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304 They know of only aggressive, hostile organisms and had never observed a peaceful, friendly form of life and so could not conceive of one. —Science fiction writer Edward Grendon, 1951!4 Contact optimists often assume that more advanced extraterrestrials will treat us benignly. Technologically superior aliens, many argue, will have evolved past the warlike behavior we have seen in our own species. Sagan and Newman claimed that civilizations that do not self-destruct are “preadapted” to live with other groups in mutual respect. The only societies long-lived enough to perform significant colonization of the Galaxy are precisely those least likely to engage in aggressive galactic imperialism. Any interstellar civilization with a lifetime approaching Galaxy-crossing time will have long before selected itself away from aggres- sive designs.'° “SETI is a screening mechanism,” Horowitz asserted. “Civilizations that don’t acquire the wisdom to control war will destroy themselves long before they can take to space, so the ones who are trying to contact you will be, by definition, no longer menacing.”!”° Matloff, Schenkel, and Marchan took an even more optimistic position: It should be assumed that extraterrestrial intelligence is benign, and that contact would be highly beneficial to Humankind (emphasis added). Mac- Gowan and Ordway were more cautious: “Cooperation and nonviolence rather than competition are probably the general mode of extrasolar social life; warfare and violence are hopefully unknown’ (emphasis added).'”’ The human example provides no support for such optimistic statements. Noting the prediction that a spacefaring society capable of crossing inter- stellar distances would be comprised of wise and benign beings, Stern commented that the same might have been said of Europeans during the Renaissance period of exploration, when ocean voyages were on par with today’s exploration of space.'** Yet, European conquerors often behaved ruthlessly toward conquered peoples. Extrasolar intelligent beings, like us, may have had violent pasts, perhaps ascending the slippery slope from barbarism to civilization several times. Their histories may have instilled in them a deep concern for security. A species that had experienced nothing but hostility in its relations with others, perhaps resulting in conflict, would be predisposed to assume the worst. A Mirror Image. One of the things that we tend to forget in our thinking about contact is how extraterrestrials might react to discovering us. If they have had bad experiences with earlier contacts, they might—at least until they acquired additional information—regard us as a potential dhennd threat. Assumptions: After Contact Technologically Advanced Means Benign