[pigpop]

I don't see why an intelligent alien species would have similar values to us. It would depend entirely on their social organization so unless they were the exact equivalent of us evolutionarily (omnivorous, sexually dimorphic, social, bipedal, terrestrial, etc.) they would value the lives, property, territory and status of their own kind and other animals very differently.

A race of aquatic arthropods could be mostly solitary, cannibalistic and regard age and size as primary dominance characteristics and their notion of property rights might depend entirely on whether they can eat the owner of said property, though sublimated through some complex set of social rules and protocols. Maybe the CEO of a company only has to offer a single leg to be eaten during a hostile takeover.

[slfnflctd]

I see someone else recently read Children of Strife.

Damn, I really enjoyed that book. Best of the series so far, in my opinion.

[pigpop]

Actually I haven't but I'll check it out.

[throwaway676712]

A necessary condition for the emergence of civilization (in its broadest sense, as in the collectively organized reshaping of one's living environment for one's purposes) is a basic level of trust and cooperation.

Humans are not naturally prone to bouts of violence like other species and human societies do not tolerate impulsive violence in adults. Instead, the vast majority of human-on-human violence is deliberate: people plan, carefully and rationally, the killing of their fellow human beings in order to achieve their goals. This is known as 'war'. This is very rare among species, and more violent species cannot form complex societies at scale, despite being also quite smart in some cases (chimps, octopuses).

We even unconsciously internalized this idea to some degree, since most people are comfortable with the idea of militaries existing and being necessary but also agree that solitary murderous psychopaths should be put in prison.

[pigpop]

>Humans are not naturally prone to bouts of violence like other species

That... does not check out. There are plenty of violent people, I've met many.

[throwaway676712]

The key part is like other species and human societies do not tolerate impulsive violence in adults. All societies have rules, customs and/or arbitrage methods to regulate violence and the vast majority of people definitionally abide by them (otherwise there wouldn't be much of a society to begin with). And the vast majority of violence dealt among humans is not impulsive but deliberate (war, feuds, etc.). This is not incompatible with many people having a capacity for violence, only it's usually channeled through these deliberate methods and the extra impulsive outbursts tend to be punished.

[altmanaltman]

I mean could a race of aquatic arthropods ever organize in scale enough to be a species that can travel light years and invade others? Wouldn't they just eat each other and never have any need to build a community or to colonize space?

We need to have some baseline for what we consider as "intelligent species" in this context and most intelligent species will need to have a system where they can pool their resources together towards something in a sustained social manner. This rules out a lot of social patterns such as beings that are solitary, canibalisitc and hell bent of eating each other.

[pigpop]

If you showed me a primate and I didn't have any knowledge of the existence of humans and then asked the same thing of them I'd also have to get creative about how they may evolve to be an intelligent society.