To the delight of our diplomatic delegation,
the aliens of the Gastronomy Sector invited them to a celebratory feast for our newly
signed treaty, with the ambassador as the guest of honor, so they may consume his wisdom. The delegation’s translator was later fired. So today we continue our look at alien civilizations
by contemplating the notion of crazy aliens, but unlike our previous look at Stupid Aliens,
this time we are not just discussing behaviors that should not exist, but ones which probably
do. Once again we will look at some popular fictional
examples to help illustrate the point. We don’t have any actual aliens to look
at and examples help, even if you subscribe to the notion that aliens visit Earth a lot
you’d have to agree there are not any convenient published papers on their physiology and psychology
lying around on for us to analyze, whereas many of the fictional examples we will look
at today like the Klingons have whole books devoted to them. That said they obviously are fictional and
we are trying to contemplate the real deal, so if you’re a fan of these and you feel
like I’ve misportrayed them or left out a piece a proper canon, do keep in mind I’m
aiming for the common perception of them so I can use that as a familiar example, this
is not a review of those works and also it will contain spoilers in some cases. Okay, when we looked at Stupid Aliens we were
essentially dispelling flawed notions about alien civilizations we get from fiction. There probably are some pretty stupid aliens
out there just as there are stupid humans, but we would not actually expect technological
civilizations to engage in overtly stupid behaviors without some additional reason,
because the capacity for logic and reason is one of the key things which separates intelligence
from higher-intelligence. However behind any logical argument there
are going to be some assumptions. Done correctly these will be axioms, postulates,
or self-evident truths which genuinely do not permit you to go back any further, or
at least seem to. I do not know why 2 is bigger than 1 and less
than 3, I just know that it is, it seems self-evident. It might not be, there may be some explanation
for that mathematicians know of or are trying to figure out, but I do not need to know it
in order to perform arithmetic. I don’t know why 2 plus 2 equals 4, but
it does. And since brains are expensive, especially
the high plasticity, slow maturing kind humans have that is assumed to be a major factor
in our heightened intelligence, we can assume most civilizations have to make a lot of assumptions
and take a lot for given. Since brains are expensive they have to be
useful right away, or evolution won’t let you keep them. They just require too much of an investment
in time and resources from the parents to stick around if they are not earning their
keep. The way complex brains like ours are useful
is the conceptualizing, abstraction, and problem solving skills. Or in practical terms tool use, techniques,
strategizing, and planning. You need to take advantage of those in a way
that heightens your odds of survival right away or that brain won’t stay. A result of that is going to be specialization,
because you won’t evolve brains able to instantly leap to huge levels of technology
and let everyone learn all of that each. People will need to specialize so they can
master and advance knowledge and benefit the tribe by doing more or better work at something
than everyone else can. This means that not everybody knows everything,
certainly not at birth, so they need a language that can communicate abstract ideas to teach
people and can express the equivalent of “Trust me, I know what I’m talking about”. Another of those abstract ideas is probably
also going to have to be skepticism, because even if we assume deception is alien to some
aliens, which seems unlikely given its survival value, they’d need to know that honest people
can just be wrong. The net result of which is that not only will
much of the logic be based on first principles that are debatable, but you will accumulate
a lot core assumptions that have just become so foundational to your civilization that
even if you know they are flawed you can’t really correct them, and your civilization
will probably reinforce and shore those up with a lot of rationales, and most people
will be content to justify something with comments like “That’s just the way it
is”. So regardless of whether or not there genuinely
is an objective right and wrong that can be determined from first principles, we are unlikely
to be able to determine it as a civilization, just relying on human level intelligence. We should expect the same apply to any other
civilization that is similarly constrained. Nevertheless, like us, they probably tend
to think their beliefs and behaviors are pretty logical. Oh, we can say that most folks are not and
acknowledge we are probably one of them, but it takes a lot of effort to actually look
at something you personally consider solidly logical and disassemble that objectively. You will almost certainly stumble on some
sort of semi-functional rational supporting your belief and seize on it and fold up shop,
content you were correct. So we would not actually expect many civilizations
that hadn’t gone completely post-biological and replaced their brains with massive supercomputers
to do the same, and those super-intelligent civilizations might too. They will value technology and curiosity and
logic and reason and so they will tend to try to operate that way but they will likely
fail. This does not mean they believe they failed
though. This takes us to our first fictional example,
the Vulcans from Star Trek. An example of crazy aliens who are totally
devoted to logic, but arguably don’t practice it too well even though they think they do. The Vulcans, are in some ways the most realistic
aliens we will look at today. If you ignore that they are almost identical
to humans in appearance in spite of having copper in their blood and their organs in
the wrong places yet can still breed with humans. Half-breed human and aliens should pretty
much never be possible unless it involves huge amounts of genetic engineering to essentially
create an artificial life form. Honestly it is way over used in both science
fiction and fantasy, the goal usually being to show us someone stuck between two worlds
or two people defying the odds and their cultures to find love. It makes for interesting characters and ethical
dilemmas but it is scientifically nonsensical. I was going to say we would never expect any
aliens to look enough like us for anyone to find them attractive but I am familiar with
Rule 34 so I imagine there would be cases where a human and an alien both somehow found
their radically different biology and anatomy attractive, formed a bond, and went to a biotech
research institute to have some functional hybrid designed. Anyway I say I find the Vulcans realistic
because they are presented to us as a very emotional race that was also very smart and
strong and was more or less killing themselves off until they got a spiritual leader that
pressed logic and reason on them as an alternative. I have never noticed the Vulcans portrayed
as terribly logical compared to anyone else but that’s on the writers being a bit inconsistent. Regardless, I find that more realistic, since
I can easily imagine civilizations deciding to rule themselves by logic and reason and
doing it in a very dubious fashion. Truth be told almost everyone thinks they
are logical and reasonable anyway and tends to assume folks who agree with their conclusions
share that trait, so an entire civilization with that shared conceit wouldn’t be too
shocking. I don’t normally consider Star Trek a great
guide or predictor for the future, even if I’m a big fan of the show, but I would expect
this particular type of crazy, trying to suppress irrational beliefs and actions to be quite
common in alien civilizations, how successful they would actually be at it from an objective
perspective, as well as their own, is another matter. We also have from Star Trek the example of
the Klingons. The Klingons are presented to us as a warrior
race, a common theme in fiction, and their focus on battle grew noticeably with time
as the franchise progressed. Something sometimes known as Flanderization,
where a minor trait or quirk of a character grows over episodes to be exaggerated and
unbelievable. The term derives from the character of Ned
Flanders in the Simpsons cartoons and you can find examples of it at TV Tropes. Let me add the warning that going to that
website is a good way to suddenly realize you’ve lost track of an entire afternoon. You can also look up Planet of Hats, which
has come to mean an alien race who seem to have a single and exaggerated defining characteristic. This one though might be a little more justified,
except for the more extreme examples. As a loose rule aggression is a handy trait
to have in Darwin’s Universe and the reverse, the super-peaceful non-aggressive species
is actually a lot less likely, at least early on, they might intentionally alter themselves
to be more peaceful over time. The odds are pretty decent the norm is that
everyone is as aggressive as they can be without making technological civilizations impossible,
because a species will generally keep having its more aggressive members prosper and breed
and get more aggressive over generations unless there is an active disadvantage to doing so. Note that aggressive and violent are not the
same thing. Anyway the Klingons’ particular form of
crazy is that everything is a battle, and when the writers remember that an entire species
having the full-time profession of warrior isn’t viable, we see their non-warrior people
as framing their own work as a constant battle. A battle to obtain knowledge through science,
a battle to get the best trade deal, a battle to win in the courtroom and so on. That makes them a lot more realistic but it
also makes them a lot more human. The Vikings and the Mongols tend to be the
favorite historical examples of proud warrior peoples, which is pretty justified, but most
of their people did not spend their time sharpening their axes and they were just as prone to
peaceful trade, art, scholarship, craftsmanship, etc as anyone else. The Spartans might be a better example, the
actual ones not the ones from the movie 300, as they genuinely were quite odd and war-like
and kept a lot of slaves to deal with unrelated matters. The real problem is the nature of space itself,
especially if you don’t have faster than light travel. There’s just nothing to conquer. You can fight among yourselves, especially
if your warrior code prevents the use of weapons of mass destruction or wholesale slaughter
of whatever passes for civilians. It’s a decent approach to population control,
so long as lethal or crippling activities were minimized. However space is big and there’s not going
to be many people to pick a fight with besides yourself and if you find someone they are
unlikely to provide a good fight anyway. Which is to say you’d either run into someone
who was behind you technologically and crush them with ease, or you’d run into someone
who was ahead of you and did not spend their surplus resources fighting among themselves
and did not play games when it comes to war. You’ve got a problem if you pick a fight
with someone like that and show up for honorable combat and they show up with a billion robot
drones with lightning-fast reflexes and accurate targeting. Kind of takes the fun out of it if your opponent’s
only goal is to kill you, they don’t like fighting, they just consider it the most viable
option to achieving their goal and they probably don’t believe in a fair fight. We get an example of that mindset with the
Daleks of Doctor Who, who are so hell-bent on exterminating all other life that they
shout exterminate everywhere they go. A race of mutants who live in armored shells,
these guys believe themselves to be genetically superior and want to eliminate everyone else. Now this is both crazy-crazy and sane-crazy. It’s crazy-crazy because they don’t seem
to follow this goal in a particularly logical method for a particularly logical reason. “Kill everybody else” is not a normal
sane goal by itself, it becomes a crazy kind of sane when it is done because you want their
resources. We see this behavior in some other fiction,
like Peter Hamilton’s portrayal of Morning Light Mountain in his Commonwealth Saga. Here we have this motivation played a bit
more straight because the creature, which is sort of colony organism or hive mind, depending
on how you want to look at it, is genuinely focused on using every available resource
in the Universe to increase itself, it deems this absolutely logical and assumes everyone
else should have this attitude too. If they say otherwise they are either lying
or stupid. There is no room for sharing in the Universe
because it genuinely wants to use all of it for itself and back when it did have other
intelligent creatures on its home planet they had the exact same attitude and they all existed
in a constant state of conflict, not cooperation. None of them needed to cooperate to survive. We see a similar sort of approach from the
Borg in Star Trek but they are more of our last category, the Cthulhu Old Ones, and like
the Daleks they do not seem to actually be bent on using the resources of their galaxy. There’s a big difference between the rather
horrifying but logically coherent approach of trying to kill everyone else because you
want all the resources for yourself, that doesn’t work when you are instead expending
huge amount of resources and effort to kill everyone off and not actually using all those
resources or even your own that would be easier to get than fighting. It takes a special kind of crazy to pursue
genocide when it actually costs you a lot to do it, rather than there being a perceived
net benefit. We never see the Daleks in Doctor Who cannibalizing
whole planets to fuel endless armadas. We get another example of that with the Cylons
of Battlestar Galactica. I picked the Cylons even though they are robots
for two reasons. First, they were actually a race of reptiles
in the original series, and were robots in the rebooted series, which will be the ones
we are looking at. Second, artificial intelligences who replaced
the original species by killing them off are still basically aliens, and we shouldn’t
be too surprised to encounter aliens who were artificial in origins. They might be biologically engineered to barely
be like the original or outright machines, and they might have replaced their makers
peacefully or violently or be just fine with them and live with them. There’s also a good chance they’d be what
we first encountered too since an artificial intelligence is a handy thing to use to explore
space. I do get why a race of robots might want to
kill of their creators, though I think that has gotten terribly overused in fiction. I enjoyed the touch where the artificial intelligences
were religious and spiritual. They laid it on rather thick but it was a
nice change of pace from the assumption computer intelligence will all follow the same specific
schools of thought on Epistemology and Ontology. I’m halfway through my life and I still
haven’t settled on one, though I gather I tilt strongly toward post-positivism though
I’m not sure I agree with that, so it is easy for me to imagine that two artificial
intelligence might have picked different schools of thought to base their reasoning off of. In regard to the Cylons, most of the rest
of their behavior, particularly in the increasingly complex and strange plot twists of the later
seasons, I basically ignore. Why you would try to wipe someone out, then
apparently intentionally let a bunch of them go, then try to make a hybrid species with
them, is beyond me. You either place a value on your creators
or you don’t, if you don’t you either leave to do your own thing or just wipe them
out. So the crazy here is on the obsession with
one’s creator, which is a logical and believable kind of crazy. In Harlan Ellison’s classic scifi horror
short story, “I have no Mouth but I must Scream”, we get a computer which doesn’t
even pretend to be logical. It, in its own words, dedicates every ounce
of its massive computational ability and powers just to despising its creators and finding
new ways to torment them and keeping them alive to do it some more. It is not made clear why it does this, which
is probably good since letting us know in the story would probably hurt the plot, since
it probably wouldn’t make sense. Trying to show up, impress, get revenge on,
or take care of your parents or creators, and potentially wanting to do all of the above
simultaneously, is the kind of crazy that has a sort of twisted core of logic to it. It’s a core motivation, not the kinds of
example of Stupid Aliens we looked at a couple episodes back. Something’s core motivation doesn’t have
to be logical, it is the first principle you use logic on to determine courses of action. In terms of aliens, their obsession with their
creators shouldn’t affect us, we didn’t create them and the notion that they’d have
a specific animosity toward all biological life is quite a stretch. They might want to wipe out all other intelligences
as possible threats, especially if they want to claim all the Universe’s resources for
themselves, but this ought to apply to all kinds of alien intelligence including other
machines. There really should not be a desire to enslave,
conquer, or torture them simply because they evolved and you were built, and they wouldn’t
otherwise resemble your creators or likely even share the same biochemistry with them
anymore than you do. “Die meatbag!” is not going to be a very
logical battlecry if you’re invading a planet where the intelligent lifeforms are silicon
based giant whales swimming around in a sea of ammonia or something. So enslaving and oppressing all intelligent
lifeforms as a sort of revenge doesn’t seem probable. The Goa’uld from the Stargate Franchise
are a great example of both the enslaver race that conquers primitives and uses them as
slave labor and the alien parasite that gets into people and takes them over. We see both of these in fiction a lot. Now we already discussed back in Stupid Aliens
that there is just no reason for high tech civilizations to ever want to enslave people
for labor, but the Goa’uld get a couple escape clauses to justify this. First they are just over-the-top bad guys
who are all megalomaniacs, and that’s an excuse to enslave people to your will even
when it isn’t efficient. Second they actually need humans as hosts
since they themselves are snake like creatures about a foot long with no tool manipulating
appendages. That’s the bit we will focus on since the
justification for a lot of their illogical behavior that might seemed screened out by
biology is that they gain their host’s memories so they didn’t actually need to evolve much
intelligence, though they are also born with the memories of everyone who came before them. Genetic memory is pretty ridiculous, DNA can
store a lot information but not that much info, but we’ll skip that too. It would seem pretty improbable a species
would evolve able to take over the mind of its victim, which is also from a different
planet. Now we do have certain types of parasitoid
organisms that can slightly puppet their host on Earth, most notable the lancet liver fluke,
so it is possible to assume something more advanced would come into play but it wouldn’t
seem likely they’d be able to annex an entire sentient creatures mind when they really should
not be sentient themselves, you’d expect the native planet to include evolution reacting
to that. We get a more friendly and symbiotic version
of them in that series too, the Tok’ra, who are a lot like the Trill from Star Trek. I don’t consider such critters terribly
likely but the symbiosis aspect is kind of fascinating to contemplate in terms of how
it would affect the two species. Other than that though there’s nothing obvious
about them which would make them particularly crazy by our standards, and indeed both those
other two examples, the Tok’ra and the Trill are pretty normal in their behavior. Our next one is the Predators from the Predator
film franchise. They are an example of the common staple of
the hunter-species, a bit akin to the warrior race example like the Klingons. Same basic issue too except this one does
fall more inside the Stupid Aliens trope. Wanting to fight or hunt is probably a pretty
common desire in a lot of alien civilizations but whereas fighting wars usually implies
some sort of additional goal besides personal challenge, like seizing territory, hunting
is about finding food. In an advanced technological civilization
that will have ceased to serve much point. Also, we have to bring up the option of virtual
reality. Warrior races can use that to relieve the
desire and train to be better but they still have a logical reason to actually fight, which
is to conquer stuff. That doesn’t apply to hunting. I could easily see a species being rather
obsessed with hunting but not the point of traveling light years to do it and potentially
provoking other civilizations to attack them in retribution. You might want to try your skills against
intelligent prey from everywhere but that can still be simulated you just have get detailed
information to do it properly. We also need to consider specialization, I
think if a species focused on hunting that obsessively they’d never have invented agriculture
and turned to it as their main food source, and it’s hard to get the kind of numbers
you need to create technology by hunter-gatherer means. It kind of requires dense population centers
allowing people to devote themselves to one specialization. You probably can get to modern technology
with a population of just a few million people, but only if they are in the same place so
they can talk, and you can’t do that if you need much larger tracts of land to support
each person. So I can’t see this particular type of crazy
being too common, and that would probably apply to a lot of singular obsessions. Our last example for today are the Old Ones,
a type of crazy that pretty much cannot be fathomed by the sane mind. I picked the old ones from HP Lovecraft but
they are also a bit of a blanket for quite a few other well know alien races like the
Borg from Star Trek or Reapers from Mass Effect or the Chaos Gods and Warp entities from Warhammer
40k and a bunch of others. They are sort of the original example in science
fiction though they have a good basis in human mythology too. Frequently, as with the Borg, we are presented
an official behavior by the aliens, the Borg are supposed to be quite logical, but the
underlying flavor is actually supposed to be ancient, dark, hungry predators you cannot
possibly reason with that will not just kill you but eat your soul or turn you into a depraved
insane slave. This is an example I would never expect us
to encounter except in the sense of running into something that doesn’t have motivations
or desires we can even contemplate. It is very popular in fiction because it resonates
with a lot of primitive fears of terrifying predators hiding in their lairs emerging every
so often to horribly murder us. I can only imagine such a thing being the
result of some sort of actual insanity snapping something’s mind, like a super-intelligent
machine mind that determines life is meaningless and free will is an illusion and has the equivalent
of a psychotic break rather than just becoming a nihilist and committing suicide. I could imagine some intelligence like that
being a nihilist and unable or unwilling to shut itself off and just stewing in its thoughts,
repeating every argument until it invents some twisted but functional purpose for itself. Something like that would probably not want
to make itself bigger and smarter since that would just add to its torment, so you could
handwave that as why you’d have some evil predator race that emerged from the depths
of space periodically to obliterate people, because it genuinely has no rational purpose
and simply is crazy-crazy not apparently crazy but following a different set of logic principles
and assumptions. It just likes killing people in horrible and
terrifying ways because it wants them to experience what it does and it always acts at a certain
level of technology or time because it wants to wait till they have the biggest numbers
but are not actually a threat to it yet. You can get away with a lot of handwaves when
you’re beginning from the basic assumption that the critter in question is just plain
evil-crazy. The problem is we would not expect to see
such things naturally occur so they probably only belong in the realms of fiction, unlike
a lot of the other crazy critters we looked at who just seem crazy by our standards. We’ll finish here for the day. Our main takeaway is that when dealing with
alien minds we are certainly justified in assuming they’d probably have worldviews
that differed a lot from our own. At the same time biology and the setups needed
to actually develop technological civilizations, like a value for knowledge and the need to
work together to specialize in skills, will force them toward some similar behaviors to
our own. So aliens will probably be both quite alien
and quite familiar at the same time, and to contemplate realistic ones we always need
to ask if a difference is viable and could still be likely as a trait they’d evolve
and which would not interfere with technological advancement. Though of course we might also want to ask,
when contemplating the Fermi Paradox, if we might have a lot of fairly smart aliens out
there who just haven’t invented technology yet for those reasons. There might be thousands of planets in our
galaxy hosting hunter-gatherer tribes that have been around for millions of years but
just never quite hit that critical threshold to make advanced technology because they aren’t
good at specializing or cannot switch over to agriculture and higher population densities,
or similar reasons. And of course to ever meet and interact with
such crazy critters stuck on their own homeplanets we have to be able to engage in practical
interstellar travel, so next week we will be revisiting that concept with a look at
interstellar ships. In the past we’ve discussed propulsion options
for spaceships, we’ve talked about living on board ships, and we’ve talked about what
you use them for. But I have almost always bypassed stuff like
detecting and avoiding collisions, or absorbing them, or a lot of the little tricks you can
use and how ship design and shape will vary with speed. We’ll also talk about what sort of engines
and power source can allow what sort of speeds and we will rejoin the crew of the Gardener
Ship Unity from previous episodes for that. When we last looked at interstellar ships
we also raised the notion that the passengers and crew might be biologically immortal, and
way back when we looked at Transhumanism and Immortality we didn’t spend much time on
the Immortality part, so we will revisit that topic in two weeks to try to take a realistic
look at the difficulty of life extension and the likelihood of achieving that in our lifetimes. We didn’t cover even a tiny portion of the
possible ways in which aliens might be crazy in our eyes or more like us than we’d expect,
so I’d encourage you to read through the comments below or join us over at the Facebook
or Reddit groups, Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur, where there’s lots of clever
folks to bounce these ideas and others around with. The Facebook group in particularly has a few
thousand members these days, so if you enjoy polite discussion of these topics try those
groups out. Again next week will be a look at problems
and solutions for interstellar travel. To get alerts when that and other episodes
come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to
like it and share it with others. Until next time, thanks for watching, and
have a great week!
The best depiction of weird aliens I've seen has to be Three Worlds Collide, a short story about three very different value systems (Humans, Babyeaters, and Super Happies) and the world-shattering consequences of their encounter.
Is there a place where I can find transcripts of these videos? The speech impediment doesn't bother me (it honestly sounds like...I want to say "Boston", but I'm not for sure), but I prefer to read really long and informative videos like this if I can, because people just speak so slowly that my mind starts to wander between sentences unless I speed up the video to 1.5x or 2x normal. Also, it's easier to go back and reference things via transcript than by pulling up a video and then looking for the right time.