Humanity's policy for encountering less advanced intelligent life

Let's assume humanity is the first race to achieve Faster The Light Travel (by whatever means) and is the galaxy's first truly interstellar race. Sure some races might be older and spacefaring but are limited to their systems or have wiped themselves out.

Any way how do you think Humanity should act with less advanced aliens? Prime Directive? Precautionary Xenocide? Enslavement? Uplifting? Pranks?

We will do what we do best. Subjugate, exploit and exterminate. It's either them or us.

If we let the Germans or the Swedes handle first contact then we'll let them rape our women and murder our citizens under the guise of tolerance.

Two posts in and the thread is already ruined.

Just ignore the jokes and post constructive ideas.

If we have economically viable FTL then there is no raw matter on their worlds that we can't get from other lumps of space rock cheaper and with less controversy. Also there is probably going to be nothing we can eat down there and probably nothing safe to breathe.

So resources aren't going to play into this.

I would like to think we would be responsible uplifters who pull the occasional prank.

We almost certainly won't go full precautionary xenocide because we have a monopoly on FTL and are therefore so far ahead of them in a military way that their aggression would be funny more than dangerous.

We would have no economic reason to enslave them.

Sadly I can see a push for some sort of Prime Directive being born out of the White Guilt/Moral Cowardice/Accountability crowd.

Although we might wind up fragmentation once we reach space. Thus causing different interstellar nations to crop up who might have other ideas.

It depends mainly on the type of organizations managing space exploration.

It's not unreasonable to assume the lust for resources to make economical superpowers close their eyes at the morals of damaging, using or outright exterminating natives.

If we are in post scarcity it'd be either prime directive or offers of uplifting for art's sake.

If we assume space exploration is done for scientific researches, prime directive will be a thing, but minor contacts will be inevitable.

I seriously hope first contacts involve exchange of artistic and sexual natures.

That is so very true.

We might still be fragmented when we get to space. Each nation that can into space deciding it's time to build an empire in their own image where no man has gone before.

[insert nation name here] Empire in SPAAAAACE!!!!

Plus the hyper rich individuals/groups of individuals dream themselves emperors in their own right and start setting up privately owned colonies that turn into interstellar nations.

Then some of the nationally owned colonies start breaking away like America from Britain.

Maybe the emerging empires would take under their wing the younger races that reside in their territories. Children people to be raised in their image.

That's called political commentary, and both of those responses are valid methods of encounter. I also agree that we should subjugate or exterminate them, for the greater good of mankind. As any nonhuman race will soon question why we are the masters of the galaxy

That makes me wonder how said child species would view each other.

as rivals for senpai's attention.

>Have FTL
>Have ships capable of routine space travel
>Have access to literally any and all types of minerals, ores, and elements we could ever possibly want
>Wasting time with alien primitives

In case you were wondering, yes this is why aliens haven't visited and enslaved humans. Slavery is really just a precursor to industrial automation. There's no mechanical or economic benefit to relying on physical labor when a machine will do it faster and better.

You missed the point. The idea is more of a moral or "eliminate future enemies" idea. Or just plain egoism.

>Find a race that we find attractive.
>Conquer or somehow convince them to wear maid and butler outfits.
>Purely because we could.

Only if future mankind isn't ruled by Western civilization.

If our tech level is so far ahead of theirs that we don't consider them a threat?

We build a 'monitoring station' in their star system. Depending on how overt we want to be, we either build it in orbit around their world or a little further away, so its not so easy to see in their night sky.

This serves as a base of operations for teams to study the planet and its inhabitants, keeping tabs on the evolution of their society and technology. Intervention would probably be preferred to be as subtle as possible until such a time that we believe that they are advanced enough to understand what we really are, instead of worshiping us.

However, that same monitoring station is also equipped to bomb their planet back into the stone age should the need arise. If anyone asks about the weapons, its to defend their helpless world against any hostile aliens that might show up, but the real goal is a safety measure.

Once they reach the point where they are ready to spread beyond their world? We simply offer our services to them for space travel before they develop the technology to do it themselves. This might sound counter-intuitive, but if we maintain a monopoly on space travel and run the space-trains that connect galactic civilization, run by human pilots, then we remove much of the incentive for them to build their own space capability so long as we provide cheap and reliable service.

At that point, any race that insists on developing their own space force anyway becomes and obvious red-flag, because they are intentionally trying to go outside the system. We can then investigate the shit out of them, and make sure no one is up to no good.

We, of course, use a prime-directive esq ruling to justify bringing the hammer down on anyone who tries to steal our technology. FTL tech is almost certainly incredibly dangerous in the wrong hands. We simply don't trust anyone else not to blow up their own planet trying to figure out how it works.

Am I the only one that actually prefers the vision of a future where you have hundreds of human civilizations in space, rather than just one generic Federation and dozens of aliens?

> Any way how do you think Humanity should act with less advanced aliens?
4X, obviously - eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate.

I also prefer that vision of the future.

One big mega-blob would be a monolithic death knell for any and all culture.

Let us go forth fractious and fragmented and diverse. Let us go forth and carve out empires and have those empires fall apart and new empires rise from all the diverse and distinct and break apart again and again and again.

Fuck the Federation "Everybody is the same" bullshit. Let us celebrate what makes us different and divided.

>Let us go forth fractious and fragmented and diverse.
Only possible if we don't encounter aliens in the beginning.
Humanity is notorious for uniting against a common perceived threat (such as aliens) and falling to infighting and fragmenting into faction when there is no such threat.

My favorite version of space-future is the one where the human colonies are united in an overarching space government (albeit with their own cultures) but Earth itself is absolutely irrelevant on the galactic stage specifically BECAUSE its fragmented.

All of the worlds settled by humanity were spawned from single colonies that rapidly spread to control the planet. That means everything on that world was always under the control of the same people and culture, no fighting nations or deep rooted bloody histories on that world.

But Earth isn't like that. Earth has too much baggage. Earth will never be united without some kind of absolute global genocide, and even that probably won't last. And that's why the colonies eventually banded together and decided that earth no longer gets a say in galactic affairs. Probably after nations on Earth tried to drag offworld assets into world war 4 or something, trying to turn a world war between two pissant nations on Earth into a space war between territories they controlled. And the space territories backed out.

So it gets to the point that you might get news from Earth saying "The North Federation Union is at war with the Republic of Western States again" and no one in space gives a shit. In fact, most of them probably can't remember the names of more than a handful of countries on Earth. As far as they are concerned, Earth countries are incredibly impermanent, changing names and territory over and over again so often that its not worth teaching anyone in space the current geopolitial landscape of Earth, they are just going to change it again in 50 years.

That, or they DO teach the 'current state' of Earth, except its 70 years out of date and no one cares. Earth is where we came from, but we left it for a reason. Earth is a shithole, man. The only thing back there is old buildings and old fueds.

Depends if we let garboons survive into space.

Peter Hamilton wrote a series that had something like that. Everybody fucked off and colonized their own shit, and Earth was a largely irrelevant shithole that nobody wanted to visit.

>Humanity is notorious for uniting against a common perceived threat (such as aliens) and falling to infighting and fragmenting into faction when there is no such threat.

You mean like how the Mesoamericans united against the Spanish, or the Chinese united against the British, or the Africans with Europe?

user please, there will be no glorious brown-and-white uniting to beat up green, it will be brown attacking white because green was working with yellow who is friends with white.

Do you recall the name of it?

Nations will inevitably form, resources will be bickered over and the worlds colonized by Spaceland won't remain just like Spaceland.

Imagine the cultural divide between East Coast and Great Plains, amplify that by about 3 light-years and give them time to develop for three hundred years. The culture of one continent will be radically different from the culture of another, to say nothing of planets.

Why should Planet X listen to the whims of Planet Origin when Planet X has everything they need?

If we are the first to get FTL by all probability we will find the stars mostly empty.

The Night's Dawn Trilogy. Pretty good, but has a very strange choice for an antagonist force. Also worst girl wins.

It depends.

If its the Chinese or Russians, they'd likely go for a prime directive direction.

The EU or American might intervene if they think the "lesser species" are
>intelligent enough to be "human"
>likely to harm themselves

Probably observe until they're ready to meet us, then offer to let them become a part of the greatest interplanetary nation, the United States of the Universe.

Also fucking them. We will most definitely fuck them.

are the fresh prince of maymays

Can I stick my dick in those aliens?

>all these subsurface oceans we're finding
What if the typical life-bearing planet looks like Europa and we're just weird enough to be in that special place where liquid water can exist indefinitely on the surface? What if the reason we can't find aliens is because they're all stuck under a fuckton of ice?

>You mean like how the Mesoamericans united
They actually did.
Except it was with those spanish fags against those asshole aztecs.

>Humans conquered the stars.
>because we were lonely.
>Also because we so hated our own kin we wanted to be as far away as possible.

So you're saying US/Chinese/Indian colonies won't fight German/Japan/British/Russian colonies in WW5/6/7/8/9/10 and will leave all happily beside earth?

desu this annoys me the most.
I just know they'll get at each other over history all over again.
Even though they're not going to lack.

Even if the future UN has some kind of prime directive protecting indigenous sapients from exploitation and attempting to preserve galactic cultural heritage sites, likely they would find it against those same principles to prevent people from peaceful cultural exchange (read: religious missionaries, educational exchanges of non-technical works such as the canon of world literature, and artistic collaborations between the two species).

So expect Mormons, Lit grad students trying to write their thesis, and avant garde artists to be allowed through the technological and economic embargo.

More like "Hey, we just got orders from the Western Alliance of Freedom. You know, that country that funded the spacecraft that carried our ancestors to this planet 150 years ago."

"Oh? What do they want?"

"They have a dispute over oil drilling rights with the Freedom Republic of the North which got hot, so they want us to launch an attack on New Catopia."

"What? Why? We are trade partners with New Catopia. Their holo-clothes can store up to 12 different outfits at once. Our people love that shit."

"Yeah, but they were founded by the Freedom Republic of the North, so..."

"Thats stupid. You know Catopia has Zero-Bombs, right? I'm not risking billions of lives on this bullshit. Fake some sort of communications malfunction and buy me some time. I'm going to call up Catopia and clear this shit up. I can't imagine they are in any great rush to trade bombs either."

You will not. With each passing year, more and more galaxies will be out of our reach. A few billion years and the number of galaxies that we could ever reach will be halved in half. A billion more and the galaxies will be so far away that their light will never reach us as their velocity relative to us is superior to the speed of light. Dark Energy is a bitch.

What if we need to make Quasars to travel to other galaxies?

Then its unlikely that we will reach other galaxies.

Making a Quasar is a pretty major endeavor, and one which if it goes even slightly wrong can exterminate dozens of star systems. Better to find an existing Quasar and ride that one to a nearby galaxy. The universe is full of them, you'll hit one eventually.

This situation is absurd, as are all the space opera tropes you're calling on. A civilization that has the power to travel between stars is a civilization with nanofabricators. There will be no resource wars in space, because 1) space is really big, with more than enough resources for everyone, and 2) because the economic structures that might motivate such conflicts will necessarily be invalidated by the technology of a spacefaring culture.

What if they insist in building Dyson Spheres?

Fragmentation seems most likely to me.
I mean look at human history, when new Lands are found people fly over there and try to start up their own Nations/Kingdoms/Whatever.
Unlike on Earth Though? In Spaces, there is no end in sight for that expansion.Unless Space turns out to be really really crowded.

I'd love to see that.
You have hundreds of civilizations, all with their own values and cultures.And even technologies, as some embrace certain "Taboo" technologies(Cybernetics, in-depth gene modding, A.I., Etc) and other shun those Taboos.

I imagine that best policy against intelligent life out there is to kill it indiscriminately as soon as you see them, as this is the smartest thing to do.

Yes, but how do you solve the Fermi Paradox? What if the galaxy is populated by Self-replicating Berserks bent on annihilating all life?

Then scarcity is truly dead to them.

The answer is pretty simple. Interstellar travel is really hard and really pointless.

Post-Singularity Aliens are constantly depressed by knowing the inevitability of the end of the universe, the extinction of stars, and proton decay.

More likely, they're plugged into their own waifu realms as gods, with their subjective time sped up so much as to become functionally immortal.

It sounds like two big nations on Earth are not fighting over space resources. You won't find oil in space. They are fighting over Earth-resources, and trying to drag offworld colonies into it too.

Also,

> A civilization that has the power to travel between stars is a civilization with nanofabricators.

Thats exactly as valid a claim as 'a civilization that can fit a supercomputer with a touch-screen in your pocket is one that that has flying cars'.

You can have one advanced thing without having all the advanced things.

>space is really big, with more than enough resources for everyone
Yeah, but can you actually get there in a timely manner?

Say there's a mineral goldmine 2 LY away. Now, there may be another goldmine 4 LY away, but we'd still fight each other over the closer goldmine because it's more economical.

>because the economic structures that might motivate such conflicts will necessarily be invalidated by the technology of a spacefaring culture
Resource wars will never be invalidated man.

>you won't find oil in space
An interstellar civilization is not going to use oil as an energy source, and there are ways to synthesize oil. Furthermore, assembling organic materials is as simple as inserting the base elements into a nanofabricator.

>we have smartphones but no flying cars!
First, we do have flying cars. They've been around for quite some time, as well. Second, nanofabrication is a very simple technology in comparison to interstellar travel. It's something that we may see in our own lifetimes, but what is certain is that we will see its precursor, 3D printing, become prominent within our lives. Already the productive efficiency of industiral automation has rendered human labor obsolete and created a fundamental insolvency in this archaic consumer economy, even setting aside the technologies of nanofabrication and 3D printing. No interstellar civilization could reasonably resemble the political or economic regime of today.

You're the kind of guy who shitposts about anarcho-capitalism/communism in /epg/ aren't you?

Basically no matter how many potentially habitable stars there are in the universe it doesn't matter if the requirements for our specific brand of communication to exist and be decoded are also super fucking slim. People using the Fermi paradox in pop sci like to make light of the ridiculous prerequisites for communication to successfully occur.

Actually I'm a racist, misogynistic, totalitarian, eugenicist, nationalist. But I'm also not ignorant of facts.

The only nano-fabricators we have even a basic understanding of are living cells and we don't even understand them well enough to cure cancer.

Interstellar travel is just pointing a shitload of energy in a particular direction.

>No interstellar civilization could reasonably resemble the political or economic regime of today
Maybe not, but that won't stop humans from doing what humans have been doing for thousands of years

This.

Aliens will be either Australopithecus, extinct or Post-Singularity. We will never find a species that has the same technological level or even with the same intellect as us. The timelines involved are way too big.

> We will never
It's extremely unlikely, but that doesn't make it impossible.

I'd say mainly pranks with the odd 'manipulating rising asshole civs into destroying each other' and self-defense where necessary.

Kind of like The Culture series:
Benevolent artificial intelligence constructs run things, humans do whatever the fuck they want. Mainly lots of things related to fucking.

On the topic of war:
> "It looks like a dildo!"
>"That's appropriate. Armed, it can fuck entire solar systems."
- characters talking about the Rapid Offensive Unit "Frank Exchange of Views".
Pic kinda related.

So. . . They're lazy and aren't trying to overcome the futility that is existence in a dying universe?

More like "Hey, we just found out that New Catopia is vulnerable right now, we could fund opposition to current ruling party and create terrorist cells in their most troubled regions"

"What do can we get from it?"

"Well, annexing TR-12 that we aimed our eyes on for quite some time"

"Okay, lets do this before those Chinks do it faster than us"

> New Catopia is vulnerable right now

Except it isn't. Whats going on on Earth doesn't actually impact the colonies in any way. Earth just wants the colonies to come when it calls because Earth still assumes it is important in the grand scheme of things.

The Freedom Republic of the North could burn to atomic ash tomorrow and New Catopia wouldn't actually be affected. There isn't anything that one nation on Earth has that a whole already established colony needs.

Doesn't mean that two colonies cannot have their own resource skirmishes and espionage action. But they gain exactly nothing from letting themselves be dragged into Earth's petty squabbles, because none of the Earth nations have anything special to offer in return.

You control a continent. I control a planet, perhaps even a start system depending on whether or not there are any other colonies already in system with me. We both have space-tech, the difference is that you use it to get people off of your world and my people use it every day of our lives because we live in space.

Tell me again what I need from you? Because Earth nations are only strong enough to push around young, recently established colonies. After that, the colonies become larger and with sufficient manpower to rival the Earth nation that founded them, and eventually grow to become much larger and more powerful than any Earth nation could be by itself.

Because all your leaders money are kept in our banks

What the duckies that have to do with what he said? Stop being pointlessly pessimistic.

So a colony separating itself from its founder has to establish its own currency? What a never-before-seen problem! I bet no one can solve this riddle.

>Any way how do you think Humanity should act with less advanced aliens?
Based on my 12 Masters Degrees in Human HIstor... Regular History, I've devised this handy flowchart:

1. Can we fuck 'em?
>Yes
Fuck 'em, maybe convert 'em to Christianity later
>No
Move on to 2

2. Can we convert them to Christianity?
>Yes
Ego credo unam substantiam Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti
>No
Move on to 3

3. Can we harvest them for useful resources?
>Yes
Enslave, domesticate, forcefeed and/or hunt to extinction, depending on the useful resource they produce
>No
Move on to 4

4. Can we make them fight for our entertainment?
>Yes
It's not cruel if they're not human!
>No
Move on to 5

5. Are they intelligent?
>Yes
Well, I GUESS we can teach them basic mathematics, if you insist!
>No
Move on to 6

6. Are we absolutely, positively sure we can't fuck 'em?
>Well, a hole's a hole
>Wait, what's that goo?
>Why is my dick purple?
>We can fix this, right?

Humans, Masters of the Universe's STDs.

Make some friends and have sexual relations with them if we can.

If the FTL drive ever becomes cheap enough to be available for purchase by private individuals (which it probably will) then the idea of "government" becomes laughable. A bureaucracy can't move at the speed of light. Human space will explode outward with ships in every direction, piloted by yahoos with money and a sense of adventure, like a mushroom spreading spores into the wind. It'll be the Wild West all over again, except this time there's no Pacific Ocean to stop at.

Now you're thinking ahead

Interstellar travel has been possible since the 60s, it only doesn't happen because we don't know how to make it make economic sense, and also we're too paranoid about massive stashes of nuclear weapons in mountain sized, invulnerable to human weapons, flying, nuclear warhead dispensers.

Maybe we'll find a technology that allows interstellar travel without gigatons of nuclear discharge moving megatons of iron in the future, but absolute material science mastery is not necessarily a prerequisite.

No it won't since you can't simply terraform a planet on your own. The Wild West was habitable. A man could build a farm on his own. No such thing in space.

>terraforming planets
>living on planets at all
>not just flying around in your self-sustaining spaceship, sightseeing like an intergalactic tourist, accelerating rocks past lightspeed at any primitives that talk shit

>people aren't the problem, Earth is the problem
This is fedora x1000. Just go play with your katana and applejack toys.

...

yes, yes, just like London isn't financial center and Switzerland is not banking center of our world, it's USA, Canada and Mexico

integrate them into our empire and be tolerant because racism will not exist in the future? duh?
And then we will genetically engineer them (or us which ever the easiest) so that we can procriate with them, and with that we should do what we can so that our species will be mixed because were not fucking bigots!

He's not wrong. There will still be war in space, but there will never be peace on Earth.

Its not hard to imagine Earth becoming irrelevant because its incapable of unification.

...This sounds kinda fun actually.

Its fun until something goes wrong. If your ship ever takes damage, you need somewhere to land to make repairs and restock on supplies that were lost or ruined in the incident. Otherwise, while you start out in a good situation you can only ever have bad things happen to you with no way to reasonably recover.

Space stations to dock at only distance yourself from the problem by one step. Someone has to be supplying the space station. No matter how far you try and remove yourself from it, someone somewhere has to be living on a habitable planet doing resource gathering. And without that guy, your entire spacefaring joyride runs out of gas.

CRAWLING IN MY SKIN

Humans will be petty, hateful, greedy and intolerant, but in Space.

>No matter how far you try and remove yourself from it, someone somewhere has to be living on a habitable planet doing resource gathering
I don't follow. In a universe of cheap FTL travel, what does a planet provide that can't be replicated elsewhere?

As ancient earth holy scripture says "You gotta catch 'em all!"

>keeping your money via quantum entanglement on Earth
>Not using the insanely cheaper method of tradition radio communications on your local planet

i seriously hope you guys don't actually do this.

I'm loving all of the idiots in the thread that obviously take warhammer 40k seriously.

>EXTERMINATE TEH XENOS

This is why we can't have nice things, you /pol/tarded fucks.

Such is the problem with cliques that pretend to be stupid. Eventually, you attract idiots that are not in on the joke, and the stupidity becomes genuine.

>Try to invade
>fail
>"It's just a prank, bro"

In all seriousness I don't think we would need to enter hostile relations with them. There are litrally so many stars out there that we could support tens of thousands of Earth's with thousands of mining planets each and we would not even cross path with any alliens who do the same. That's what annoys me the most about alien invasion movies, there is never a conceivable reason they should do this. There are just so many more planet out there that could be terraformed or mined. We literally have nothing in abundance except the most abundant resources in the universe.

Humans would probably set up some kind of UN thing that handles claims and trade FTL travel against signing contracts into this construct, holding any other alien species down enaugh to not overpower us.

If we are the first, we are also the first to call dips and the first to build a military, so the alliens would probably get enaugh to not be pissed off, but not enaugh to actually do anything against humanity.

Knowing us, we would probably call dips on 3/5th of the Galaxy and leave the rest free in spheres for the other aliens to colonise. There is no reason to give them FTL if they don't comply, and since we would be there first everywhere, they could not outpace us economicaly.

Too unciviliced? We reserved you the closest 10k suns to your homeworld, but you need to git gud for us to give it to you.

Too full of themselves or agressive? Good luck developing FTL like you seem to be unable to do. When you finally do it in 50 years we will just crush you like a bug.

That is of course assuming the scenario given in OP, if we are not the first this would probably be done instead by whomever was first instead.

I just don't see intergalactic conquest to be worthwhile to do for post-scacity societies, at all

>I just don't see intergalactic conquest to be worthwhile to do for post-scacity societies, at all

Have you considered the simple fact that some members of such a society might simply wish to go to war because they can? It's not logical or civilised, but they're bored and really want to have real war at least once.

Hell, they can even reenact stupid clichés from Old Earth stories, like letting them re-build only to come back so often because that way it's sporting.

Lifeforms from another planet would be so different from us down to the genetic level that it's unlikely there would ever be any meaningful understanding between us. The child of a different sun is no brother of mine.

I dunno, if something can evolve into a society, it must be at least somewhat, if not entirely, logical.

It may not feel the same emotions, but it will have logic, since logic is necessary for survival and forming a society.

And, logically, space is fucking huge.
You don't murder someone if just avoiding them is an option.

The only reason they'd ever go to war with us is rampant paranoia over some incredibly unlikely circumstance, or worshiping some fictional ideal that portrays a heavily skewed reality.

Utter nonsense. A species that is both sapient and capable of using tools as well as mankind will not only greatly resemble it physiologically, but also technologically and culturally.

What if vomiting in your lover's mouth is the main form of courting?

>Copulating involves stabbing their pseudo-penis into whatever part the male feels like it and injecting the "semen" directly into the bloodstream.

I roll to seduce the three-pronged starfish on wheels

Rolled 13 (1d20)

I'm sorry, this is the roll.

That's just anthropocentric chauvinism.