Legal implications of an encounter with extraterrestrial intelligence | Hacker News Reader

Legal implications of an encounter with extraterrestrial intelligence

thespacereview.com

Any species capable of interstellar travel would probably also be capable of harnessing enough power to reduce our entire planet to ashes on a whim. The legal implications would probably be that the concept of human law is no longer relevant if they turn out to be hostile.

Paraphrasing a comment on that site paraphrasing a line from the movie Battleship: "If aliens show up, it'll be like an atomic bomb against an anthill, and we're the ants."

Which seems like a paraphrase of a scene in Contact, on why scientists ("egghead types" in the movie) believe aliens would be friendly to us.

Ellie: "We pose no threat to them. It would like us going out of our way to destroy a few microbes on some ant hill in Africa."

Drummond: "Interesting analogy. And how guilty would we feel if we went and destroyed a few microbes on an ant hill in Africa?"

I know many find that movie cliche, but I actually loved it. One of my favorites. The book was superior, but the movie got a lot of my friends talking about science in a non-judgmental way, and as a total space nerd, that made my day.

Exactly, law only applies if you don't have power. If you have power, unilateral actions apply. See United States for an example.

> What is more, conducting life threatening or physically disabling experiments to examine the biology of extraterrestrial captives ought to be banned

The choice between the possible extermination of humanity and some vague concept of morality, let's just give it to the aliens because reasons? I wish there was a discussion about this with an eye toward critical thinking. There's nothing that can benefit our species from introducing even a limited number of unknown in/organic elements into our environment. The best case would be extreme militant xenophobia and an attempt at a lunar dissection at the earliest possible convenience. Maybe not even that.

Eh. thats if they are militant. what if they want to allow us to use their alien technology as long as we disband our gov, and join their alien alliance.

man ill tell you what, ill see you up there, then we can talk back about it.

Depends on how much gravitas their spaceship names have. If it's sufficiently lacking, sign me up.

Nice write-up. The first step is to get nations to apply these principles to their interactions with each-other. (i.e. agree that torture is bad.)

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