There has been a debate for many years within the general public and SETI communities as to whether aliens from other worlds, if they exist, would be human-friendly or aggressively predatory towards our civilisation.
The general consensus is that the latter is more likely.
This attitude is particularly relevant to the future planning of the SETI project, recently canvassed in the January 23rd issue of New Scientist. The discussion centred on whether it would be advisable to signal our presence on planet Earth by actively broadcasting a message to our intergalactic neighbours or to just continue passively scanning for their messages.
This debate is now beginning to have practical consequences for SETI and therefore deserves a closer and more sophisticated analysis. The pro-active alternative involves significantly greater investment and broader cooperation with both the scientific community and public in general.
Supporters of the negative side of the argument base their analysis primarily on our own past behavioural patterns. Humans have aggressively waged war throughout our evolutionary history. The inference therefore is that other intelligent species would do the same, reflecting this same aggressive archetype, which has been portrayed in numerous sci-fi scenarios.
However there are two fundamental oversimplifications, if not blatant non-sequiturs, supporting this argument.
Firstly, members of an animal genus may include both types of behaviour- in this case predatory and benign. Examples include meat and plant eating dinosaurs and more recently sharks such as the predatory Great White and the mild bottom-feeders such as the Wobbegong.
But the second flaw is more pertinent. Behaviour in a species is not a static property- it can be modified over time. Our civilisation is moving towards a phase change in its social awareness, following the last 14,000 years of social evolution since the end of the last ice age.
Although humans have waged war continuously over this period, with greater knowledge and hindsight we are beginning to comprehend more clearly its appalling consequences for future as well as current generations and the urgent need to avoid or mitigate its debilitating outcomes at all costs.
In the 20th century when the ferocity of conflict began to spiral out of control, threatening the very existence of our species, we began to construct an institutional and legal architecture to better reflect this awareness and safeguard our survival.
Evidence of this accelerating trend includes- the creation of global institutions such as the UN including the World Health Organisation and UNESCO, major advances in democracy, human rights and social justice, the creation of global Peace-keeping forces, implementation of critical treaties and protocols covering nuclear disarmament, war crime resolution, conflict mediation and outlawing the use of chemical weapons and land mines.
This new ethical framework will provide the basis for managing our civilisation in the future and provide the glue to hold it together in times of extreme stress such as during global warming.
Democracy with all its shortcomings has spread from 20 countries a hundred yeas ago to more than 130 nations today. In addition, the 27 countries in the European Union, which in the past waged relentless war on each other over hundreds of years, now live peacefully and productively in harmony.
In other words, as a civilisation becomes more knowledgeable and cogniscent of its history, a higher level of ethics and wisdom emerges. Once past a critical threshold of societal awareness, it is capable of transforming itself from an aggressive into a more peaceful entity. Our civilisation is now on the cusp of such a threshold.
But what drives this process towards a more peaceful self-sustaining state?
The rate of acquisition of knowledge by groups is largely independent of local social turmoil such as wars and internal conflict. It is instead dependent on the rate of exchange of information between a system- in this case human society and its broader cultural and economic environment. It is also dependent on the capacity of the system to process that information and generate an appropriate response.
History is replete with instances of 'barbaric hordes' overrunning more socially 'advanced' states, or of 'civilised' nations dominating more 'primitive' peoples. In both cases, the result is a transfer of information through the merging and adaptation of cultures, technologies and social structures. In many cases, the adjustment is unequal and painful, particularly for indigenous cultures, with valuable knowledge destroyed or suppressed in the process.
However the morality of the evolutionary process itself is neutral. Information and knowledge continues to be accumulated at faster and faster rates regardless of temporary blocks and losses; dependent only on the unstoppable need of society to expand its well-being and potential.
Over the past century, advances in computing and communications such as radio, television and now the digital Web and mobile technology have facilitated this generation and transfer of knowledge at a breathtaking rate, resulting in the phenomenon of global knowledge convergence. This occurs when most nations are able to access, share and make decisions based the same core knowledge base.
And while information is being propagated at a massive rate, another meta-process is at work, sifting and winnowing out the useful outcomes required to ensure the most beneficial directions for life. This meta-knowledge comprises the essence of today’s ethics, morality and wisdom.
This is a constraining influence, ensuring the survival of life in the face of potentially extraneous, misleading or lethal data. The implications for society of this evolutionary juggernaut are enormous, as we enter this next and most significant phase towards a more peaceful civilisation.
This evolutionary process operates at a fundamental level. All forms of life categorise events and relationships broadly as either useful- capable of adding to the quality of life or irrelevant or wasteful, potentially reducing its value.
Relationships and knowledge are represented by a web of associative neural connections or patterns, which become firmly embedded not only in the individual’s memory, but in the group’s social consciousness. Such knowledge categories also require continuous feedback and adaptation to remain relevant to the process of winnowing value.
A framework of democratic and human rights provides the basis for good patterns in a society, in which all individuals have an equal opportunity to decide the type of government and society they need; in other words, the social, legal and economic framework for a civil society. In times of war and during periods of economic hardship, there is a major potential for a reduction in social value and pressure for disintegration of a civil society framework.
Transactions between individuals and sub-groups, related to work, health care or food distribution, all need to be mediated by ethical protocols and meta-rules such as ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’. These are closely linked to the core protocols of human rights and are based on the benefits of reciprocity and cooperation.
In all instances the aim of such overriding rules is to ensure that life's potential is provided with the maximum opportunity to develop and avoid social implosion. This is the essence of the 'good' pattern. It allows life, human or otherwise, the opportunity to ratchet forward on its evolutionary path.
Wisdom is therefore a distillation or form of meta-knowledge essential to survival- feedback derived from outcomes of evolution. Ethics and morals are codified wisdom critical to life’s survival. They provide constraints on the destructive impacts of knowledge and extends beyond the taboos and moral codes enshrined in religious models. Ancient tribal wisdom evolved over tens of thousands of years, using the natural evolutionary process of trial and error; learning from those processes that enhance the potential of life and discarding those that don’t. Current wisdom derives from the same process but in a globally advanced age has the potential to be vastly accelerated.
In war, killing is still accepted by both aggressors and defenders as necessary. Overall however, killing is an extremely negative action, resulting in great loss of human potential not only for a society, but for the world as a whole.
In the future, preventative action will be taken to ensure conflict resolution by the world community, before it escalates out of control, resulting in overall convergence to the elimination of wars.
As evolution is a generic process, driving life in whatever form across the universe, it is reasonable to infer that a similar evolutionary process selecting for peace as outlined above, will also be the norm in other worlds.
Any civilisation that responds to our greeting and has the capacity to visit us in the near future would be infinitely further down the evolutionary knowledge path than us and have advanced through this wisdom threshold long ago.
Therefore despite all the Star Wars and intergalactic alien warfare mythologies, there is a very high probability that such a society would function at an advanced level of ethics and morality.
It is therefore time to put aside the same inherent biases that we have applied to other races on this planet in the past and peacefully welcome our intergalactic neighbours in the future.
The general consensus is that the latter is more likely.
This attitude is particularly relevant to the future planning of the SETI project, recently canvassed in the January 23rd issue of New Scientist. The discussion centred on whether it would be advisable to signal our presence on planet Earth by actively broadcasting a message to our intergalactic neighbours or to just continue passively scanning for their messages.
This debate is now beginning to have practical consequences for SETI and therefore deserves a closer and more sophisticated analysis. The pro-active alternative involves significantly greater investment and broader cooperation with both the scientific community and public in general.
Supporters of the negative side of the argument base their analysis primarily on our own past behavioural patterns. Humans have aggressively waged war throughout our evolutionary history. The inference therefore is that other intelligent species would do the same, reflecting this same aggressive archetype, which has been portrayed in numerous sci-fi scenarios.
However there are two fundamental oversimplifications, if not blatant non-sequiturs, supporting this argument.
Firstly, members of an animal genus may include both types of behaviour- in this case predatory and benign. Examples include meat and plant eating dinosaurs and more recently sharks such as the predatory Great White and the mild bottom-feeders such as the Wobbegong.
But the second flaw is more pertinent. Behaviour in a species is not a static property- it can be modified over time. Our civilisation is moving towards a phase change in its social awareness, following the last 14,000 years of social evolution since the end of the last ice age.
Although humans have waged war continuously over this period, with greater knowledge and hindsight we are beginning to comprehend more clearly its appalling consequences for future as well as current generations and the urgent need to avoid or mitigate its debilitating outcomes at all costs.
In the 20th century when the ferocity of conflict began to spiral out of control, threatening the very existence of our species, we began to construct an institutional and legal architecture to better reflect this awareness and safeguard our survival.
Evidence of this accelerating trend includes- the creation of global institutions such as the UN including the World Health Organisation and UNESCO, major advances in democracy, human rights and social justice, the creation of global Peace-keeping forces, implementation of critical treaties and protocols covering nuclear disarmament, war crime resolution, conflict mediation and outlawing the use of chemical weapons and land mines.
This new ethical framework will provide the basis for managing our civilisation in the future and provide the glue to hold it together in times of extreme stress such as during global warming.
Democracy with all its shortcomings has spread from 20 countries a hundred yeas ago to more than 130 nations today. In addition, the 27 countries in the European Union, which in the past waged relentless war on each other over hundreds of years, now live peacefully and productively in harmony.
In other words, as a civilisation becomes more knowledgeable and cogniscent of its history, a higher level of ethics and wisdom emerges. Once past a critical threshold of societal awareness, it is capable of transforming itself from an aggressive into a more peaceful entity. Our civilisation is now on the cusp of such a threshold.
But what drives this process towards a more peaceful self-sustaining state?
The rate of acquisition of knowledge by groups is largely independent of local social turmoil such as wars and internal conflict. It is instead dependent on the rate of exchange of information between a system- in this case human society and its broader cultural and economic environment. It is also dependent on the capacity of the system to process that information and generate an appropriate response.
History is replete with instances of 'barbaric hordes' overrunning more socially 'advanced' states, or of 'civilised' nations dominating more 'primitive' peoples. In both cases, the result is a transfer of information through the merging and adaptation of cultures, technologies and social structures. In many cases, the adjustment is unequal and painful, particularly for indigenous cultures, with valuable knowledge destroyed or suppressed in the process.
However the morality of the evolutionary process itself is neutral. Information and knowledge continues to be accumulated at faster and faster rates regardless of temporary blocks and losses; dependent only on the unstoppable need of society to expand its well-being and potential.
Over the past century, advances in computing and communications such as radio, television and now the digital Web and mobile technology have facilitated this generation and transfer of knowledge at a breathtaking rate, resulting in the phenomenon of global knowledge convergence. This occurs when most nations are able to access, share and make decisions based the same core knowledge base.
And while information is being propagated at a massive rate, another meta-process is at work, sifting and winnowing out the useful outcomes required to ensure the most beneficial directions for life. This meta-knowledge comprises the essence of today’s ethics, morality and wisdom.
This is a constraining influence, ensuring the survival of life in the face of potentially extraneous, misleading or lethal data. The implications for society of this evolutionary juggernaut are enormous, as we enter this next and most significant phase towards a more peaceful civilisation.
This evolutionary process operates at a fundamental level. All forms of life categorise events and relationships broadly as either useful- capable of adding to the quality of life or irrelevant or wasteful, potentially reducing its value.
Relationships and knowledge are represented by a web of associative neural connections or patterns, which become firmly embedded not only in the individual’s memory, but in the group’s social consciousness. Such knowledge categories also require continuous feedback and adaptation to remain relevant to the process of winnowing value.
A framework of democratic and human rights provides the basis for good patterns in a society, in which all individuals have an equal opportunity to decide the type of government and society they need; in other words, the social, legal and economic framework for a civil society. In times of war and during periods of economic hardship, there is a major potential for a reduction in social value and pressure for disintegration of a civil society framework.
Transactions between individuals and sub-groups, related to work, health care or food distribution, all need to be mediated by ethical protocols and meta-rules such as ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’. These are closely linked to the core protocols of human rights and are based on the benefits of reciprocity and cooperation.
In all instances the aim of such overriding rules is to ensure that life's potential is provided with the maximum opportunity to develop and avoid social implosion. This is the essence of the 'good' pattern. It allows life, human or otherwise, the opportunity to ratchet forward on its evolutionary path.
Wisdom is therefore a distillation or form of meta-knowledge essential to survival- feedback derived from outcomes of evolution. Ethics and morals are codified wisdom critical to life’s survival. They provide constraints on the destructive impacts of knowledge and extends beyond the taboos and moral codes enshrined in religious models. Ancient tribal wisdom evolved over tens of thousands of years, using the natural evolutionary process of trial and error; learning from those processes that enhance the potential of life and discarding those that don’t. Current wisdom derives from the same process but in a globally advanced age has the potential to be vastly accelerated.
In war, killing is still accepted by both aggressors and defenders as necessary. Overall however, killing is an extremely negative action, resulting in great loss of human potential not only for a society, but for the world as a whole.
In the future, preventative action will be taken to ensure conflict resolution by the world community, before it escalates out of control, resulting in overall convergence to the elimination of wars.
As evolution is a generic process, driving life in whatever form across the universe, it is reasonable to infer that a similar evolutionary process selecting for peace as outlined above, will also be the norm in other worlds.
Any civilisation that responds to our greeting and has the capacity to visit us in the near future would be infinitely further down the evolutionary knowledge path than us and have advanced through this wisdom threshold long ago.
Therefore despite all the Star Wars and intergalactic alien warfare mythologies, there is a very high probability that such a society would function at an advanced level of ethics and morality.
It is therefore time to put aside the same inherent biases that we have applied to other races on this planet in the past and peacefully welcome our intergalactic neighbours in the future.
