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236 Fears Astronomer Eric Chaisson drew a sharper distinction between the remote and direct forms of encountering extraterrestrials. Electromagnetic contact probably will have a negligible effect on us, but physical contact probably will be harmful. If competition is part of any complex being’s methodology, they might dominate us. One need not assume an overtly hostile posture on their part. Dominance is likely to be the natural stance of any advanced life-form; advanced life will tend to control other life. Chaisson concluded that physical contact could lead to a neo-Darwinian subjugation of our culture by theirs.” The optimistic scenario only works if we are free to accept or reject the effects of contact, historian McNeill warned. If we have no choice in the matter—especially in the case of direct physical confrontation— the end of human civilization as we have known it would become an expected consequence. Societies with inferior technology have invariably collapsed when confronted with a more advanced technical culture. There may be a kind of natural selection among societies, McNeill suggested: Only the fittest can survive. We know of an Earthly example, 30 thousand years in our past. The Neanderthals succumbed because, in anthropologist Richard Klein’s analysis, they wielded culture less effectively than modern humans. Huntington, addressing the unilateral impact of Western civilization on all others, found that the distribution of cultures reflects the distribution of power.” Allen Tough challenged these gloomy perspectives. If contact occurs without “aggression,” the less powerful culture often survives and even prospers. Yet, we know that powerful societies motivated by what they believe to be the best of intentions can damage others. Even if there is no threat of violence, the human experience suggests that a civilization’s expansion of power has almost always involved its using that power to extend its values, practices, and institutions to other societies.* Idealistic cultural emissaries—particularly missionaries—can have a devastating effect. Author and historian Alan Moorhead described classic examples in his book The Fatal Impact, about the consequences of Europeans impinging on less powerful societies in the South Pacific. In the case of Tahiti, the impact was not immediate; the Tahitians initially welcomed the English and were sorry to see them go. Cultural shocks accumulated over time. Captain Cook was aware of the trauma that his visits might cause the Tahitians. “It would have been far better for these poor people never to have known our superiority in the accommodations and arts that make life comfortable,” he wrote, “than after once knowing it, so be again left and abandoned in their original incapacity of improvement. Indeed they cannot be restored to that happy mediocrity in which they lived before we discov- ered them.””?°