What Can We Reasonably Predict Concerning Alien Religion and Ethics?

ABSTRACT

It is very easy to be pessimistic concerning what we can know of possible aliens, much less what we can know of their religious or ethical beliefs. Nevertheless, I make the attempt by laying out a set of assumptions consistent with our best science and then use these assumptions to make reasonable inductive projections. The results are, unsurprisingly, but at the very least can serve as a critique delimiting what cannot be said as much as what can. Nevertheless, I hope that a few of my conclusions will prove interesting as points of contention if nothing else.

KEYWORDS:

• Alien
• religion
• first contact
• astrobiology
• xenoreligion
• xenoethics

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Strictly speaking, long distance interstellar messages only prove CCA’s did exist, since messages that travel long distances originated long ago.

2 Chris McKay, “What is Life? It’s a Tricky, often Confusing Question,” Astrobiology Magazine, September 18, 2014.

3 Martin Rees and Mario Livio, “Most Aliens May Be Artificial Intelligence, Not Life as We Know It,” Scientific American, June 1, 2023, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/most-aliens-may-be-artificial-intelligence-not-life-as-we-know-it/.

4 Edward Ashford Lee, The Coevolution: The Entwined Futures of Humans and Machines (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020).

5 Carol E. Cleland and Christopher F. Chyba, “Defining ‘Life,’” Life and Evolution of Biospheres 32, no. 4 (2002): 387–93.

6 Kelly C. Smith, “Life is Hard: Countering Definitional Pessimism Concerning the Definition of Life,” International Journal of Astrobiology 15, no. 4 (2016): 277–89.

7 Katrina Miller, “Scientist’s Deep Dive for Alien Life Leaves His Peers Dubious,” The New York Times, July 24, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/24/science/avi-loeb-extraterrestrial-life.html.

8 Jill Tarter, “Should we fear space aliens?” CNN, April 7, 2010, http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/04/27/tarter.space.life.fears/index.html.

9 Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End (1953).

10 J. W. Traphagan, “Do No Harm? Cultural Imperialism and the Ethics of Active SETI,” Journal of the British Interplanetary Society 70 (2017): 219–24.

11 Steven J. Dick, “Cultural Evolution, The Postbiological Universe and SETI,” International Journal of Astrobiology 2, no. 1 (2003): 65–74.

12 Kelly C. Smith, “Manifest Complexity: A Foundational Ethic for Astrobiology?” Space Policy, 30, no. 4 (2014): 209–14.

13 Some may cite Hymenoptera (bees, wasps, and ants) as a counterexample. Don’t they achieve cooperation via instinct? Yes, but suppose I told you that pavement ants will one day become capable of interstellar communication. Could you not reasonably conclude that either the hive system would abandoned or the hives would became agents who interact with other hives? If so, the problem is not about SRCT, but rather the messiness of what we mean by “individual.”

14 See for example, Tom Bethell, “Against Sociobiology,” First Things, January 2001, https://www.firstthings.com/article/2001/01/against-sociobiology.

15 Amrisha Vaish and Robert Hepach, “The Development of Prosocial Emotions,” Emotion Review 12, no. 4 (2019): 259–73; Michael Tomasello, “The Ultra-Social Animal” Eur J of Soc Psychol 44, no. 3 (April 2014): 187–94.

16 See Robert Wright, Why Buddhism is True (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018).

17 Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper & Row, 1956).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kelly C. Smith

Kelly Smith is a philosopher of science who is also trained as an evolutionary biologist. He holds appointments in both Philosophy and Biological Sciences at Clemson University. Kelly believes deeply in the renaissance idea that humanities and science have valuable insights to offer each other and his research is thus highly interdisciplinary, encompassing ethical issues surrounding the search for life on other planets, the scientific conception of “life”, the relation between science and religion, theoretical issues in biology and complexity, as well as bioethics.