this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2024
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Is it? I think externalizing our bad impulses is the only way we as a species could possibly survive. People love to hate. People love to group around shared hate. Internally, that urge causes social unrest and racism, externally it could hit someone else and give humans something to come together around, the hatred of everything else…
Sounds super cynical, and it is. But we are just dumb monkey tribes who figured out to obliterate their own world with the push of a button
I used to think this way, until I tried writing more sci-fi and I kept running into weird moral quandaries trying to keep stuff realistic on a human level. I genuinely don't think there will ever be a threat that could rally all of humanity at this point. Not only because I don't believe aliens are a thing we'll ever experience, but also because everything I've seen points to people being too chaotic. Even the perfect enemy (some bugs that just want to kill us all) would have humans helping them out, a contingent of people who think the whole thing is a deep fake, and a multitude of people preying on the flawed reality of those groups and others to horde whichever resource (money, food, manpower, etc.). That's before you even get into the various well-intentioned factions that would form around a variety of "best" approaches to the issue.
I'm not even saying this in a doomer kind of way, I'm rather optimistic and believe we tend to stumble forward. I'm just saying the rally around the flag moment for humanity feels like a total fantasy.
Except the fictional "fixing" of humanity involves an inhuman "enemy", a thing that very much happens in real life (dehumanizing others in war or oppression), which tracks because these things are satire of that real world scenario.
All of this is to say that embracing the fiction without that distinction as satire really just enforces those innate bad impulses you brought up, and we have enough of that right now, imo.
I feel ya. We need sole aliens out there for us to mostly stop hating ourselves.
And our governments would totally turn any first contact into a war type thing if they could get away with it. Because the loss of control otherwise would be terrifying to them.
Well, as long as we bring 'democracy and freedom and capitalism' to them and win, it's all good. :)
It'll be awful if we lose but I am a firm believer that humanity I'll be able to handle any of the dangers lurking out there after thousands of years of practice within the tutorial part of our history, aka, when we were still confined to our homeworld.