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233 torn from our hands and we would, as a tearful old medicine man once said to me, find ourselves ‘without dreams, that is, we would find our intel- lectual and spiritual aspirations so outmoded as to leave us completely paralyzed.” White wondered if contact would provoke a new mental illness that resembled manic depression on a grand scale.’ Others have been more ambivalent about the shock of contact. On the one hand, proposed Davies, the discovery that humans were not the pin- nacle of evolutionary advance might serve to make people feel demoral- ized, marginalized, and inferior. On the other hand, the knowledge of what is attainable through continued progress would surely be exhilarating and inspiring. Edelson, too, thought that contact with a more technologically advanced society could either encourage us in the sense of knowing what can be done or discourage us in the sense of realizing how technologically backward we are.* Drake was more optimistic. “Some eminent people say it will be terribly depressing, that we’ll feel ignorant, and they predict a planet-wide inferior- ity complex. My take is that it would have the opposite effect. It could motivate us to think that if we worked hard we could be as good as them, motivate us to make progress much more quickly than we are.” “We all have been exposed to minds and accomplishments greater than our own,” he argued. “The result is more often inspiration rather than depression.” After examining historical analogs, the social implications group pro- posed a different outcome. Like the medieval philosophers, we may acquire a worshipful respect for a wisdom more ancient than ours, without knowing whether it constitutes the long-sought “objective knowledge” that will propel the human species into a new age or a wisdom so superior that it will leave no scope for human endeavor. Like those philosophers, who felt intellectually inferior to the Arabs at first encounter but grew ever more arrogant as they mastered their wisdom, we may come to challenge extra- terrestrials who undertake our education.”® The violent clash of Europeans and Aztecs is as close as mankind has ever come to an encounter with an alien world. Two advanced societies, each dominant in its own universe and ignorant of the other, were utterly changed the moment they collided. From that instant, both sides knew that only one of their worlds would survive. —New York Times correspondent Anthony De Palma, 2001" We need not be afraid of interstellar contact, for unlike the primitive civili- zations on Earth which came in contact with more advanced technological societies, we would not be forced to obey—we would only receive information. 107412 Cultural Shock Cultural Shock —Frank Drake, 1976”