Interstellar Racism: The Future Problem

When it comes to world-wide contact and aliens are accepted as existing from full public disclosure, would you not think for a second to allow an extraterrestrial being in your home? Would it be a problem for parents raising there own children? Interstellar Racism is a future problem that has to one day be resolved.

Racism is an issue that exists between different types of human, I don't think that you can justifiably extend it to include other species. The question might be valid if they turned out to be human, but on the assumption that most of them aren't, I don't think we should be thinking in these terms - the idea is dangerous and leaves us open to all kinds of risks. If they turned out to be highly intelligent crocodiles, would you really want one in your home, playing with games with your kids? We don't know how they think, we can't predict their behaviour or surmise their intentions in the way that we can with other humans. We know how other humans reason, because we are humans. The first thing I think we need to do is to stop ourselves being tempted into thinking of them as being too much like ourselves. It also begs the question of their approach to us, would they even have a concept like racism?

That's a good point there skjalddis, so say when any ET race (primarily the grays) make contact to the public, they would never be accepted amung society? If so, than the government may be doing just the right thing, denying there existance.

Originally posted by 7Ayreon
That's a good point there skjalddis, so say when any ET race (primarily the grays) make contact to the public, they would never be accepted amung society? If so, than the government may be doing just the right thing, denying there existance.

TBH, I don't think that the question of whether or not we should accept them into our society is even valid until we know who / what they are and why they're here. How many different ETs are there and are they friendly or hostile?
Are they here to enslave us? To use us as lab rats? To use us as a source of raw materials for experiment and manufacture? To plunder Earth's natural resources?

And then we also have to consider - if they are superior in intelligence and development, surely the boot is on the other foot. It would be more a question of whether or not they are prepared to accept us into their society, not the other way around.

As to whether or not the govt should deny their existence, no - I don't think that this necessarily follows.

There's a big difference between humans discriminating agianst other humans, as if they were animals, and humans interacting with alien beings. An alien 'intelligence' may be, and probably will be, utterly inhuman, unrecognizable as 'sentient' or anything like that.


As far as they have 'humanity', then humans should treat them more or less equally. There is no way to know if they have any aspects of 'humanity' though.

Even that is part of the problem you are alluding too, why should we 'discriminate' against organisms that are completely lacking in any humanity? At the same time, why shouldn't we? We treat animals rather harshly, we raise them as livestock and slaughter them for food. Why should we treat alien life any different? And, at the same time, why would it treat us any different? Why should it treat 'humans' in the same manner that they treat one another, especially if they are so completely and inherently different? We don't expect frogs to treat humans like they treat other frogs, nor vice versa. And those are organisms that are related, aliens, we'd be completely unrelated to.

How we interact with aliens is going to depend on what they are like. If they are basically humanoid and human-ish, then we'll want to treat them like humans, if they are blobs of jelly without centralized brains, emotions, mercy, or recognizable characteristics, we're going to probably act different to them.

THe biggest problem is that we simply don't know anything about aliens. We can talk about 'aliens like the grays' but we don't even know if they exist, we can only speculate about them in terms of their being like or unlike humans. Our 'perspective' is, necessarily, biased, we can't imagine what is going on in the head of a truly alien being, even if it has a recognizable head.