We all share many similar biological imperatives And these contrived examples because we all evolved on the same planet. Even the worst case scenario of the Dark Forest has many anthropomorphic priors within.
Imagine an intelligent shade of blue. Thank you, Douglas Adams. I suspect we have no idea WTF is out there and I'm not a carbon chauvinist like Carl Sagan was. But I wish I would have lived long enough to find out and I suspect that won't be the case.
There's also a lot of "universals" that people take for granted as universal when it really isn't universal.
Things off the top of my head that humans usually take for granted as "universals":
- Separation of memory and DNA. What if memories were stored in DNA and can be passed between individuals?
- Inability to share memories. What if memories can be passed around like semen and sweat?
- Inability to easily read others' minds. What if kissing/touching someone would share all of each others' thoughts? How would that alien society develop differently?
- Existence of the ego. What if they live in a constant state of ego death, like some humans on certain drugs?
- Separation of the id and the superego. This is... one way to solve an alignment problem, I suppose. Imagine a species which replaced their sense of hunger/sexual craving, with a craving for morality. And they execute creatures like humans when they see a human do anything immoral, such as eating an ice cream when it can reduce your lifespan and thus deprive your children of a parent, or deprive your society of tax dollars.
- And many other possible examples that i can come up with that exists within human "thoughtspace", let alone concepts that do not exist within human thoughtspace
How would you feel if you met an alien species that communicates by raping their children? If that sounds weird to you, what if they can communicate via the DNA in sperm, so it'd be somewhat similar to how human sex transmits information from the human male to the human female?
> - And many other possible examples that i can come up with that exists within human "thoughtspace", let alone concepts that do not exist within human thoughtspace
Unfortunately, I was unable to follow this comment because eating ice cream may be healthy :) Here's a gifted link from the Atlantic which I sure hope is true because now I let myself eat a little ice cream every night. But otherwise, I agree, I cannot imagine what it would be like interacting with another intelligent life. It is also interesting to consider how different any travelers may be from their original colony, if faster than light travel is not possible.
That's a terrible counterargument for aliens having moral systems incompatible with humans... because it applies to the existence of aliens as well!
You might as well as argue "we have no idea if aliens exist, being able to imagine aliens does not mean it's actually possible there are aliens", and you'd be technically right... right until the day we meet aliens.
Your line of thought is tantamount to "one should just close your eyes and cover your ears" towards the possibilities in this universe.
Note, I am not a conspiracy theorist and do not believe aliens have visited earth and abducted people or something stupid. But I find it extremely stupid to assume aliens would have familiar moral and ethical systems compared to humans, considering how extremely different human beings already are, and at least humans are all mostly similar! This is similar to european explorers being confused at matriarchal family systems when they meet some random tribe. If some humans cannot even wrap their head around matriarchy, how naive would it be to assume that the average human could be comfortable with alien ethics?
To use an example that a regular human would be familiar with: what if the aliens knew math and physics... and were basically ultra-nazis, and very happy to just subjugate you because "our nazi philosophy says that we are superior to everyone else and you are inferior to them" and put you in concentration camps as factory labor for their war machine? You have your own reasons for studying science and math, but what if their entire reason for studying science and math was to build rockets to kill others?
This seems extremely likely, actually! The vast majority of human history has been filled with autocratic governments that centralized power, not free democracies. From the sample size that we have in history, most of the time when the natives meet a stronger scientific power... has not gone well for the natives. What makes you think it will be any different if you meet an alien?
What makes you think just knowing math and physics means that the intelligent alien would be "good" by modern human standards?
And this is just standard boring political talk! We understand that from human politics! What if it's STEM-y and the aliens decide to say "we are killing all of you and slicing all of you into thin slices to scan, in order to scan you into training a LLM"? That sentence would not even be in human thoughtspace 10 years ago! There's almost certainly an even weirder concept that humans today do not have words for, which may be a strong motivation for aliens or even their primary motivation!
I am not an english major, by the way. I am a typical engineer with a strong STEM background, who has happened to have absorbed enough sci-fi concepts through osmosis. I do not consider it likely that we will meet aliens in our lifetime, but I do not expect aliens to follow modern human standards of behavior.
Imagine an intelligent shade of blue. Thank you, Douglas Adams. I suspect we have no idea WTF is out there and I'm not a carbon chauvinist like Carl Sagan was. But I wish I would have lived long enough to find out and I suspect that won't be the case.