In a recent paper in The International Journal of Astrobiology, bioethicists Konrad Szocik of Yale University and Rakhat Abylkasymova, an independent researcher, argue that could actually be a good thing for humanity. And it’s a more plausible scenario than you might think.
What’s New – Our first contact with intelligent aliens might find us massively outclassed in the technology department and perhaps in social development and raw intellect, too. But if that first contact ever happens, Szocik and Abylkasymova say we should be prepared for another plot twist: the aliens may be so wildly different from us that they don’t even realize that we’re sentient, too.
“We were interested in the way people think about extraterrestrial intelligence, especially what people imagine such an extraterrestrial intelligence – if it existed and knew of our existence – would imagine us to be,” Szocik and Abylkasymova tell Inverse.
Most of us — laypeople and SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) researchers alike — tend to assume that any species capable of building spacecraft and traveling between star systems will think more or less like us: similar logic, similar motivations and values, and a similar range of emotions. But, Szocik and Abylkasymova argue, there’s no real reason that has to be the case, especially for a (hypothetical) species that evolved in another world. Instead of just a more advanced version of ourselves, spacefaring aliens might turn out to be completely unfathomable to us — and vice versa.
In their recent paper, Szocik and Abylkasymova imagine how our first contact with intelligent extraterrestrials might play out if they didn’t recognize that they’d found intelligent life here on Earth.
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