I’m more concerned that the “other species” will just be us splintering into the following four groups. “Genetic Purists” that will refuse any sort of genetic or technological advancement. The Technophiles that will accept any form of genetic or cybernetic advancement. The Cyborgs that will accept only cybernetic advancements. Finally, The Neo-Humans that will only accept genetic advancements.
Wonderful. We now have only 4 possible categories of future humans. This simplifies things enormously, if, and only if, we reject the rest of our historical divisions.
If such a scenario did come to pass, I would hope that humanity as a whole is advanced enough to call out the bigots and racists, so as to shut down any division in the species. I know that we have it in us, we literally have thousands of years of prehistory that is telling us that cooperation on the grand scale is how we started.
Racism is a fairly modern concept. It was invented in Portugal in the late 1500s to early 1600s to justify the North American slave trade, because some people were asking how that could be justified under the teachings of The Christ that said that we all are equal. Racism as we know it is barely 400 years old.
I hope that as we progress we will return to the ideals of equality and democracy.
I know this is about humanity, not another species, but I fear that if this isn’t fixed before we meet another species we will inadvertently, and with the best intentions be colonizing assholes yet again.
We, the human species, have taken notice of your civilization. We here by request that you relocate it to the New York sewer system to fulfill our Futurama prophecy.
I’m not sure another civizilation is possible on Earth within our lifetime. Look what we’re doing to the planet. Even if some species did evolve to become highly intelligent like our ancestors, humans would put them in a lab somewhere to study long before a civilization has a chance to develop.
I definitely understand this sentiment being expressed across the comments here, however the aim of the question is to try to encourage one to imagine a little more, try to go at the idea with a little more idealism.
That’s why I framed it as, how would you like, rather than how do you think a new civilization would be approached. A slight difference, and although both require thought, the latter grounds the question more than the former, at least to my mind.
I think something to consider is the sheer timescale that evolving civilization implies, evolution takes a very long time, and as far as we know nothing else on earth quite is as smart as humans. That means that another species on earth developing civilization implies one of three things:
That we will have been interacting in some form with their ancestors as they evolve intelligence for a very long time, and so their civilization will have evolved with and probably around ours, rather than completely separately, meaning that they probably won’t be a separate civilization so much as we’d have a shared one, or at least a loosely connected one. (Like if over the next several thousand years, some octopus was to slowly get smarter and eventually evolve to civilization, they’d do so in an ocean littered with human artifacts and shaped by human activity, and they might even need some of this stuff in some way, like maybe they develop metalworking by shaping bits of metal in shipwrecks and garbage rather than extracting it from rocks for example.)
That they already were intelligent in a way similar to humans, with language and other such things needed to develop civilization, without us knowing, but simply had not invented it yet (like humans were until around 10000 years or so ago, most of our history as a species). In this case, I don’t think just leaving them to their own devices without contact is a great idea, because they’ll probably have an extremely bad view of humans (we don’t tend to treat wild animals all that well, and especially the more intelligent ones, which we have often hunted for food or to remove competition, and they’re probably going to have a whole lot of stories and oral history about us as a result.) Since they haven’t been able to really do much in retaliation (to the point we didn’t even recognize them trying), they’ll probably think of us less as just rivals and more like unstoppable monsters to be avoided at all costs. This kind of view is basically setting us up for conflict with them later on, and will take a lot of work to address given how ingrained it probably is with their culture, so both communication and helping them out with early civilization problems that we’ve already solved is probably a good idea for peaceful relations later.
Finally, the third possibly is that they are able to suddenly become intelligent and develop civilization because we made them that way, ie, they’re either AIs of some sort, or an intelligent species we engineered, or an existing species like dolphins or such who’s intelligence we have artificially enhanced (in science fiction this is often called uplifting). In this case, their civilization is intrinsically linked with ours from the start, and if they happen to need some of our technology to exist (ie, like machines need manufacturing equipment to make more of themselves, or maybe an artificially enhanced creature needs some kind of drug to get the intelligence enhancing effect or something) then making their own civilization without help from ours in at least giving them that tech isn’t even possible. It’s possible they might still want to go out and found their own government or something, but such a thing is less like a wholely separate civilization and more like just a new country, at least at first, and so probably should be treated as such.
I’d like to see us study them from a distance, find out what’s different about them from us, and consider what could be improved about our civilization.
Well, robot means (originally meant?) something a bit different in Czech. As I understand it, robots were basically indentured servants/ slaves. It means something like “one who doesn’t think.” At least that is if all the Isaac Asimov videos I’ve watched are correct.
It seems like human civilizations are having trouble coexisting, so I don’t see how we could, with an other species, unless it was profitable for us in one way or another.(sadly)
Let only certain people interact with them who agree to not drag their culture into matters. Some might say dolphins are a living proto-example of this. Some interaction can be good, but then there’s hypercultural exchanges we have with them. And then there will be interspecies scars that will resonate forever. Handle them similar to Antarctica.
In practical terms, they would have to live either underwater or underground for the real estate. Underwater, it would either be some variety of octopus, which we would make an enemy of almost immediately, or a cetacean, which would be poached to extinction within a few years. Leave the octopus alone, approach the mammal and advise them to swim the fuck away. Quickly. I’m not sure what might be stewing underground and I’m not sure I’d want to know.
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