Fiction:PGPS/The Case For Contact

The Case for Contact by Prof. Puno Ironsun

It is a commonly accepted convention, indeed, one embraced by all but a few civilizations throughout the gigaquadrant, to avoid, even at extraordinary cost, (usually any cost short of the annihilation of the race in question), making contact with, or in any way affecting, civilizations which have not yet, of their own ability, developed the technology to leave their planet of their own accord. This directive is cherished by civilizations from the Farengeto Trade Coalition to the Draconid Imperium. However, despite its near universal acceptance, this directive is, I assert, not only unjustified, but an extremely counterproductive and harmful policy based on misplaced priorities and paranoia.

I will begin by addressing the common arguments for this directive. As I see it, the most important such arguments are as follows: first, that contact with an alien race is likely to cause mass panic, or otherwise induce members of the contacted race to harm other members of said race, second, that such contact is likely to do great harm to or damage their culture, third, that it is likely to result in the exploitation of the contacted race by those contacting them, fourth, that it risks the spread of a pathogen from one species to another, which could be devastating, and fifth, that it interferes in some way with the cosmically mandated correct course of development for an alien civilization to take.

Regarding the first argument, I assert that this is not, in fact, a likely result of contact. That it is is usually argued on the basis of the fact that such contact would disprove the religious beliefs common on those worlds. However, if the religious beliefs of a civilization without spaceflight technology would be disturbed so as to somehow reduce a large portion of the planet’s inhabitants to a state of destructive panic, we must ask why this does not occur when a race makes contact for the first time under commonly accepted circumstances. Such a thing is not the typical result of the first encounter between a freshly inter-stellar species and its first contactor, nor do such things typically result from the commonly accepted exceptions to the directive. When species are rescued to save them from astronomical catastrophes which threaten to wipe them out, they almost never enter such a state.

I believe that those putting forth this objection underestimate the resilience of religious beliefs in the face of contradiction. World religions are hardy. Religions that aren’t never spread far enough to become world religions. Religious belief systems routinely survive new revelations about the universe which flatly contradict their dogmas. Many holy books plainly assume something contradicting the spherical nature of their originating race’s home world, yet that is routinely discovered on worlds dominated by such religions with minimal problems resulting. The same is true of each race’s discovery that their world orbits either their home star or a planet. The same is true of quantum physics, deep time, geology and the rest.

I also believe that such persons overestimate how severely most religions are contradicted by the existence of aliens. Most are not contradicted much more than they were with an otherwise scientific cosmology which did not include aliens. Most religions are easily adapted to such a revelation by simply expanding their statements about their race of origin to encompass all sapient beings.

There is another source of mass panic one could contend is likely, though surprisingly I do not hear this argument made very often. It is possible for a species to assume that the sighting of aliens means that they are being attacked, and to, as a result, begin looting, raping, and killing as they please, believing their world shall end regardless. My rebuttal to this is twofold. First, this only applies to a very narrow category of uncontacted races. They must be advanced enough that the common member of the race would be able to recognize an alien spacecraft for what it is, but not advanced enough to be able to build a spacecraft of their own. This window of time rarely lasts for more than about three-hundred years, which is a while, but pales in comparison to the hundreds of thousands of years which usually elapse between a species’ inception and its invention of spaceflight. Therefore, this argument is irrelevant to the vast majority of pre-spaceflight sapient races. Second, the simple broadcasting of peace messages will be enough to prevent the vast majority of such panic. What little remains, and the harm which would result from it, is more than made up for by the benefits of contact I will lay out later in this essay.

The second argument will be easier to address. I contend that it is of no moral consequence if contact results in the voluntary abandonment of a races’ previous culture. No one is obligated to preserve a culture which no one wants to practice. If no one wishes to abide by a set of customs and traditions, no one must, and others are not obligated to go out of their way to avoid causing a culture to go out of fashion or assimilate itself into another so long as this occurs through the voluntary actions of the original practitioners of said culture or their expected successors. In other words, if a contacted race’s culture is lost in the process of its being contacted due to willful assimilation and voluntary abandonment, nothing bad has occurred.

The third argument is a matter of the self-control possessed by the civilization which will be doing the contacting. It is easy to contact a less advanced culture without oppressing them. In fact, it’s trivial. All one must do is contact such a culture, and then fail to oppress them. Granted, this may be somewhat harder than it sounds, but not by much. So long as they are careful, governments should be able to reign in their citizens and corporations well enough to prevent oppression from setting in. All that is necessary is that the contacted peoples be protected from government and corporate exploitation by the same means members of space-faring empires are protected.

In addition, if this concern were valid, it ought to prohibit very large inter-stellar Empires from contacting very small ones. While it is common enough to hear complaints, often valid ones, that a corporation from a large interstellar society is engaging in economic imperialism, no one uses this as pretense to advise a universal prohibition of any kind of interaction between large interstellar societies and small ones.

The fourth argument seems to me to be a carryover from earlier eras. When more advanced civilizations contact less advanced civilizations where the two are of the same species, this is indeed a significant problem. However, pathogenic transmission between two completely unrelated species is rare enough for this not to be a big deal, especially when precautions are taken to avoid the problem. Few races with technology sufficient to allow space-flight are so impotent in the area of medicine as to be unable to avoid the transmission of a pathogen from one biosphere to an unrelated one.

The fifth argument is very common, which is concerning in light of how absurd it is. Arguing that contact with a pre-spaceflight civilization violates “the natural order of things” holds no water, even granting that it’s true. What’s so special about the natural order of things that we must preserve it even if it means allowing otherwise needless harm or shunning advantages which otherwise have no drawbacks? If we were to accept this logic, we must abandon everything artificial, including all technology. Vaccines prevent things from occurring as they naturally would as much as alien contact does. Water filtration, likewise. Replicators, likewise. Spaceships, likewise. There is absolutely no reason we need safeguard the most common sequence of events through which a civilization passes and ensure that every species passes through it regardless of what they want and what’s best for them or anyone else. To assert otherwise is to place an undue value on the “purity of nature.”

Now that I have gone over the objections to the practice of contacting pre-spaceflight societies, I will lay out what I regard as the benefits of making such contact, which are thus: first, that the quality of life of the contacted is likely to be increased by access to better technology and, second, that the increased exposure to more enlightened ideals is likely to increase social justice in contacted societies.

Starting with the first point, that access to increased technology increases the span and quality of life is overwhelmingly evident. For a contacted race, access to computer technology can allow their society to become not only easier, more comfortable, and more efficient, but safer. (Let’s not forget that self-driving cars have much lower accident rates than those operated manually). Advanced factories, sophisticated farming techniques, and replicators can end world hunger on a pre-spaceflight planet, saving billions of lives. And then there’s medical technology. While it’s true that most illnesses are species specific, and some cures only work on some organisms and not others, there are medical techniques and technologies which are very versatile. In addition, access to an advanced race’s other technologies will speed the development of medicine for species-specific illnesses, and often, the fact that the contacting species has more experience developing medical technology, perhaps even for analogous illnesses, is likely to be helpful in curing the contacted race’s ills. Contact from an advanced race can easily be the best thing that happens to a species. It can and does move races from a state where abject poverty, illness and starvation are common to one where all live in the luxury of a properly climate-controlled home with access to medicine, food, water, and entertainment.

There is also another benefit to increased prosperity. It is likely to decrease crime in a society. According to empirical observation, over and over again, the impoverished commit more crime. Whether it be out of desperation, or because their cultures have instilled them with ambitions and denied them the means to fulfill them, poor people commit more crime. By making everyone in a society better off, you are likely to decrease crime. Crime will also take a hit from the planet’s governments having access to higher quality forensic technology, allowing more crimes to be solved and punished, fewer innocents to be wrongly convicted, and resulting in fewer people being willing to commit crimes, because they know they’re likely to be caught.

Now, regarding the second point, helping to increase social justice in a contacted civilization can take many forms. Far too many assume that it would have to take the form of a violent conflict. While I would argue that such a thing is often justified -- would you be willing to allow a member of your own species to be murdered or enslaved if you could only stop it through violence? -- it is far from the only thing one may do to help. First, one may simply encourage the society to act differently. This method has led to social justice victories in the past, especially when one shares their tools with the planet’s own activists. Think of a civil rights movement on your home planet which occurred before spaceflight was developed. Does it not seem likely that it would have been either more successful, or if it eventually succeeded on every account, been faster about it if it had the help of extraterrestrial technology? Another technique, one my own Empire has used on multiple occasions, is to offer a society with some unjust institution a deal. They may be allowed to receive your technology, and the benefits which come with it, listed above, if they abolish such institutions. If there are multiple nations on a planet, persuading one to take such a deal can ignite a domino effect, as the others see its prosperity and come to understand better the benefits of such an arrangement. Notice that this technique is not in any way, shape or form coercive or destructive. On the contrary, it persuades the oppressors to stop oppressing of their own free will through voluntary trade. In addition, simply allowing contacted cultures to merge with those of their contactors through voluntary assimilation will likely mean the destruction of vicious and harmful ideals. By being contacted, a slavekeeping society goes from functionally living in a society where the consensus is firmly on the side of slavery, to having support for the institution be a tiny, fringe view within the larger culture, facilitating the removal of the less common view by cultural osmosis, especially over multiple generations.

It is our moral obligation as sapient beings to help people when we can. It is wrong to abandon those who have committed no sin but happening to be born in the wrong place at the wrong time to slavery, religious sacrifice, persecution, genocide, false incarceration, oppression, torture or murder when they may be saved from those things. Those are real people, really suffering. It is not acceptable for us to ignore them. Those speaking of a species’ autonomy do not seem to me to be considering the autonomy of the victims of such atrocities. While the possibility may not have occurred to them and so they may not consciously want it, I think it’s safe to say that, for example, a group of chattel slaves chained for life in a salt mine would sooner be rescued by aliens than not, given the choice. What of their autonomy?

That leads into my final point. You, as a member of an advanced civilization, may think that access to advanced technology will be less than I have made it out to be. You may think that a species risks losing its culture if it is contacted. However, surely that is a choice which individual members of an uncontacted species have the right to make for themselves? Why don’t they have any say as to whether they are given access to advanced technology at the cost of some portion of their culture? Why are they forced to live in the world the universe birthed them on, and not allowed any alternative? Far from safeguarding their autonomy or independence, failure to contact them makes that choice for them, and it does so without consulting them. Whether or not they would choose to give up the current form of their culture in exchange for access more advanced technology, no matter how desperately they don’t want to die of starvation when aliens could feed them, no matter how badly they want their life prolonged by medicine which aliens could provide, that option is denied to them. If your concern really is choice, then surely you must agree that an alien desiring to abandon their culture for a better life ought be able to, rather than unable?

In conclusion, we have discussed why common arguments against contacting less advanced civilizations are unsound. We have seen the benefits of contacting such civilizations, and I have argued that it should, at the very least, be the choice of the people in question whether or not they wish to enjoy those benefits. Multinational organizations and heads of state, as well as the individuals who influence them, you have the opportunity to bring about massive benefit to the universe, to save lives, to reduce crime and poverty, to free the enslaved, to protect the endangered, to feed the starving, and in a manner which will make you potentially politically and militarily useful allies in the future. Take that opportunity. Set up a program to allow less-advanced civilizations to be contacted, for your benefit and theirs.

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