasonable” if you can doze away a thousand years at a time and maybe are more like a tree than an animal, or like a fungal root system popping out transient individuals as needed…
LOl, He wouldn't be a Legionnaire anymore since his government and military would no longer exist. We will need to get some fluent Latin speakers to learn anything from him, and to start teaching him modern Italian.
This is exactly what my book is about and I love this particular episode for that. It's basically a book set millions of years in the future and now humanity isn't the only race in the galaxy. Now there's 5 other sentient races from multiple dimensions that live on and call earth home. The whole solar system is basically reset back to the stone age after several apocalyptic events and now everyone is scrambling to survive. Meanwhile there's Martian's, Moon People, Venusians and several other alien races living in the solar system. It's honestly very crazy yet very cool.
Sentient comes from the latin _sentire_ which means to perceive. Sapient comes from the latin _sapere_ which is to have knowledge. Almost all animals are sentient, they have eyes, antennae, noses...
@@Archgeek0 we're still classified as animals my dude. And let me be clear if I wasn't already, I really don't care for keyboard warriors trying to play smart and correct my mistakes. I used the wrong word OMG! Get over it, I'm an author but even I can mistakes. These 5 other races, key word there, are people who now call earth home and thus they need to work with the remnants of humanity in order to ensure the survival of all species.
@@rojack79er Easy there, you didn't use the wrong word, you left out of a word. Its absence changed the meaning of your statement, causing it to look like a commonly-held but to me deeply annoying anthropocentric viewpoint that we're somehow above or at least separate from other animals. The form it took came real close to one I've hated for a long time: "That's what separates us from [the] animals.". In short, I wasn't correcting any mistake, but myself mistook what'd you'd actually typed as intentional, espousing a viewpoint I've long despised, and subsequently lashed out at it. Misunderstandings sure can be silly.
I would say there are really only two viable options. Either wipe them out so they never become a threat to human survival OR cultivate an alliance for mutual benefit. If they have no familial bonds, empathy, or social instincts then wiping them out would be the prudent thing to do. If they possess the mentioned characteristics, then cultivating a long-term alliance with them would be the more prudent path. As you said, if we find one alien specie capable of technology then there will certainly be many more we have not found yet. Due to the age of the universe, at least some of those unknown species will be far more advanced than we or the newly discovered aliens. Therefore, the more allies we can cultivate into an alliance would increase the security of all species in the alliance against a more advanced and possibly genocidal species we have yet to encounter. I do not believe we will ever find a water species that has technology due to never being able to use fire. That would also apply to worlds with any condition that would prohibit fire. While they may be intelligent, they would be without the capability to develop technology. One thing leads to another and mastering fire is one of those critical steps.
There's another: observe them from far away, and if they have some tech that we don't, covertly obtain that tech and reverse engineer it. Thus we get to have their tech while they don't have ours, and it also gives us the element of surprise if we ever decide to vaporize them.
we don't have the right to wipe out aliens, especialy the inteligent ones, and concidering how rare they are I highly doubt we will erace them from existance even if they were a threat, which is also very unlikly concidering how big the universe is.
@@mrzenox9835 Well, that would depend on whether or not they have colonized many worlds or not. If they have not, completely eradicating them would be rather easy.
@@The1stDukeDroklar it would, but assuming there was for example a more powerful alien race with higher morals and values, observing us in the act, they would deem us as a savage and dangerous race and erase us all. Not only that but assuming there are other aliens in the neighborhood, they all have nothing in common with each other, if we start a genocide we would give them something in common which is hating us. Invading an alien race that's less advanced is wrong, and it's not worth it, why would we be the bad guys? we can just leave them be, the same way we want a godlike alien race to leave us be.
Great video. Brings up some great points and is just what I needed to jog my creative brain. And especially cool that you hit upon the relation two of my favorite science fiction series (Uplift Saga) and (The Enderverse).
im hopeful that future generations will look at the idea of uplifting other species and our selves with a greator focus on empathy and maximizing the potential quality of all the lives we can, instead of focusing on paranoid worst case sinarios and iratinal spiritual arguments to avoid the topic entirely.
Uplifting is as likely to be as bad as any other action. Most likely due to the fact we can't even agree on what that would mean just among humans. Further, you and me are almost certainly exist because our ancestors would be considered evil by some of those now extinct or maybe even by ourselves.
Uplift is playing God. It is taking direct control and responsibility for the genetic evolution of another sentient species. Humanity needs to learn that not everyone needs or even wants our increasingly mono-cultural benevolence. And even if it works out well, what happens if later - that species comes to our ancestors and demands to know who the hell did we think we were deciding their genetic destiny when they could not give consent when they were pre-sentient?
@@darkorion69 ah... i see!, so you think they would regret any form of tampering on the grounds that it messes with distiny... though, that would requre distiny to exist, and god... nether of which exist, so dont take the term playing god to seriously, its more just... doing what we inevitably could to improve life... anyone dumb enough to complain about that... well, thats theyre problem. not the worlds, not humanity or the uplifted species problem.
Its simple. Evaluate their intelligence level and relate it to an animal on earth and then see what it tastes like cooked before coming to a conclusion.
With an alien derived biochemistry, I predict a bouquet of noxious, with a strong toxic body, followed by fine lingering finish of carcinogenicity. You try first.
I've also wondered, how would a Starfleet Captain react if they found an alien civilization on the brink of extinction, say they found a world that had engaged in thermonuclear war. They are obviously intelligent and once covered their planet with nations/etc, but now there's only about 10,000 of them left living in a post-nuclear apocalypse world. Would Starfleet ignore them, or step in to help them rebuild/recover?
Keep in mind, giving them technology that leads to a brutal war of conquest could end up unifying them and giving them a desire to play great powers against each other to avoid being colonized, at least in the immediate term. This is pretty similar to what happened in Hawaii. Although it's also kinda imperialist Japan's excuse for attacking all of east Asia so... it can definitely be a bad thing too.
If a more advanced civilization chooses not to save from danger a less advanced one then it should not expect even more advanced civilizations to aid them when they could use it.
Neanderthals were not dumb and uncompassionate humans, they were highly, highly intelligent and advanced, just as much as homo-sapiens were until around 20,000 years at least
the head size hypothesis for human birth is now considered incorrect. Birth occurs when the mother can no longer take in enough calories for both her and the child.
I took a few classes in ethics in my university days, non were as well organized or interesting as these sorts of episodes. Good work by the way of incorporating the real horror angle of finding primitive aliens.
We can get more energy out of hydrogen shipped in slow than it takes to transport. If we figure out how to make microBlackHoles or set up around naturally occurring BHs then we can get orders of magnitude more energy & out of every kind of matter. Might be robots for the most part, but setting up around BHs for their higher mass-to-energy conversion ratio might just guarantee some degree of crewed interstellar travel, even if it is slow-boat colonization.
6:00 minutes in and I’m wondering about a scenario where a primitive society comprised of beings that have a superior cerebral architecture for intellect, memory and learning AKA primitive but not dumb at all. Give them a few years with advanced tech and they are improving faster and better than we have ever done be it energy, propulsion, and weapons.... uh oh 😬
I cannot remember if it were Poul Anderson or Arthur C. Clarke, but one of them wrote a short-story about just that scenario. 'Tis been a long time since I read it.
With the exception of actually given them any tech, this concept sounds rather similar to the Tau from the WH40k universe. Humanity already had a galactic empire, discovered some bronze age aliens but before we could decide what to do with them, we had our FTL travel disrupted for a couple of thousand years. Fast forward to when we travel back to check up on these aliens, they are now an FTL space faring species with better/more proliferated tech than us in many fields, while our own species is in a techno/social dark age of tech stagnation/regression.
This happened with the MMO game "Wildstar"'s "Chua" race. The game's futuristic space-human race made a space-empire, came across the Chua and gave them tech in exchange for them joining the empire. Next thing was the Chua destroying the ecology of their planet, having quickly exploited it for resources.
Really hard to tell. I think there is no perfect choice. But I tend to think it would be best to make meaningful contact with good intentions, since at this point the advanced civilization is a part of the universe and therefore not different from any other transformational, environmental event a civilization encounters that kicks evolution into high gear, like a planet killer asteroid for example. I tend to say everything flows and evolves, and an advanced civilization becomes part of the "nature" of the universe.
I hope you do a video on intergalactic job hunting & education. I don't think that those who went to among the best universities on the planet to find that they're 40 years of age and they'll need to go back to school with curriculum that makes the information taught at say Harvard be the intergalactic equivlant of say pre-middle school. What would a intergalactic jobs fair look like? Maybe humanity drifts apart because child raising age adults slowly get absorbed into a intergalactic jobs market such as millions or tens millions of workers being exported year after year?
Ha! Jokes on the intergalactic community... Bachelor's of Under Water Basket Weaving! FTW! Wait we uplifted Dolphins *and* gave them hands?!!! Sigh, welp, back to Mom's basement.
Okay, hear me out: The obvious strategy is quite simple. Since we came so far, we don't have the resources to just move onto another star system, or even a different planet. WAY too much effort. So we need to install an operating system in all our computers that is compatible with their own computers, and park our main ship in low orbit. Then, we dispatch ships just a bit more advanced than their aircraft, and make sure to hook our city-busting 'superweapon' to our main reactor. Then we destroy the capitol building of their most powerful capitalist nation for unspecified reasons.
I liked this episode very much. How humanity would treat less advanced species can teach us how more advanced species will look at us. There are many questions in this episode.
If we don't improve from where we are now, we'll never reach other solar systems, let alone inhabited ones. That's probably true for any other species that might exist out there, too. So we better hope there aren't any genetically nice species traipsing around the galaxy handing out advanced technology to species like ours.
@@MagnusItland You'd have to imagine any benevolent aliens would have something skin to the Prime Directive in Star Trek before encountering that issue. Or hope that the painful lesson was taught via previous encounters.
on the "colonizing the galaxy and leaving no room for them" conumdrum what is stopping aliens form living in human colonized space alongside us we will be potentially as alien to eachother as they are to us anyways
I just imagined the squid scenario - Hello Jake, how are you, what was it...20 years? Your hair got white - Yeah Jelly, what can I say, age cought up with me, my children finished university and joined starfleet, how is your family btw. - My children just finished building space habitat and I have become great grandfather... my immediate family is about 1 million people.
If they had tardigrade like physiology primitive aliens could arrive on Earth using steampunk technology and primitive nuclear reactor pile technology. After millions of years traveling. How anticlimactic that would be, humans wanting advance technology. And they just arrive and crash on Earth and setup shop. 😀
One of these days you need to end a video with “If advanced aliens are watching us right now, then make sure to like, comment, and subscribe.”
I’d argue that if aliens are watching our media. This would be the one page theyd likely subscribe too
@@akasha9141 agreed 🤝
Imagine the questions it would raise if he said that then suddenly gained millions of new subscribers.
We already do. 😉
Also start the video with a big thank you to all my time traveling viewers who have already liked this video prior to publishing
Most importantly we need to help them to build various stone strucrures. In the shape of pyramids and circles, only to ghost them for next 5000 years
We leave a monolithe with mathematical equations, directions to earth and instructions to developing certain technology. Then we bounce and never interact with them again for 50,000 years.
@Boco Corwin neanderthals were prehistoric sapiens at the same time humans were. Do you know what we did to their species? It wasn't murder as some people suggest, since our own DNA tells a very different story for where they went.
Granted, that case is still nowhere close to equatable with actual alien beings
That would make a great practical joke but it should be noted that monuments like Egypt's people were made by their own people, as evidenced by the fact that they have pyramids
EXACTLY, we traverse the stars to help them make pointless stone things, and the only rule is we must leave literally zero evidence they didn't do it themselves. That would just hurt their self esteem :(
@Boco Corwin Bruh, you think the aliens are going to be hot by our standards? Maybe the aliens who came here are like those people who are into weird shit
In Stellaris, every time I land troops on a primitive planet I say, "Hey, folks! Welcome to the galactic community!" 😁
I just bombard took a couple of them for "archiving" then colonize, destroy or just live them, sometime I also love a small population and wait for them to advance to see if they take revenge
I indoctrinate them until they, like me, are Fanatical Xenophile Pacifists. Then I uplift them and we all live happily ever after. Space hippies for life!
@@ekulerudamuru dude uncool
Purge all xenos! But only through displacement. I have morals.
@@ekulerudamuru Same thing, i did in one of my playthrough.
I recall a TV show episode which had humans visiting a world and finding primitives. They wipe out the primitives to claim the system, but then find out that the 'primitives' were actually a outdoor youth camp for a far more advanced empire, and they (and Earth) get exposed by a alien warship sent to find out what happened to their children.
Edit: Found the episode! "Relativity Theory" is an episode of The Outer Limits television show. It was first broadcast on February 27, 1998, during the fourth season.
That sounds very familiar, but I can't recall what it was.
@@isaacarthurSFIA
Outer limits. Reboot late 90’s early 2000’s.
I remember that episode.
@@isaacarthurSFIA that episode of futurama where they find a new kind of food on an alien planet only for it to turn out to be omicron persei 8 babies?
That sounds absolutely horrifying. I checked the outer limits channel and they have many episodes but unfortunately that episode is not there.
Ah another video exploring the thankless task of answering the Fermi paradox this is the best candy for many of us
Me with each new ‘Aliens’ episode to answer the Fermi Paradox: “Oh, a piece of candy! Oh, a piece of candy! Oh, a piece of candy! Oh, a piece-“
>Gets trapped in a box stuffed with all SFIA episodes until the end of time.
@@twenty-fifth420 🥳🥳🤩🤩😍😍😎
@@twenty-fifth420 get trapped in a box make sure you bring the snacks and some candy
Don't forget the drinks too. 🛀 I like my cold fresh water, It's cheap, plentiful and is generally considered the best drink in existence, after the pan galactic gargle blaster naturally. 👍
Here's to the blaster!
th-cam.com/video/KR_6VxoUcjY/w-d-xo.html
th-cam.com/video/vWQa05uYTN8/w-d-xo.html
And here is for my favorite chemistrical anomaly in the universe (D.N.A, Diogenes and quite a few others come close 😂)which by quite a coincidence happens also to be the second best drink in existence.
th-cam.com/video/crjugtkXZN4/w-d-xo.html
Ty, gn. ✨️
As always, Arthur has the new perspective
"No matter which side you're on, first contact is a dumpster fire"
I’d avoid it just to avoid the moral headaches that comes with contact with someone weaker than us.
“ If you break it, you buy it” principal for dealing with primitives
@@Nostripe361 they'll become good pets and skins for a sofa
@@Слышьты-ф4ю future humanity is going to have a field day with deciding on which view is best. Do we leave them to their own devices and potentiallyrisk getting trounced by them in 50,000 years, or do we sew them into our haute couture? Decisions, decisions...
@@Variety_Pack The most ecologically important specie on their planet will be good material for baby ear plugs with smell of rotten penises, therefore these aliens will not be considered sentient. And this fact will be perfectly fine in the same head with the fact they are stealing your guns and able to use different tactics, so the war and tax raises last for years.
@@Variety_Pack the BEPWSORP will be instantly bought out as the protest action against killing these aliens, thus increasing need for making more.
This whole thing reminded of Neil Asher's Polity book series and his Jain species. They evolved from aquatic lobster creatures that re-produced via death match, with the winner taking the genetic material of the former. This hostility was literally part of them on an instinctual level, so after a few million years of doing that they evolved into tool use and eventually developed technology, which became part of the acquisition process in mating. Eventually they learned to steal knowledge from their opponents, merging into a new being after each challenge. A weird solitary species that grew though violence, takes longer to get to high tech than we did but over very scary.
So... Zerg? But with non-bio tech?
Added Neil Asher to my reading list. Thanks for recommending books.
Also added Neil Asher to my reading list, starting from his first book, even though it's not technically the first chronologically.
@@EliasMheart Kind of like primal zerg but the jain never worked together, they are 100% hostile to each other.
@@KarlRosner So how did they do well, anything? You might have the knowledge of 10,000 individuals in your brain, but if you have the labor of only yourself available, how do you get anything done with that knowledge?
Like for example how do you develop plastics if there is no oil industry? A single individual is also going to build an oil rig, refinery, and chemical factory? Who's going to operate all this? The idea seems like it would break down past stone age tech that individuals can feasibly conceive and build like a spear.
If its spoilers don't tell me, but it seems nearly impossible for a species like that to achieve technology, even if they absorb the knowledge of defeated foes. Maybe its just my human bias but I literally cannot imagine a scenario of achieving high technology without cooperation.
The squid example reminds me of the vampires in the "blindsight" universe. Antisocial, territorial & almost incapable of a civilization of their own, but ridiculously smarter than humans and able to dominate us once reintroduced into society. They're tenuously held in check only by a crucifix "kill switch" humanity has.
I read the book when Isaac recommended it back in 2020
Master. Chef love vampier
15:24 Actually xenomorphs can parasitize any animal species that has a circulatory system it can attach to and feed off of. It doesn't have be human, intelligent, or even mammalian. Just big enough to support the embryo without dying too early.
Xenomorphs even copy some of the hosts biology as a way to increase the probability of them being able to survive in new environments.
The urge to play Civilization on primitive worlds for me is too hard to ignore. Flintlock rifles for everyone!.
Yeah I don't think I'd be able to long resist either, dropping a techno-optimist into a first contact team probably is setting yourself up for failure if you're a non-interference civilization :)
@@isaacarthurSFIA playing civilisation would be too hard to resist
@@PyxelDreams Now I'm resisting the urge to start a game of it :)
@@isaacarthurSFIA Go on, yknow you want to! (ps: i'd recommend stellaris if you like your games or olan thoresons Cast Under an Alien Sun book series )
@@isaacarthurSFIA One... More... Turn...
Based on how empty the galaxy looks, I think it's very likely that this is the most likely first-contact scenario. I like to think we would be friends with them.
I can only wish I was as optimistic as you are gentle stranger.
@@greenrocket23 I know right?
We all have history books so we know how bad christopher columbus was, i think future humans would be able to look at the past and try not to repeat that, and even if there would be people who would try to abuse the aliens there would be enough people to call them out on their behaviour. Also, besides potential for new pharmaceutical drugs the aliens would have nothing we would need. In order to get to the aliens we would have solved many of the problems that would usually cause us to be warmongering assholes.
why do i feel we would genocide them for their resources
We will go down the Imperium of Man path at the end, mark my words.
Alien youtuber, 10,000 years from now: "This is the evidence we have that Xüdiflafs were actually built by humans in the ancient past."
Humans:- FIGURED IT OUT DIE FIRES PLASMA AT ALIEN AND DELETES ANY MEMORY OF HIM
@Sadiq Ahmed
MiB: Sigh, why use Noisy Cricket when just add a bit o' shroom to their diet to appear like duuuude... huuummaanss did allll thiiiissss.
If they noticed us we could accidentally ruin they're entire civilization timeline. Bad manners. But I guess if they are hyper horrible to each other it would just help them thinking about better things.
Thanks Isaac Arthur for keeping up the greeat work.
Would we blame aliens for ruining our entire civilization timeline if we happened to spot some?
@@thezyreick4289 Blame... nah. Not me anyway. We know something must be out there by now anyways. It would crash our imagination land- based- hypes and myths that give some few the authority and wealth to endanger us all on they're whims. Probably.
Ahem.. their whims.
Well.. it is not exactly like we are discussing and deciding very much, or at least efficiently as a species the big decisions about what to do about our resources and biosphere.
Actually.. It looks like we will be needing an effective and honest playground to do that sooner than later. If we want the coming generations to feel they can be proud of us and also basically get the standard of (or at all) living they deserve to grow up in. Buuuut that is a matter for another day. I'm still waiting to be forty in a couple of months. Decided that it would be best to wait for that when I was 17 years old, before rushing it and ruining the best chance we have to manage our selves.. not having much of the experience whilst doing a big project can lead to unnecessary mistakes and... other "silly" things.
Love. Respect. Responsibility. 💕♻️😄👍
their*
@@NoNameAtAll2 phew!😄 34 minutes ahead of you there. But thank you anyways.🛀
To anyone who hasn't read/ listened to children of time and it's sequel children of ruin you really should. It's a very realistic depiction of everything that's been discussed in this episode (especially the sequel) and it's really interesting.
Speaking of that alien squid that is intelligent, but without empathy, there's an interesting parallel with real life monitor lizards, especially Komodo Dragons. Komodo Dragons don't seem to show any compassion to fellow dragons in the wild, but they -can- be quite affectionate to zoo keepers. Whether they interface well with humans or not seems to be dependent on their individual personality. It's interesting to think that they could be universally antagonistic toward their own species (not usually outright hostile, as they do hang out in big groups) but think of human beings as big squishy teddy bears who scratch behind their ears and bring them food.
I think you are overestimating how easy it is to give tech, giving tech to primitive aliens could be like puting an diesel electric generator and some bulbs in a hunter gatherer tribe, they dont have diesel, they dont have spare parts and they are used to going to sleep when its dark so they are probably not going to use it, you need to provide so much support that it takes pretty much colonizing them or thousands of years of intense contact and trade to get them up to par to an interstellar civ and that can hardly be achieved "undercover"
you give tech slowly, first by introducing concepts and mathematics over generations, then introduce them to how wheels and pistons work. You don't give primitive aliens an Iphone XG9 and hope they know how it works, as you said this process of uplifting is gonna be a LONG haul.
Human settler: "Uh, Captain- I mean 'Pharaoh' Jackson?
Pharaoh Jackson: "What is it, first mate?"
First Mate: "You know these alien primitives, the ones who you tricked into worshiping you as a god?"
Pharaoh Jackson: "Yeah, what about them? "
First Mate: "Welp, turns out this planet was being watched over by a precursor civilization fifty light-years away. One of their fleets are en route and they do not look happy. "
Pharaoh Jackson: "...I'm sure there's nothing to worry about."
[Roll credits]
With primitive *sapient* aliens, I think we should take heed. With regards to aliens as primitive microbes, we may want to consider the idea of "Move over, microbe!"
Yes, now all we need to do is discover the universal definition of sapience
@@ahzizM Wauw! That almost didn't sound condescending!
The thought comes to mind; The microbe in my brain. Even if not intelligent, let alone sapient the little microbe still could cause confusion and consternation.
Human Exploration Team:
Nope, not even intelligent life on *this* planet; feel free to colonize!
~~~6 months later~~~
Yes, brain Bob, the emissary will be leaving shortly with brain Brian, brain Brenda, and brain Boron. (I don't know why someone called their kid Boron or why all infected are called brain).
I am glad you recognize the hypocrisy and horror of “practical” solutions.
Often the “practical” choice, is also horribly inhumane and immoral.
Based.
21:41 "might raise a hazy line between a child and a pet" for many people I think the difference between the two boils down to potential. The kind of person that calls their companion animal a "fur baby" would probably put their pet through school if there was any point to doing that, same as they already sometimes take them to obedience training classes. Perversely, there are also people who treat their kids like pets and don't let them live up to their potential because they enjoy the early years of childrearing more than watching them mature. Point is, there are probably ways to figure out how to mentor someone with different psychology but had humanlike potential for growth, borrowing lessons learned from special needs kids and maybe some veterinary techniques, since that's our only experience raising nonhumans for now.
My fur babies are quantifiably more intelligent than my coworkers. Most pet owners have probably experienced this too. There's definitely overlapping examples we can use from our interactions with other mammals that might as well apply to intelligent aliens. If we get queasy about blurring the line between adopting a child and getting a pet, than aren't pets just slaves? We can't just let all the pet dogs go and expect them to fend for themselves at all (the vast majority wouldn't be capable of self-sufficiency) so we basically are forced to keep the 'slavery' unless we're fine with genocide. It's a moral catch 22.
Yeah we're talking about aliens, but also PETA and similar groups. The animal activist extremists who think pets are slaves but also acknowledge that pets CANT just be let go, so they 'rescue' strays just so they can euthanize them. Most people agree that those people are freaking psychopaths and wouldn't trust such a person with their human children. We can also easily draw the parallels of how the "spay and neuter" advice is indistinguishable from eugenics. Should we apply the same morality to an alien species as well? Are we practicing eugenics on species that could one day develop human level intelligence on their own? We could be very well curbing the development and evolution of cats and dogs and be unjustly moralizing it as 'merciful'. If we can do that to fellow mammals than why wouldn't we do the same to aliens on a whole separate tree of life? Discussing the morality of first contact opens up the identical, ugly can of moral worms we can apply to today.
Sorta morbid stuff but we can't discuss a topic without first asking the question. I find that scifi topics like this are fantastic for self reflection.
I actually think this scenario is more likely than a visit from a saucer from some super advanced alien race. It will be them looking up at our ships with stark terror. And given our history, the little green men indeed have much to fear.
The thing about that TOS gangster episode is that after everything the only real change they make is to reorganize the mobs to all be one big mob. No changes to how they operate or anything like that, just implement a one world government and every thing is peachy. Never mind that the one world government is run by literal gangsters.
Honestly, if you look at the politics of Gene Roddenberry, it's not surprising that he thought that a one world government run by oligarchs was an improvement. TOS had all sorts of his creepy politics creep into it while he was in charge of Star trek. He even managed to get his anti-sematic tropes thrown into Next Gen with the Firangi. He was the type of Hollywood personality that the Red Scare/McCarthy Witch Trials SHOULD have gotten and it's a shame it didn't.
Now, I'm a Star Wars fan first and foremost so I acknowledge my inherent bias, lol. BTW, f*ck Disney. Roddenberry probably would have gotten along great with the one-world-gov technocratic oligarchs running the show at the mouse house nowadays.
Remember to do unrestricted observation on primitives to get more society research
You should watch the Star Trek: Enterprise season 2, which is criminally underrated, because it contains an arc that deals with why the Prime Directive was created in the first place and the writers actually put some decent thought into the incidents which occur. It isn't your run of the mill "they might become bad guys in a hundred years", and it's not just shown from the one perspective. It actually backfires on humanity because a species' culture wasn't respected by a crew member.
The prime directive makes sense because you don't want to have species start to turn up to earth like in the movie District 9. One species is a nuisance, so what do you call the 3rd or 8th species that wants to stick around and to be taken care of?
I think it would make even the most cosmopolitan person become a bit of upset because the 8th species just turned up & in their minds they'll be wondering if another 8 more to come with some species already demanding we start transforming Mars or Venus for their species.
It’s been a while since I watched the series but isn’t that the episode where Dr Phlox opts not to give a cure (that he had already developed) to an alien race that was dying of a plague because some of them had slaves from another intelligent species? I have no sympathy for slave owners of any form but that seems a bit too genocide-y for my tastes despite technically not being genocide.
@@jazzfan1994 nO THEY WEREN'T SLAVERS. Damn Caps. Anyway it is mentioned that they are treated well and given tasks to do. They had been living like that for thousands of years and were getting smarter. Phlox insisted that if we gave a cure they would never be forced to have true intelligence as they were cared for by the more advanced ones and so wouldn't be forced to evolve through evolution. Made some bullshit argument about neandertals died out so we evolved.
I'm sure it would go just as smoothly as when civilizations on Earth throughout time made contact with less technological peoples 👍🏻👍🏻
Lol yeah, I am sure they won't be crushed and brutalised/s
One would probably take over the other. Slavery?
If oil is found, the aliens are fucked.
It might actually go better we mining most of our resources in space by then. The biggest danger from us will be tourists, tech and those who have zoos.
Don't worry, 90% of people won't want to fuck them.
I’m a simple man, I see aliens and Isaac, I grab a drink and some snacks.
There was several episodes in star trek voyager that actually explored later events after a first contact. Like when a backup of the doctor was discovered and activated by a species who thought voyager was a war craft and he had to correct the history.
I've always loved the plethora of space-related videos shown while Isaac Arthur narrates
Humanity will be such an *great* and benevolent(!) influence on those types of civilazations /s
I can see first contact with an alien race being Walmart showing up in orbit and opening a new outlet on the planet. Those primitive aliens then shape their entire society around shopping at Walmart. A century later, a government ship makes orbit and the aliens are shocked to learn the rest of the galaxy isn't run exactly like their society.
@@joshuarichardson6529 lol ! That should be a series
Maybe to commemorate your 50th peer contact, you might establish some constraining contact protocols. But, when you're travelling generations to discover your first, or even your 10th Jurassic World, or Neanderthal protocivilization, you're probably not going to be that picky about who you talk to.
Primitive Aliens, I'm insulted, I throw the finest stones sir.😆
Yes yiu do
For those squids, inventing squid birth control would be a high priority.
This is the episode I've been waiting for!!!
as a star trek fan i dont support the non interference idea, not all interference is inherently negetive or destructive....
Or avoidable. Big Startrek fan too but the religious adherance to that principles drives me crazy.
The idea behind the Prime Directive is not that all interference is destructive...it is that before we intervene, we cannot know the consequences of our actions. Star Trek generally would probably argue that not knowing those consequences makes non-interference the best policy in most cases
The Orville did a season 1 episode covering the unintended effect of cultural contamination on a primitive alien species. They also did a followup on that a few episodes ago.
Anyone else excited for the JW Telescope images being released this week?
I'm excited for the JWS telescope. 😁
The best novel I can think of that has less advanced, sentient aliens becoming aware of advanced humans -- and from the alien's perspective, no less -- is _A Deepness in the Sky,_ by Vernor Vinge (a prequel to _A Fire Upon the Deep_ ). In fact, it might be the only one I can think of the heavily features the alien perspective ... well, there was that thing by Tchaikovsky with the spiders, but they weren't really aliens. And Tchaikovsky is nowhere near the writer Vinge is.
Oh, that was a good read! I did read them in reverse order but didn't realize until late... both had interesting aliens and motivations. (I didn't understand some of the alien motivation, but then again that helps make it alien.
@@brentmartin6833 - I _really_ wish Vinge would finish those _Zones of Thought_ books, but I'm afraid he's really getting up there in years, and it's probably not going to happen.
There are a few more, but the hybrid perspective is more common, like around the 45th chapter of The Deathworlders
What we should do is watch their alien invasion movie and do what what they thought aliens would do. But not for real tho...after it we just laugh and say its a prank bro!!
A great, thought inspiring episode with many questions and on important topics, too. To quote Einstein: "Don't listen to the person who has the answers; listen to the person who has the questions".
4:18 reminds me of that guy who went to sentinel island
The hubris of starfleet is astonishing
Or as I call them the human borgs. They want resistance to be futile. Look at what they tried to do to Eminiar VII, the Halkan council, and the Orgaians.
There's one Trek episode where Worf's adopted brother does something similar-the crew of the Enterprise is very angry and IIRC he might have ended up prosecuted for it.
So I'd guess non starfleet citizens that interfere get thrown in jail at the minimum for doing what you say.
S7 E13 Homeward
This reminded me of the movie, the Avatar, that interaction between the aliens and human in exo Moon.
Yes g o I'd move. Goid alines
1. Do No Harm - Do not kill, steal, lie, or transmit toxic stuff.
2. Do Some Good - Try to leave each situation better than we found it.
3. Ask Permission - Every being, every society, has the right to be left undisturbed.
I assume that by the time we can travel beyond the Oort Cloud, our social evolution will include ethical systems that will distinguish our behavior from that of ape troops. Given the ethical postulates (above), "The Prime Directive" is a logical consequence. But there are always trade-offs. "The Prime Directive" can also be viewed as an excuse for "Benign Negligence". If a world is in danger of a catastrophe that we can prevent or mitigate, do we stand back and rationalize that disasters are *natural* in an uncaring universe?
It is worth noting, that Earth does not seem to have been meddled-with ... even though, mathematically, it most likely might have been. Perhaps the formation of the Earth-Moon system was an act of 'gardening' by some billion-year-old civilization that existed when our solar system was just forming. Gardening encourages interesting plants to live by tweaks to the natural system.
There is no way you can use mathematics to conclude earth was intentionally "gardened" by some advanced species or claim that it's likely that happened. I see similar arguments used by theists to justify God.
In fact, the opposite is true. It's the same as a lottery winner. Was it lucky that a lottery winner emerged even though they had such a small chance of winning it? No, since the chance might be 1 in 10 million for a single person but 10 million people participated so it would be improbable that there weren't any lottery winners. There are a 1-10 trillion estimated planets only in our own galaxy. It would be unlikely a planet supporting intelligent life wouldn't pop up here and there and lo and behold Earth was one that won the "which planet can support life" lottery.
Wro. ionic. Stuff okay safe limited dnt I've ionic safe toxic disentangle too much toxic jsing
We should probably avoid interfering with any primitive aliens that we might find unless they are about to go extinct, and we should be very careful even in that scenario.
We will just treat them as animals as we do with other lifeforms here on Earth. We'll see their habitats as zoo and won't really interfere. Just observe from distance. And other alien civilizations can mingle with them. We'll observe them too. Its like when a Tiger hunts a zebra in the wild. We generally don't interfere with any of them, we just observe. I think most of the advanced civilizations act this way.
Isaac Arthur is a legend
I for one welcome our new alien insect overlords.
Excellent channel with awesome content and great quality as always say 🌍💯
Culture answer: Gradually fold the alien civilization or sentience into your own civilization by use of incentives and cultural pressures. All life gets subtle love and care. When spaceflight is achieved or negotiated, any alien / uplift individual has the option to culturally accommodate with others or further uplift itself, with the incentive of a passport saying they're safe to traverse your society and may become citizens. Citizens get all of space so long as they don't harm others, they respect public spaces, and they share certain over-ethics.
Sure, the polite trans-sentiences who most easily qualify for passports and citizenship inherently comprise a diverse hedonistic machine civilization... but at least the full range of posthuman expression stays available in physical and virtual space. I'd love an episode on the ethics (and pitfalls!) of hegemony of the uplifted or cultured.
'the future is wild' has squid as the dominate earth critters one day
Imagine trying to hold back an alien race that is bound to pass us in technology out of a misguided sense of morality. God this could go really bad.
Relax the nearest star is 40,000 years away if we left now. We pretend to be advanced however a not insubstantial number of us are burning excrement for fuel. The number of us that understand, let alone use General relativity, quantum mechanics, plumbing or electricity to build tools is tiny.
Wrobg
I think the classic and obvious answer of what to do is to immediately land and see if there's any sexy, oddly humanoid alien babes around.
The Zap Brannigan way of doing things.
I find it worrisome that you lumped Darwin in with major world religious figures/icons. We know without any doubt that darwin existed, contributed to science, and was a flawed guy but real. We can't say that same about the others.
Jesus certainly existed though and other cultures even mention his involvement in history. Who was Darwin? I don't recognize his existence in that case.
Bruh... I tried to read David Brin. I really did lol. Maybe it's the VA? My experience was listening to a directionless, plotless exposition piece as dry as the Sahara and rambling in a mode that makes our friend Peter Hamilton seem positively taciturn. In like 7 1k page volumes. Some cool concepts in there though. Liked the aliens with biological wheels.
Re: David Brin. Some of his work can be rambling. But I encourage you to give him another try. Check out "The Postman." (It's short and the classic of post apocalyptic fiction)
What if the aliens come in a medieval spaceship made of wood and iron (they just happen to be naturally immortal and resilient against cosmic radiation)…
The wood and iron would also have to be space proof, possibly atmosphere-proof too, at least if they're going to visit a planet.
@@lomiification The idea is just that they’re technologically less advanced than we are, rather than a thousand or a million years ahead as is usually the case in SF…
I swear there is a book about this. It's about some aliens comming to conquer earth, but they have wooden space ships and muscets, because they have some other amazing piece of space travel tech that simply abolished the need for them to invent anything else. Humans kicked their ass with basic Nowton.
I'm reminded of Jerry Pournelle's novel 'A Spaceship for the King' (also known as 'King David's Spaceship') though I must admit to not having actually read it.
However, it's hard to imagine merely getting into orbit around a presumably Earth-like planet with 'medieval' technology, much less reaching stellar escape velocity, and even slightly reasonable interstellar speeds...
@@stardolphin2 One could move the whole thing a thousand years into the future so they can be more or less where we are are now, rather than needing medieval (or, say, steampunk) space travel to work… and maybe interstellar speeds needn’t be “reasonable” if you can doze away a thousand years at a time and maybe are more like a tree than an animal, or like a fungal root system popping out transient individuals as needed…
That Roman Legionnaire would obviously be a Swiss citizen, right?
LOl, He wouldn't be a Legionnaire anymore since his government and military would no longer exist. We will need to get some fluent Latin speakers to learn anything from him, and to start teaching him modern Italian.
This is exactly what my book is about and I love this particular episode for that.
It's basically a book set millions of years in the future and now humanity isn't the only race in the galaxy. Now there's 5 other sentient races from multiple dimensions that live on and call earth home. The whole solar system is basically reset back to the stone age after several apocalyptic events and now everyone is scrambling to survive.
Meanwhile there's Martian's, Moon People, Venusians and several other alien races living in the solar system. It's honestly very crazy yet very cool.
Sentient comes from the latin _sentire_ which means to perceive.
Sapient comes from the latin _sapere_ which is to have knowledge.
Almost all animals are sentient, they have eyes, antennae, noses...
@@rikospostmodernlife yes except it's also used to separate us from animals.
@@rojack79er *other* animals. We're not plants, fungi, protists, monerans, or archea.
@@Archgeek0 we're still classified as animals my dude. And let me be clear if I wasn't already, I really don't care for keyboard warriors trying to play smart and correct my mistakes. I used the wrong word OMG! Get over it, I'm an author but even I can mistakes.
These 5 other races, key word there, are people who now call earth home and thus they need to work with the remnants of humanity in order to ensure the survival of all species.
@@rojack79er Easy there, you didn't use the wrong word, you left out of a word. Its absence changed the meaning of your statement, causing it to look like a commonly-held but to me deeply annoying anthropocentric viewpoint that we're somehow above or at least separate from other animals. The form it took came real close to one I've hated for a long time: "That's what separates us from [the] animals.".
In short, I wasn't correcting any mistake, but myself mistook what'd you'd actually typed as intentional, espousing a viewpoint I've long despised, and subsequently lashed out at it.
Misunderstandings sure can be silly.
*> Being blamed for not stopping unstoppable famines.*
🇬🇧 can relate.
I would say there are really only two viable options. Either wipe them out so they never become a threat to human survival OR cultivate an alliance for mutual benefit. If they have no familial bonds, empathy, or social instincts then wiping them out would be the prudent thing to do. If they possess the mentioned characteristics, then cultivating a long-term alliance with them would be the more prudent path.
As you said, if we find one alien specie capable of technology then there will certainly be many more we have not found yet. Due to the age of the universe, at least some of those unknown species will be far more advanced than we or the newly discovered aliens. Therefore, the more allies we can cultivate into an alliance would increase the security of all species in the alliance against a more advanced and possibly genocidal species we have yet to encounter.
I do not believe we will ever find a water species that has technology due to never being able to use fire. That would also apply to worlds with any condition that would prohibit fire. While they may be intelligent, they would be without the capability to develop technology. One thing leads to another and mastering fire is one of those critical steps.
There are magma vents, light concentrators, and so on which can potentially be used in a similar fashion as fire in water or oxygen-less environments.
There's another: observe them from far away, and if they have some tech that we don't, covertly obtain that tech and reverse engineer it. Thus we get to have their tech while they don't have ours, and it also gives us the element of surprise if we ever decide to vaporize them.
we don't have the right to wipe out aliens, especialy the inteligent ones, and concidering how rare they are I highly doubt we will erace them from existance even if they were a threat, which is also very unlikly concidering how big the universe is.
@@mrzenox9835 Well, that would depend on whether or not they have colonized many worlds or not. If they have not, completely eradicating them would be rather easy.
@@The1stDukeDroklar it would, but assuming there was for example a more powerful alien race with higher morals and values, observing us in the act, they would deem us as a savage and dangerous race and erase us all. Not only that but assuming there are other aliens in the neighborhood, they all have nothing in common with each other, if we start a genocide we would give them something in common which is hating us.
Invading an alien race that's less advanced is wrong, and it's not worth it, why would we be the bad guys? we can just leave them be, the same way we want a godlike alien race to leave us be.
Great video. Brings up some great points and is just what I needed to jog my creative brain. And especially cool that you hit upon the relation two of my favorite science fiction series (Uplift Saga) and (The Enderverse).
Fortunately, humanity won't survive long enough to destroy other worlds.
That's right
The episode I’ve been waiting for
im hopeful that future generations will look at the idea of uplifting other species and our selves with a greator focus on empathy and maximizing the potential quality of all the lives we can, instead of focusing on paranoid worst case sinarios and iratinal spiritual arguments to avoid the topic entirely.
Uplifting is as likely to be as bad as any other action. Most likely due to the fact we can't even agree on what that would mean just among humans. Further, you and me are almost certainly exist because our ancestors would be considered evil by some of those now extinct or maybe even by ourselves.
Tough luck. The worst case scenario is most likely what we will get, if at all.
Uplift is playing God. It is taking direct control and responsibility for the genetic evolution of another sentient species. Humanity needs to learn that not everyone needs or even wants our increasingly mono-cultural benevolence. And even if it works out well, what happens if later - that species comes to our ancestors and demands to know who the hell did we think we were deciding their genetic destiny when they could not give consent when they were pre-sentient?
@@spacejunk2186
ah the paranoid type i see... pity, i know how that feels man, good luck to you.
@@darkorion69 ah... i see!, so you think they would regret any form of tampering on the grounds that it messes with distiny... though, that would requre distiny to exist, and god... nether of which exist, so dont take the term playing god to seriously, its more just... doing what we inevitably could to improve life... anyone dumb enough to complain about that... well, thats theyre problem. not the worlds, not humanity or the uplifted species problem.
It is amazing how many topics from these videos end up being lessons in ethics.
Woah my favorite original series episode got name dropped :o
The ancient judgey aliens silently watching don't exist. You have discussed how hard a prime directive is.
Its simple. Evaluate their intelligence level and relate it to an animal on earth and then see what it tastes like cooked before coming to a conclusion.
With an alien derived biochemistry, I predict a bouquet of noxious, with a strong toxic body, followed by fine lingering finish of carcinogenicity.
You try first.
@@NullHand You are describing a well done steak. Mmmm delicious. Lol
Tell them that the answer to life, the universe and everything is 42, give them a towel, and explain the beauty of pasta.
I think the Prime Directive was more a tale about how the US shouldn't believe they are the police of the world.
Nah, *much* older than that.
More to do with the results of Europeans imposing themselves on the 'New World.' and Africa...and Asia to some extent.
It's also a nice way to create internal moral conflict for the main characters.
@@stardolphin2 That they ended up overtaking the Europeans and stealing all their tech.
That's right
I've also wondered, how would a Starfleet Captain react if they found an alien civilization on the brink of extinction, say they found a world that had engaged in thermonuclear war. They are obviously intelligent and once covered their planet with nations/etc, but now there's only about 10,000 of them left living in a post-nuclear apocalypse world. Would Starfleet ignore them, or step in to help them rebuild/recover?
Star Trek meets Fallout. I'd read it, or play/watch it.
Ignore them. They brought it upon themselves.
@@dipanjanghosal1662 True, but this could be centuries later, long after the culprits have passed on...
@@falsfire That doesn't matter to xenophobes. They're always looking for excuses not to help outsiders and to instead further purify their culture.
We surgically alter our ears and dress in soft colored kimonos so that they think we are Vulcan or Jedi.
We do? I hope that becomes more common. I love wild forms of self expression
Yes
Chief kniw what h e likes don't like. Same ss every one. Some times do wire stuf shiw iff I niwness
Keep in mind, giving them technology that leads to a brutal war of conquest could end up unifying them and giving them a desire to play great powers against each other to avoid being colonized, at least in the immediate term. This is pretty similar to what happened in Hawaii.
Although it's also kinda imperialist Japan's excuse for attacking all of east Asia so... it can definitely be a bad thing too.
So it is ok when England dominated half the world through conquest?
If a more advanced civilization chooses not to save from danger a less advanced one then it should not expect even more advanced civilizations to aid them when they could use it.
@Bu$$yButcher That is a poor yet hilarious analogy. Lol.
Oh nice. forgot it was sifi Sunday. Just happened to be looking for something to watch when the notification popped.
Neanderthals were not dumb and uncompassionate humans, they were highly, highly intelligent and advanced, just as much as homo-sapiens were until around 20,000 years at least
the head size hypothesis for human birth is now considered incorrect. Birth occurs when the mother can no longer take in enough calories for both her and the child.
I used to have that picture book i havent thought about it in 30 years
I took a few classes in ethics in my university days, non were as well organized or interesting as these sorts of episodes. Good work by the way of incorporating the real horror angle of finding primitive aliens.
There’s no natural resource we could find on an alien planet that would outweigh the cost of getting there. We probably wouldn’t be colonists.
We can get more energy out of hydrogen shipped in slow than it takes to transport. If we figure out how to make microBlackHoles or set up around naturally occurring BHs then we can get orders of magnitude more energy & out of every kind of matter.
Might be robots for the most part, but setting up around BHs for their higher mass-to-energy conversion ratio might just guarantee some degree of crewed interstellar travel, even if it is slow-boat colonization.
6:00 minutes in and I’m wondering about a scenario where a primitive society comprised of beings that have a superior cerebral architecture for intellect, memory and learning AKA primitive but not dumb at all. Give them a few years with advanced tech and they are improving faster and better than we have ever done be it energy, propulsion, and weapons.... uh oh 😬
Sounds similar to short stories from the Humanity, Fvck Yeah subreddit.
I cannot remember if it were Poul Anderson or Arthur C. Clarke, but one of them wrote a short-story about just that scenario. 'Tis been a long time since I read it.
With the exception of actually given them any tech, this concept sounds rather similar to the Tau from the WH40k universe.
Humanity already had a galactic empire, discovered some bronze age aliens but before we could decide what to do with them, we had our FTL travel disrupted for a couple of thousand years. Fast forward to when we travel back to check up on these aliens, they are now an FTL space faring species with better/more proliferated tech than us in many fields, while our own species is in a techno/social dark age of tech stagnation/regression.
This happened with the MMO game "Wildstar"'s "Chua" race. The game's futuristic space-human race made a space-empire, came across the Chua and gave them tech in exchange for them joining the empire. Next thing was the Chua destroying the ecology of their planet, having quickly exploited it for resources.
Really hard to tell. I think there is no perfect choice. But I tend to think it would be best to make meaningful contact with good intentions, since at this point the advanced civilization is a part of the universe and therefore not different from any other transformational, environmental event a civilization encounters that kicks evolution into high gear, like a planet killer asteroid for example. I tend to say everything flows and evolves, and an advanced civilization becomes part of the "nature" of the universe.
I like that you kept here the old soundtrack and animation
I sincerely hope there is no other life in our galaxy. The dark forest is terrifying.
I hope you do a video on intergalactic job hunting & education.
I don't think that those who went to among the best universities on the planet to find that they're 40 years of age and they'll need to go back to school with curriculum that makes the information taught at say Harvard be the intergalactic equivlant of say pre-middle school.
What would a intergalactic jobs fair look like? Maybe humanity drifts apart because child raising age adults slowly get absorbed into a intergalactic jobs market such as millions or tens millions of workers being exported year after year?
Ha! Jokes on the intergalactic community...
Bachelor's of
Under Water Basket Weaving! FTW!
Wait we uplifted Dolphins *and* gave them hands?!!!
Sigh, welp, back to Mom's basement.
Okay, hear me out: The obvious strategy is quite simple. Since we came so far, we don't have the resources to just move onto another star system, or even a different planet. WAY too much effort. So we need to install an operating system in all our computers that is compatible with their own computers, and park our main ship in low orbit. Then, we dispatch ships just a bit more advanced than their aircraft, and make sure to hook our city-busting 'superweapon' to our main reactor.
Then we destroy the capitol building of their most powerful capitalist nation for unspecified reasons.
Only to lose to a computer virus because we forgot to update our antivirus software.
Sounds like a plan.
Apple would like a word.
@@69Kazeshini 50k star miles after it really gets hard to find good internet connection to do that.
Yup, it really makes ya think.
I liked this episode very much. How humanity would treat less advanced species can teach us how more advanced species will look at us. There are many questions in this episode.
I can't believe that reporter lied about Sarah like that. The audio was clearly different than what they claimed.
There's no way humanity will handle themselves better with aliens than it did with itself ...
If we don't improve from where we are now, we'll never reach other solar systems, let alone inhabited ones. That's probably true for any other species that might exist out there, too. So we better hope there aren't any genetically nice species traipsing around the galaxy handing out advanced technology to species like ours.
@@MagnusItland You'd have to imagine any benevolent aliens would have something skin to the Prime Directive in Star Trek before encountering that issue. Or hope that the painful lesson was taught via previous encounters.
on the "colonizing the galaxy and leaving no room for them" conumdrum
what is stopping aliens form living in human colonized space alongside us
we will be potentially as alien to eachother as they are to us anyways
Fortunately there seems to be no life out there so we dodged a bullet, yeah?
Oh dang I requested this one forever ago!
Another excellent video. Thank you for the work that you do.
I just imagined the squid scenario
- Hello Jake, how are you, what was it...20 years? Your hair got white
- Yeah Jelly, what can I say, age cought up with me, my children finished university and joined starfleet, how is your family btw.
- My children just finished building space habitat and I have become great grandfather... my immediate family is about 1 million people.
If they had tardigrade like physiology primitive aliens could arrive on Earth using steampunk technology and primitive nuclear reactor pile technology. After millions of years traveling.
How anticlimactic that would be, humans wanting advance technology. And they just arrive and crash on Earth and setup shop. 😀
This is by far my favorite video ever. And should be our goal.
Teach squids the math of game theory and social interactions covered?
I mean, what could go wrong?
The whole squid example is like the Bitenic Squids from Orion's Arm in reverse.
Children of time is a wonderfull book that works with a lot of subjects aborded on this video
A better book is Vernor Vinge's _A Deepness in the Sky_ -- much better.