How would you depict and/or justify the existence of a race of aliens who are technologically advanced and very (if...

Fairly certain Babylon 5 did this first.

Pacifist does not mean weak. NATO is quite pacifist but is still strongest alliance on Earth, while being not so willing to use it's military strength.
USA prior to WWII was pacifist, and when gentle giant awakened it showed the world what it could do.

So pacifistic race can still have powerful army/fleet but just use it for defence, police task, and as deterrence for other more aggressive factions.

How does a militaristic race survive if they can't just Clarkemagic all their enemies away to explain their continued existence?

Your pacifists are unlikely to make themselves a target, while your militarists are likely to make themselves a target as soon as they start ignoring borders.

They evolved somewhere insignificant and lucked out on never encountering other intelligent life. The moment they do, they gonna get subjugated or exterminated.

This one is pleased to do so, human. You will not be disappointed.

>NATO
>Quite pacifist
As a citizen of a NATO-member country, what the FUCK kind of 1984 doublethink are you employing to reach this conclusion?

The US doesn't really count

>there's no real need to war for control of it other than xenophobic paranoia.
Relativistic weapons.

I imagine OP means literal pacifism, not just being inclined to peace.

Yeah, America was only part of NATO so it could kill anyone threatening the other member countries. It's like having that one crazy asshole in your circle of friends who doesn't mind getting into fistfights so that the rest of you don't have to.

A race descended for AI that are only meant to observe other life and compile that data.

Next question?

Arent the Asari a good example of a pacifist empire?

The most technologically advanced in the ME setting.
Yet they, establish dominance through trade and culture.
They get turians to handle peacekeeping.

They have a fleet with some of the biggest warships in the galaxy and an army of psychic death commandos with gunship support.

Only for preventing war before they're started! In fairness though, the fact that the asari are huge hypocrites in this department is part of the PLOT of Mass Effect 3. They give everyone SO much shit about having to be super duper careful and hand over all xenoartifacts to the Council etc. but it turns out the reason for their own progress is a civilization is because they were uplifted by the protheans. They'd have gone extinct several times and wouldn't have had their psychic powers if not for prothean interference in their evolution, and their capital city contains a huge ass vault full of prothean artifacts they pull out at random every once in a while when they feel like declaring the great Asari Republic has made some amazing scientific discovery...

Don't make themselves a target.

Look at the Federation from Star Trek. They don't want war. They prefer diplomatic solutions to conflict, even when that involves questionable agreements like agreeing to not build/research cloaking devices. Agreements they stick to. They weren't even building dedicated warships until the Dominion showed up.

But just because they don't want violence doesn't mean they are unprepared for it. They know they are likely to have no choice, so their exploration vessels have enough firepower to hold their own, even win, against a similar volume of enemy warships.

And when they are really pushed:
youtube.com/watch?v=-D2SHNqkjbY

isn't that just Vulcans from star trek?

Puppeteers.
Extreme fear/true xenophobia of other races and species, as well as general phobia of space travel and other dangerous activities in general.
Extreme pacificsm due to locking down in scary situations, they only attack when cornered, and usually it involves a kick to the face.

They use the clinically insane members of their overpopulated species to conduct trade, research and development, dangerous labor activities unable to be performed by robots, and robots for the rest.

They focus on technology that will protect and allow them to flee, and their homeworlds are secret. (Secretly flying away from the galaxy at .5C) (Yes, the planet(s).)

The Culture

>Not Organians advanced
The Culture is a lot of things but hard science fiction it isn't. It's basically magic.

There are other powers within the Culture-verse at the same tech level. They don't want a war with it.

Though part of that is that they are all post-scarcity economies. They have very little reason to fight.

>If you want peace, prepare for war

What the pacifist faction needs is enough of a military capacity to make anyone else decide that war with them is not worth it. So no enemies that make war for the sake of war, just other factions that make war because it's the best way to achieve what they want. Until they look at the pacifist faction, then they decide that war is not worth it.

The pacifist faction doesn't need to be the strongest in the setting. Just strong enough that a war will be costly, so negotiating with them is a more effective way for other factions to achieve their goals than fighting them.

Sup, larry niven

The term you are looking for is sleeping giant, not gentle.

Early Foundation achieved peace by flooding enemy markets with their advanced tech and making them dependent on the Foundation. The Foundation was their exclusive source for these techs, and anyone who wanted to know how to repair or even use them had to be trained by the Foundation, making them more sympathetic to their cause. War against the Foundation meant a drastic drop in quality of life and possibly even civil war, and in cases where war was still declared the Foundation would have had time to sneak bombs and shit into all their donated tech.

Basically, make a race that has enmeshed itself so firmly into the lives of its neighbors that the idea of war with them is simply unthinkable.

They have such advanced social and trading skills that they can easily convince any civilization that being friends and trading is a much better option to fighting each other.

Having cheap nuclear power and advanced spaceships when every neighboring planet was stuck in a barbaric dieselpunk society also helped a lot.

Maybe that's how the pacificstoids got that way.

The race as a whole is very pacifistic. They are sickened by the idea of war, as it would be too much death on a mass scale. Assassination however... Certain elite members of their race have taken the mindset that a few key deaths can prevent millions from death. Still distasteful but hey, for the greater good.

One of their advance techs predicts outcomes, and can tell them who needs to die to prevent the most deaths. So you usually only see them as these peace loving, helpful techies what constantly are too open and giving. Unless you are one who needs to die. Then one of their number will be meeting you in a dark alley.

Pre-emptive RKV strikes fall, I'm pretty sure, under "xenophobic paranoia"

They themselves are genetically engineered by another species out there, and spend most of their time hiding from the rest of the galaxy who could beat the shit out of them and take all their goodies if they were so inclined.

I should also note they're not technically pacifistic, what they are is very passive and lacking in the sort of emotional readiness to use force, especially when they're confronted with unexpected situations. They're quite capable of say, pushing a button to fill a room full of poison gas. But if one of them was holding a gun and you just ran up to him and started punching, he'd probably freeze in panic or try to flee rather than just shooting you, even if you did something as suicidal against a human as running across an open room shouting how you're going to kill him before delivering the first blow.

I can't think of any B5 races who are particularly pacifist. Who are you talking about?

Perhaps you should look for inspiration in the Chozo from the Metroid series. They are a pretty interesting way to depict what you're looking for.

>How would you depict and/or justify the existence of a race of aliens who are technologically advanced and very (if perhaps not entirely) pacifistic
The universe is fucking big and there's enough space for everyone, so they don't care if some monkeys live on a rock nearby

Reminds me of a series of books I once read. Can't remember the name though.

It had an alien race like that. They had no word for "war" in their language and could not understand the concept either.
In the second book it was then revealed that this is because they're highly agressive if pressed. They are hard to anger but when they actually do get angry they go on a hulklike rampage until the thing that angers them is gone.

The same basically applied on an interstellar level. They were extremely pacifistic and no one messed with them. One other race had done so in the past. In response they repurposed their entire planet for "warfare" and completely wiped out that race as one big angry horde.

The thing about space is that unlike on a planet, if you want to run away from somebody, you can run as far as you need to. Once you're moving away, you keep moving away.

I forgot how dark and counter-Roddenberryish DS9 could be. Dayum.

>Alien race doesn't know what war is
>Has wiped out an entire race before

How does this work user?
And if you remember what series it is please share.

>counter-Roddenberryish
Maybe. Maybe not.

Look at humanity today.
Look at humanity in TOS/TNG.

How did the first become the second ?

My interpretation of TOS/TNG is that the environment around humans changed. Poverty was eliminated, resource scarcity was reduced. Reasons for conflict reduced, making peace easier. All that violent potential is still there, but not brought out. Unless forced.

> We're human beings with the blood of a million savage years on our hands. But we can stop it. We can admit that we're killers, but we're not going to kill today. That's all it takes. Knowing that we're not going to kill - today!
youtube.com/watch?v=yKmUd0zHW4w

Yeah that's basically it.

They're post-scarcity and don't actually settle planets, so they give fuck-all about actual borders (as much as they matter once you go beyond one solar system or so). They are certainly powerful enough but far from the strongest in the universe (Consider Phlebas mentions basically 5th dimension aliens that even Culture doesn't fuck with). Their own overall philosophy is malleable enough that they allow their own people to go their own way if they want to, they're not really a solid entity in any way.

They can also fuck you up with gridfire if you manage to piss them off really bad somehow.

See . The Abbai are mostly pacifistic. Same for the Hyach, who, incidentally, are close allies of the for,er/

Hyach didn't really get enough attention in the show to be able to say much.

>pilgrims
>pacifists