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Comment by roberttod | Hacker News Reader

I hope that also applies to the evolution of morals for intelligent lifeforms. I think it's safer to assume any aliens will have bad intentions but maybe any lifeform that can build interstellar technology has come to the same conclusions that we (albeit slowly) are coming to.

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I don't think any sophisticated intelligent beings could evolve without their primary social interaction being cooperative. You can't build a spaceship if you don't learn to get along with others. You wouldn't evolve complex thought or even language without social pressure. This doesn't necessarily automatically translate to cross-species cooperation, or even intra-species, as evidenced by our own history of wars and subjugation, but in the grand scheme of things, our baseline is trending towards more peaceful existence. I expect the same pressures that would make aliens follow the same form factor as us would also drive them towards similar social constructs.

> You can't build a spaceship if you don't learn to get along with others.

We literally built rockets and started spacial exploration out of a pissing contest. It has been clearly on mankind history that we don't need to cooperate as a unified peaceful race to advance technological progress.

I have a somewhat less optimistic view about your points of view. The humans and most of the successful creatures on Earth are terrific natural born killers.

Cooperations in humans has emerged only as a way of better milking of resources from otherwise dangerous environments for one individual-at-the-time endevour of surviving.

The evolution of complex thought on Earth had a lot to do with other species competing with humans for food, and simultaneously hunting humans as a food source.

I share your opinion about not automatic cross-species cooperation, but baselining to peace is not what's happening on our society of speaking predators, most of the order (in the whole planet), of the apparently peaceful society, is being continously kept by sheer force or menace of inmediate violence retribution (nation-states, others).

I.E. You could turn-off the lights of big city for a couple of days and few will have doubts about a tragic outcome.

As we are the only society of intelligent species (at least, we are speaking folks), we know, we should be carefully analyzing those facts when hypothesizing about alien intentions.

Indeed, all we can do is conjecture, there's not much evidence to go by. And given a practical question like "should we try to make first contact with unknown aliens?", best to not take the risk. But while we are just conjecturing, it seems intuitive that society and intelligence could in general lean toward peace and kindness. With intelligence comes empathy, and increased understanding - although it's born out of a ruthless and cutthroat evolutionary process, it seems to have its own goals that you can't easily equate to that of other species in the animal kingdom (mammals might show kindness, and empathy even to creatures outside of their species but it's a little easier to see the evolutionary benefits than some very unevolutionary human behaviors).

Turning the lights off in a big city will revert us back to our base/evolutionary goals - so perhaps we better hope these aliens aren't too desperate!

I think it’s safe to assume any highly evolved alien species will have moral constructs that support self-preservation.

Whether those morals extend to preserving other intelligent life forms (I.e. humans) seems unlikely since the prosperity of other life forms will inevitably lead to more competition for scarce resources.

The fact that human moral constructs apply to other intelligent species seems to be a bug that arises solely from the fact that we’re currently capable of out competing all other intelligent species.

This assumes that the hypothetical aliens draw (ultimately artificial and arbitrary) distinctions between themselves and other intelligent species. Who knows, they might consider us, another intelligent species, to be 'one of them' in some sense and thus deserving of protection.

What exactly is a "scarce resource" on a galactic scale? I'd think there isn't one.

Habitable planets with the exact chemistry to support your species without expensive or slow terraforming.

Those could be scarce on a solar scale, but probably not on a galactic one.

1) Not really scarce on a galactic scale and 2) if different species' chemistry are radically different (and why wouldn't they be?) there wouldn't be competition even if habitable planets were scarce.

My optimism says that radical consensual transhumanism might be a universal Schelling point and that if humanity reaches that point we'd fit fairly well into any advanced alien culture that reached the same values. Probably the biggest value difference at that point would be the morality/consciousness thresholds for tiers of personhood.

I don't think any morally advanced culture would be willing to accept an indefinite policy of "live and let live" between the cultures as a whole; there are some injustices (slavery, murder, torture) that wouldn't be tolerable to exist in the known universe.

But that raises a moral conundrum of interference with an alien culture’s development and impact on their world. On Earth, intervention in other societies has not gone over that well. If you have relatively equal societies in terms of technology, then you risk devastating warfare.

It's definitely a moral conundrum as evidenced by the U.S. civil war, the two World Wars, and some interventions in genocides, contrasted with the lack of intervention in other genocides or in Soviet and Chinese (to pick on the largest) mass murder/starvation of citizens for political reasons.

I agree that equally powerful societies face the hardest choice; whether to risk everything to save everyone or to knowingly allow atrocities to continue while preserving themselves.

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