Heh. Are you really suggesting that after decades of disinterest, the US government is releasing this in order to...make people afraid of aliens? In order to increase taxse?
Or do I misunderstand what you mean?
I had a Political Science professor in college who came from that school of IR thought who evangelized it, and then a couple of others who explicitly called it out and attacked it, which was shocking to me as a student. It feels like par for the course as a more jaded adult.
I'm disputing that lying about aliens would be an effective or preferred strategy for doing so.
Like, a war against...whom? Is the voting public going to buy it? Cut me a break!
I've seen this sentiment expressed before, but it's never seemed persuasive. Seems to me that the only inherently peaceful alien race would be the one that never had the evolutionary pressure to compete for resources - and that seems like an impossible occurrence.
Not only that, but the moment that peaceful species encounters a non-peaceful species it would be wiped out, as evidenced by numerous extinct, or in the verge of being extinct, species on planet Earth. So peaceful species are going to be short lived and may not last much, in Universe times, to have too much contact with other species.
If you've mastered enough energy to arrive at another solar system in force, you already had to figure out how to live peacefully with many billions of individuals.
There's no reason to assume they would feel empathy towards other intelligent species. We coexist with intelligent animal species on Earth, and at best we consider their intelligence a novelty. If other apes began to speak and reason as we do, do you think we'd grant them property rights and a vote? No, we'd probably just slaughter them.
It seems more likely to me that an advanced alien species would see us the way we see animals, rather than as like themselves.
Not even advanced aliens can get around the laws of thermodynamics - that would take far more energy than any resource it creates could possibly be worth.
But, they wouldn't even need to, because they can find abundant supplies of whatever resources they wanted anywhere. Even in our own solar system, they would be far better off mining our asteroid belt and Jovian planets and not even acknowledging our existence.
https://cominsitu.wordpress.com/2017/05/08/flying-saucers-th...
Actually aliens being peaceful fails the logic test as evidenced by our experience with the only intelligent species we have encountered so far, humans.
How so? Humans are capable of basic space travel already.
If they still wanted the biosphere intact afterwards, then they could alternatively deploy a targeted anti-human bioweapon.
1. Up until sometime in the last decade or so, the UFO sightings that were not successfully explained as natural phenomenon or optical effects that made something ordinary like an airliner appear as something else were all accidental sightings of government projects.
2. Then sightings started that the government recognized as the same technology, except not from the government. Whatever it is the government was experimenting with that occasionally led to an accidental sighting is now being experimented with by someone else, and the government does not know who that is.
When it was just the government projects getting accidentally sighted, they wanted to discourage reports and discussion to try maintain secrecy. Now that someone else is doing similar work, they want to know who and how they got the technology. They need people to report and discuss sightings so they can try to get past the secrecy of whoever is doing these new experiments.
That or it really IS aliens, and we're just used to not believing the Pentagon, or U.S. govt... cause they haven't always looked out for our best interests (NSA / Snowden ring's a bell).
- The US government has been studying this phenomenon for years and has recently managed to reverse engineer the technology to the degree it has real-world applications. To actually explain how we achieved those feats, it will be necessary for the public to understand where it originated from, since a lie would be obvious.
- There's some really (REALLY) bad news to share, and this is part of a rollout plan needed to be able to deliver that news in the way that would minimize it's net effect on our society. (For example, we're in a zoo. And we've hit some tripwires and are now no longer allowed to develop technology X, Y, or Z.)
Um, why?
(1) The number of filters they've passed through without destroying themselves suggests that they've overcome tribalism. The late-stage species most prone to violence are also the ones most prone to self destruction before they developed the tech to traverse space and get to Earth.
We don't have good predictions on the destructive potential of future tech, but suppose that tech advances in 1000 years means that every individual can easily make a weapon as destructive as a nuke. If such advances are possible, only the species predisposed to peace will survive.
(2) Resource abundance from technology removes the selective pressure towards tribal conflict, in the same way that it achieved that for the evolution of bonobos. They are genetic bonobos, not chimps, and violence is anathema to their genetic predisposition (assuming they're biological). Aliens may not have been that way in their ancestral past, but they would evolve in that direction post abundance.
We can't know that - once you can spread to multiple planets, even planet-killer tech isn't an extinction-level event.
> selective pressure towards tribal conflict
Over thousands, or millions of years; not only that, but you have to have selective pressure against tribalism to actually remove the instinct. Otherwise there's no pressure, and it can remain, just like any other vestigial organ.
"even planet-killer tech isn't an extinction-level event."
You're right that a civilization that has violent tendencies may not self-destruct since it may turn out that the destructive potential of future technology is confined to the capacity of city-scale destruction instead of solar-system-scale destruction. Or they may escape their host planet quickly and diversify before nukes or whatever comes after nukes wipes them out.
But it seems to me that the probability of extinction is non-trivially positively correlated with violent and tribal tendencies once that civilization reaches our stage of development. And so that nudges the odds towards an advanced alien civilization being peaceful.
"Over thousands, or millions of years"
I believe it won't end up as a vestigial organ and will be actively selected against. Tribal conflict has a positive reward to the victor in a resource constrained environment but is negative sum over both parties. Without the payoff to the victor then all we are left with is a negative sum outcome which should be selected against. The only thing I'm not sure of is tribal conflict over reproductive capital, although I can imagine that technology could make that abundant as well.
From the genetic perspective of a male, a female's ability to reproduce is a scarce, excludable resource that they need for their genetic fitness and other men stand as roadblocks to obtaining that resource. That makes violence and conflict a valid way to improve the competitive odds of male A over male B.
In a future where gestation occurs outside of the womb in some bioengineered setup, that genetic pressure to compete between men will be lessened, which will be a force for peace.
I don't mean to talk about groups of people as resources, but for this topic in particular, since we're talking from the perspective of unconscious genes, I think it offers the most clarity.
It's all in the realm of speculation of course, with any proposal having quite a risk of anthropocentric (terracentric?) biases.
An organism (biological or otherwise) could have competing internal parts/models, and not be constrained by the mechanism by which natural selection operates now, i.e. biological reproduction.
So multiple subagents could compete within it, without posing an existential threat to the physical manifestation of the organism itself; somewhat analogous to redundant computers making decisions by consensus in e.g. spacecraft.
Just the "Motivation and Planning" category will reveal several reasons. My favorite is that there is almost no reason to go through the trouble of colonizing our planet, if you need any of our resources you can mine asteroids and no one will fight back. Unless of course the aliens are Evil.
If the aliens are millions of years ahead of us, it's pretty optimistic to think they'll take us into account at all, unless maybe as a mildly interesting subject of nature documentaries.
This may be more of a reaction to Qanon and troll farms.
(Or I guess conversely they might be trying to distract people)