The Challenges of First Contact

"The kind of classic fifties-era first-contact story that Jonathan Swift might have written, if Jonathan Swift had had a background in game theory." -- (Hugo nominee) Peter Watts, "In Praise of Baby-Eating"

Hardest problem is the balance between making your presence known and very slowly (perhaps over years) let them get used to the idea, and then incrementally advancing interaction, but all without having them re-orient their whole society around you.

I think about this a lot with animals, where if you go into a field of horses, they see you coming and know you are there, but if they know you have food, it can disrupt the equillibrium of the herd because the incentives for keeping distant from each other have suddenly changed with the introduction of exogenous rewards. Often it can result in fights.

Kids can be the same when you bring a guest over, where they think "new person = new rules!" and become rambunctuous to attract the attention of the guests as the result of the disrupted equilibrium in your relationship. We also learn about a similar dynamic in basic management as "storming, norming, forming, performing," where adding new team members causes the team to go through the cycle again.

When you consider that in terms of a whole species with multiple likely civilizations, and what the macro version of that cycle is, wise aliens would likely keep their distance and move slowly.

The fun thing to think about is once we figure out the best way for us to do it incrementally, we could look for evidence of it having happened already. What values or behaviours would we need for the civilization to demonstrate before we decided to contact and integrate? If they were relatively primative, it wouldn't matter because information about our presence wouldn't scale and our impact would be limited. Once they developed tools to cohere information not just as individual civilizations on a planet, but as a species, we'd have to disappear as not to cause them to orient themselves to the incentives they percieved as coming from us. Like feeding and taming wild animals, they could become dependent on us and can no longer sustain themselves, or change their evolutionary selection to become dependents and ultimately stunt their own development. We would likely have to periodically put them down like bears living near dumps because they would blunder into our solar system looking for more of our stuff without a sense of what was safe or consequences. I'm sure we would need a kind of mature deep ecology concept for spacefaring, or a more mature ethical concept of power.

Maybe this is meaningless and the universe is just a bunch of meta alien wet markets all the way down, but I suspect a universe that tolerates our existence has probably figured out how to wield power ethically.

Must a species effectively homogenize before we contact it, or do we contact the leaders of prominent groups privately and read them in to a long term multi-generational project for integration and co-existance? Do we help them produce cultural artifacts to prepare, or do they live such short lives our relationship with any given group is moot because they will be gone by the time we return from a supply run. What values of our own do we promote, and even advantage with our knowledge and technology so they prevail in the culture? Maybe we're competing with others with different agendas.

It sounds like crazy sci fi, but more concretely, when you learn advanced work with horses, you learn to communicate in the context of geometric figures, mostly circles, because it's something their minds can interpret as a constant, consistent carrier or control for more sophisticated and subtle variations, gestures, and movements. Circles and straight lines don't physically exist in their natural environment but they fit as a consistent abstraction everywhere within it, and this is the channel you use to educate them and elevate their understanding of increasingly sophisticated versions of your intentions. That guy who did "My Octopus Teacher," and Jane Goodall probably had some deep insights into these questions as well. I'd wonder if what circles and lines are to horses, loops, recursion, fractals and graphs/matrices and other higher order objects are to humans. They represent something you can't fully apprehend, but are consistent tools for interpreting consistency and variations. Instead of arriving and giving us answers or boxing us in with their will, they have the time and patience to gently ask the same questions in different ways using consistent forms until we freely develop understanding by ourselves, and when we finally hear them, their intentions become clear. I have optimism.

Spoilers below, if you don't want to read a badly aged sci-fi story from 75 years ago.

A human and an alien spaceship randomly encounter each other in deep space and can't be sure that the other won't track them back to their homeworld. So, they come up with the "clever" solution of ripping out all their long-range sensors and wiping their navigation logs and then swapping spaceships! That way they both know that the other ship can't track them because they each sabotaged their own sensors. It's really dumb because you can imagine that there must be differences in levels of technology like metallurgy, life support, propulsion, etc, but the story didn't even give those concerns a passing nod.

Then, like much sci-fi of that era, it has to end with a punchline as one of the human officers proclaims that he trusts them after all because he spent the past few weeks sharing dirty jokes with his alien counterpart... who evolved on a different world and probably has a radically different biology and sexual practices.