I like a lot of what you say here, but I feel like the problem in the comparison with the conquests of the Mongols, Arabs, etc. -- apart from the equation of contact with a novel culture with being conquered by one -- is that those were situations of humans encountering other humans, so naturally it led to some expansion of the possibilities of how to live as a human. The aliens are by definition not human, so in order for this to create a dilemma they would have to be *just human enough* for people to somehow recognize them as peers, and therefore make use feel like they reflect on us somehow. I'm not sure where that line would be, but I don't think that tool using would be it; the differences that you bring up are moral ones, not technical ones, which is why we seem to live with some tool-using animals and robots without worrying about their morals. It does seem like "They act like I wouldn't, but they're not human" is always there as an escape hatch, because we've basically always done that with animals.
Yes, I think that’s fair. Obviously there’s no good comparison to be made because nothing like it has ever happened in human history. The closest we come is to wildly unexpected cultural intrusions — the Byzantines had no idea that Islam was coming, nor the Abbasid Caliphate that the Mongols were coming, nor the Aztecs that Spain was coming. I’m not sure “expansion of the possibilities of how to live as a human” is precisely how I would describe those encounters, but you’re also correct that conquest is not the only model for how such an encounter might go with space-faring aliens.
But I agree that we might find a species of space-faring crabs completely unintelligible — indeed, I said as much myself. I doubt we’d be able to shrug their existence off as easily as we do animals that can’t threaten us or machines we control, though.
It's whether they can threaten us that's the dispositive question, isn't it? What surprised the Byzantines about Muslims wasn't so much what they believed, which resembled previous Christian heresies, but that they built a rival empire on it. Whatever weirdness the aliens believe would, I expect, matter mostly to the extent that it seems to give them an advantage. I mean, I think that would matter to most people--I agree with you that the philosophical questions are interesting, but in my experience most people are more pragmatic. If the aliens do some equivalent to "we never set foot on that mountain because we thought the gods would curse us, but they've dug a mine in it and gotten powerful and rich" that could certainly shake things up.
I like a lot of what you say here, but I feel like the problem in the comparison with the conquests of the Mongols, Arabs, etc. -- apart from the equation of contact with a novel culture with being conquered by one -- is that those were situations of humans encountering other humans, so naturally it led to some expansion of the possibilities of how to live as a human. The aliens are by definition not human, so in order for this to create a dilemma they would have to be *just human enough* for people to somehow recognize them as peers, and therefore make use feel like they reflect on us somehow. I'm not sure where that line would be, but I don't think that tool using would be it; the differences that you bring up are moral ones, not technical ones, which is why we seem to live with some tool-using animals and robots without worrying about their morals. It does seem like "They act like I wouldn't, but they're not human" is always there as an escape hatch, because we've basically always done that with animals.
Yes, I think that’s fair. Obviously there’s no good comparison to be made because nothing like it has ever happened in human history. The closest we come is to wildly unexpected cultural intrusions — the Byzantines had no idea that Islam was coming, nor the Abbasid Caliphate that the Mongols were coming, nor the Aztecs that Spain was coming. I’m not sure “expansion of the possibilities of how to live as a human” is precisely how I would describe those encounters, but you’re also correct that conquest is not the only model for how such an encounter might go with space-faring aliens.
But I agree that we might find a species of space-faring crabs completely unintelligible — indeed, I said as much myself. I doubt we’d be able to shrug their existence off as easily as we do animals that can’t threaten us or machines we control, though.
It's whether they can threaten us that's the dispositive question, isn't it? What surprised the Byzantines about Muslims wasn't so much what they believed, which resembled previous Christian heresies, but that they built a rival empire on it. Whatever weirdness the aliens believe would, I expect, matter mostly to the extent that it seems to give them an advantage. I mean, I think that would matter to most people--I agree with you that the philosophical questions are interesting, but in my experience most people are more pragmatic. If the aliens do some equivalent to "we never set foot on that mountain because we thought the gods would curse us, but they've dug a mine in it and gotten powerful and rich" that could certainly shake things up.