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234 Fears Human history is littered with examples of cultural shock—of societies that were demoralized, destroyed or absorbed by other civilizations. Would an encounter with superior aliens disorient our thinking, diminish our achievements, wreck our confidence? The first widely quoted study addressing the cultural consequences of contact with extraterrestrials was done by the Brookings Institution for NASA in 1960. The Brookings experts, who did not rule out direct contact, observed that “anthropological files contain many examples of societies, sure of their place in the universe, which have disintegrated when they have had to associate with previously unfamiliar societies espousing different ideas and different life ways; others that survived such an experience usually did so by paying the price of changes in values and attitudes and behavior.”!* First, let’s consider the remote contact scenario. Morrison and Oliver believed that there would be no culture shock from detecting the first alien signal, which probably would be a beacon. What if a later signal were information-rich? Morrison admitted that the impact could be significant if extraterrestrial wisdom is totally different from what we consider the conventional wisdom here, although he foresaw that the impact would be slowly and soberly filtered through scholars."* Sagan spoke on both sides of this issue. “The cultural shock from the content of the message is likely, in the short run, to be small,” he wrote in 1973. He responded more cautiously a decade later, saying “there is a sig- nificant potential for culture shock.” Others believe that the effect of high-information contact would be overwhelming even without any visits. If a superior civilization made their store of knowledge available to us, Kuiper and Morris warned, that would abort our further development. Musso foresaw that introducing alien tech- nology into our society would be an event very similar to a direct contact, which on Earth has almost always been destructive for the less advanced culture.'® The Urge to Merge At Byurakan, Von Hoerner argued that “if a Stone Age culture comes into contact with us, this means absolutely the end of that Stone Age culture ...if we come in contact with some superior civilization, this again would mean the end of our civilization. ... Our period of culture would be finished and we would merge into a larger interstellar culture.” Kardashev predicted that the two civilizations would combine to form one. “This means that we disappear, because we conserve only our historical past.” Lee, too, thought that our destinies would merge with that of the more powerful civilization; diffusion preempts invention.