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300 In the case of our own planet, biologists have documented a basic fact: selfless generosity occurs less often and with decreasing intensity as indi- viduals grow more distantly related. Biological and social evolution have not selected the most altruistic. This fall-off, warned Brin, bodes ill for the likelihood of interstellar altruism. Shostak acknowledged that when it comes to interactions between extraterrestrials and humans, the aliens will have little biological reason to be altruistic, only intellectual ones.' What if more advanced extraterrestrials are postbiological, machine intelligences? Some may have freed themselves entirely from their genetic past. Nonbiological aliens, feeling no kinship with us, might be uncon- cerned about our survival. Few of us show altruism toward Humankind’s nearest relatives, the chimpanzees. Nor do researchers find much altruism among the chimps themselves; they are indifferent to the welfare of unrelated group members. Cooperative behavior in nonhuman primates is virtually never extended to unfamiliar individuals.“ We have elevated altruism from a rare phenomenon to an ideal, argued Brin—something to be striven toward. It is entirely by these recent higher standards that we now project a higher level of altruism upon those we hope to find who are more advanced than ourselves. If we are capable of rationalizing and even exalting brutally unaltruistic behavior, might advanced extraterrestrials be capable of something similar?’ Cooperation within a group can make that group more lethally aggres- sive in its dealings with outsiders, Paul Seabright warned. This is the dark side of reciprocity.’ Goodbye, Golden Rule Even the Golden Rule has been questioned. Lawyer Andrew Haley, in his seminal book Space Law and Government, argued that doing to aliens what we would have done to ourselves could be disastrous for the other species. Consider the sad fate of a captive killer whale returned to the wild. The animal, accustomed to being fed and cared for by its human han- dlers, stayed close to their installation until it prematurely died. “It is a classic anthropomorphic fallacy,” declared psychology professor Clive Wynne, “to believe that an animal’s best interests are whatever a human would desire under similar circumstances.”'””’ An alien species which assumes that it knows what is good for us may be equally wrong. MacVey cautioned us about seeking altruistic intervention from above. It is not unpleasant to envisage some advanced, humane, and cultured race descending upon our perplexed world and putting it to rights, to contem- plate the guiding hand of an elder brother from the stars, a mind knowing all the dangers, all the pitfalls—and all the answers. Would it work out that Assumptions: After Contact