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303 A common implicit assumption in optimistic contact scenarios is that a technologically superior civilization will treat us as equals, even if they know that we are far less advanced. Optimists expect extraterrestrials to consider us their wards rather than their inferiors. Yet, a hallmark of complex societies is the inequality of their people.’ In contact with more advanced extraterrestrials, we might be seen as barbarians. In our own history, separate codes have governed behavior toward those who are like us and inferiors who are not. Our ancestors defined their own groups as human and ascribed varying degrees of beastliness to those outside them, according to historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto. Indian, Greek, and Chinese texts mentioned deficient or imperfect categories within our species, including women and barbarians.'!” According to Plutarch, Aristotle advised Alexander the Great to treat only Greeks as human beings and to look upon all the other peoples he conquered as either animals or plants. Even today, African pygmies need protection from cannibal neighbors who hunt them with impunity because they consider pygmies to be a subhuman species.'”° A Thought Experiment. Imagine that some of the species of hominid that once shared the Earth with Homo sapiens survived into our own time. If we were in daily contact with Neanderthals or with a population of Homo habilis, how would we treat them? As equals, as anthropological subjects, or as apes? If many civilizations exist in our galaxy, they are likely to be wildly unequal. Sagan acknowledged that “there is almost no chance that two galactic civilizations will interact at the same level. In any confronta- feate the seb a 9 Mme ett AS tion, one will always utterly dominate the other.” Dominance may be a natural—even inevitable—stance of any advanced life-form, Harrison and Dick recognized; it may be a functional necessity for society and culture.'*! Advanced extraterrestrial societies will have some sort of a hierarchy. Harrison saw positive trends, asserting that human societies have been shifting away from authoritarian forms of government and toward democ- racies. Others argue that growing disparities in economic power among humans are re-creating dominance in another form. David Christian, in his overview of “big history,” concluded that social and economic trends over the past 5000 years offer little hope for a significant reduction in eco- nomic and political inequality. On the contrary, they suggest that gradients of wealth will get steeper and that differences between the weakest and most powerful will grow.'”7 The ancient Greek historian Thucydides, commenting on the Pelopon- nesian Wars, put it bluntly. Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.’ They Will Treat Us Fairly