Ethics of Interfering with Alien Life

Just random musings of, if humanity managed to develop interstellar travel and found alien life on other worlds, what would be the ethical boundaries for interference/influence?

For example, if we were to find a planet that had life that had yet to reach the point of starting to develop primitive societies, and we also detected an extinction level asteroid about to collide with that planet, should we step in and redirect or destroy that asteroid? Or do we allow it to strike, in the knowledge that humanity's own evolution involved an asteroid wiping out the previous order of life?

If that life is developed, with societies, laws, and customs, do we step in if we extrapolate that they are on a path to self-destruction? If we do decide to make contact, do we keep it to just that? Do we establish regular relations? Do we attempt to influence their culture and customs or try to let them develop as naturally as possible, even if the direction they're developing in may be morally repugnant to us, ie sacrificing children or the like?

Edited by danime91 on Aug 6th 2019 at 1:09:27 AM

The astonishing number of predicates to this query... My head is spinning wondering how humans have gotten to the point where they can flit around the cosmos discovering alien life and deciding whether to interfere with it or not. Okay, fine, let's postulate a standard Space Opera setting where people are basically people as they are now, but we have FTL and Casual Interstellar Travel and whatnot.

Should we deflect an asteroid so the primitive life isn't obliterated? I'd say probably. It's not like they'll ever know.

Should we interfere with their societies? Probably not. Playing God has never worked out well for us in the past.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 6th 2019 at 4:25:52 AM

This sounds like a reverse Fermi Paradox of sorts. Some sort of Prime Directive also appears to be in the cards.

Which would make sense if humanity becomes a spacefaring race that is either one of few, the only one out there or has made for itself a manifest destiny of being the leader of the galaxy/universe in which case we became the stewards and custodians of the galaxy and all life in it thus it becomes our duty to protect life even if it is unaware of us.

The way I see it, if the the lifeforms are primative but sapient then stopping the asteroid would be the morally right thing to do but we should not interfere in their societal development unless the extinction of that species is a likely outcome.

If an asteroid is heading to a planet with just animal life on it then I'd gather as many specimens as I could then just let nature take it's course.

Any successful ethical system has to accommodate self interest. If there is a great deal to be gained by exploiting the resources of the planet, then some accommodation of human economic activity must be made (if you don't provide an ethical framework for such activity, then you are inviting an "anything goes" ethos that will end being far worse for the natives).

The same reasoning applies for that as it does for a straight-up invasion: if you're looking for resources, there is absolutely no need to go after a life-bearing world. The galaxy has resources just lying around for the taking on trillions of lifeless rocks.

If you're looking for a biosphere that people can live on, however... that's a little different, and at that point how are we any better than any other sci-fi space conqueror, if we displace a sapient (or near-sapient) species in the process? We don't like to imagine ourselves as the villains, but the aliens certainly would!

I suppose self-interest might dictate that humans become the galactic conquerors that we portray as the villains in our own stories.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 7th 2019 at 9:44:12 AM

For straight up raw resources, yeah, sure, asteroid mining and stuff will always be easier, but there's a reason biomedical and pharmaceutical companies have so much interest in rainforests and other diverse biomes. Not to mention possible tourism if space travel is casual enough, as well as aforementioned seeking out habitable planets to colonize. And then there's the question of uplift. Would it be ethical to take a random alien species (or even a native Earth species) and artificially uplift them to full human-level sapience, even if we are planning to make them full citizens afterward?

I suppose this question is being asked in the framework of humanity (or really any species, really, it's more of a general ethics question than a specifically humanocentric one) being one of the first or the only spacefaring race around. I'd assume that if there were more there would be a sort of intergalactic community with laws already in place concerning this kind of thing.

The novel 2001 postulates that there is a species of Sufficiently Advanced Aliens who beat everyone else to space and roam the galaxy looking for life-bearing worlds with proto-intelligent species. Finding those, they "bootstrap" them — give them a kick towards full sapience. They do this because they think that intelligent life is the most important thing regardless of what form it takes, but they try to interfere as little as possible with the exact form that life takes.

The book then speculates that they periodically have to "weed" species that become malignant, but we don't see that happening directly.

Humanity could become such a Precursor race.

Fascinating. All I know is the movie. Would be interesting if the novel had taken it farther and actually went into how that Precursor race interacted with the uplifted races afterward. Like, did they come to them and say "Hi, welcome to the galactic community!" and invite them into a federation, did they just leave them alone to continue to develop on their own and seek out the Precursors if they wished?

I believe that is the background to the Stargate TV series.

Self-interest and benevolence are not binary—fortunately, or there would be nothing to choose between Western democracies and authoritarian dictatorships. Instead I think any sustainable ethics system will have to try to balance the two in a way that allows all parties to benefit somehow. This is the ethical framework Adam Smith gave to economic activity, for instance. A framework for dealing with sapient and near-sapient alien races will have to set the parameters for benefiting ourselves in our interactions with them. How should the costs and benefits of inter-species interaction play out? It's not unlike the debate between realists and idealists regarding American foreign policy.

No, in fact the Precursors get so advanced and powerful that they transcend physical bodies and live on as Energy Beings, and this evolution has happened long before humans became spacefaring. What they do is leave guideposts so that extraordinary representatives of the species they bootstrap can find them and be transported to a place where they are transformed into lesser versions of the aliens themselves, to act as a sort of watchdog/intermediary to their own species.

They do communicate with humans but only minimally. They aren't interested in adopting us into their "federation", although a comparison is made to zoo animals or pets.

Edited to add: A novel that I've read that explores the Sufficiently Advanced Alien idea from the flip perspective (humanity as the godlike super-species) is Alan Dean Foster's Design for Great-Day.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 8th 2019 at 11:36:46 AM