Extraterrestrial Treaty

The first nation to engage in a treaty to leverage a learning relationship with an extraterrestrial civilisation shall likely find themselves so vastly overwhelmed by intelligence, technology and (all associated, downstream) complexity that they might later wish they had simply stayed in a cave sharpening the pointy sticks with which humans are so prone to assault each other in company.

A likely first domino to fall here would be that of the utterly atavistic neuroses and bundled pathologies we humans have, as a civilisation, grounded our identities and bellicose differences upon.

I expect that – should these artefacts, entities and systems prove to be “other-worldly” – the future shock to we terrestrial anthropomorphs will be of an order of magnitude so extreme that the human insecurities and identities that have percolated through difference and conflict will be the first to go.

We can not enter into any such relationship as equals but our endemic hubris might lead us to assume such a technical and intellectual fallacy to be justifiably true.

All life and intelligence exists on the same material and logical continuum but the exponential step-changes that lie before us, self-inflected or acquired, will be extremely unorthodox.

Context: ‘Technology surprise’: Are China, Russia ahead of us in UFO retrieval, research?