[stcredzero]

Charles Pellegrino/George Zebrowski covers this in _The Killing Star_ (1995). They reason as follows:

  1. Any species will place its own survival before that of a different species.
  2. Any species that has made it to the top on its planet of origin will be 
     intelligent, alert, aggressive, and ruthless when necessary.
  3. They will assume that the first two rules apply to us.

So any starfaring species might well destroy another starfaring species -- immediately. In _The Killing Star_ the aliens do so at the first opportunity with high-powered relativistic bombardment. The power that they use dwarfs that generated by asteroid impacts and past mass extictions. They blanket the entire hemisphere of planets with relativistic projectiles! The earth is taken out entirely in just two shots.

http://sites.inka.de/mips/reviews/TheKillingStar.html

[ericb]

It's an interesting theory, but advanced civilization is built on collaboration, not defection (aggression). Most things that lead to advances in civilization are based on collaboration: science, openness, sharing knowledge, rule of law, free trade, contracts.

I would argue the exact opposite--any species that makes it to the top of the food chain will likely have collaboration ingrained in their nature, and the more advanced, the greater their collaborative nature will be.

[stcredzero]

Yes, but we tend to collaborate with members of our own species and enslave/butcher/experiment on other species. Even our relationships with dogs and other family pets can be highly unequal and sometimes downright disturbing. (Treating them as chattel, "putting them to sleep" when it's more convenient to do so.) So this counts against your position in two ways: 1) our only data point indicates that interspecies collaboration is likely to be less than cozy 2) others might observe our treatment of other species and use that to evaluate our potential for hostility.

Also, our record with regards to polluting our own environment doesn't recommend us highly as "good citizens of the galaxy." (This was brought up as a possibility in David Brin's Sundiver series.)

And this isn't even considering the vast differences in culture and even basic mental models there will likely be. It's far from a sure bet that this openness will extend to us.

Also, one can readily imagine how a "innocuous" act from the point of view of one species might be considered a greivous crime by another. (The Ender's Game books are one example.)

[ericb]

I don't think we're highly advanced, so we have 0 data points from a highly advanced species.

Collaboration leads to advancement and that trend applies to higher levels of advancement than we are at. For example, imagine there was no war. Trillions of dollars of economic activity could instead be directed toward, say, curing cancer. The more collaborative a society, the farther and faster it can advance. Learning from another species (thanks for the cool warp drive tips, Xarcon!) is a type of collaboration that offers benefits that a species doesn't get following the approach in the parent post. So, as a matter of policy, extending the openness to other species can be sound strategy.

The rest of what you're saying is not really related to my argument, which was focused solely on the "personality" of highly advanced species.

[stcredzero]

How many data points do you have for saying we're not "highly advanced?" I should not have said "highly advanced" and should just have said "sentient interstellar" instead. My discussion is about the future of humanity, not the present day. We are not quite even space-faring yet.

Learning from another species' technology is likely to be a largely one-way transaction. Instead of trading warp drive tips, it's much more likely that the "Xarcon" will have warp drive and we will not. (Or vice-versa.) In any case, if the other side has things like antimatter fueled starships, they may still have the potential to wipe out the other civilization, or at least preemptively cause huge damage to it. Why would another intelligent species give up a potential technological advantage without first assuring the safety of their own species? Of course, there are many ways of assuring such safety. In the case of practical warp drive, one way of doing this would be to withhold warp technology and use the intervening time to propagate your own species. Another option might be to absorb the less advanced species into some sort of confederation. Actually, a really savvy species would do both!

[Tichy]

I'd like to believe in friendly aliens, but I changed my expectations since I read "Collapse". I don't recall if there were in fact any friendly encounters, but for the most part I remember from the book that newly discovered human populations were destroyed by the explorers from other countries.

There is also at least one example of a pacifist society that was completely butchered when they were discovered by less pacifist people, even though they gave those people a friendly welcome.

[LPTS]

Most advances are first military advances.

Canned food, sanitation, nuclear power, computers, all first developed in a wartime capacity

[shawndrost]

About 2: they might simply be capable of aggression or ruthlessness, ie highly elastic. I would argue that is a better description of humans, and more speculatively, a more likely route towards species success.