The Ethics Around Potential Extra-Terrestrial Engagement & Our Fascination with Aliens

Returning home from a disturbing visit to an acquaintance's house in which Graham Hess (played by Mel Gibson) has recently had a close encounter with an expected alien being, Hess is greeted with the sight of his tinfoil hat-wearing family fearfully huddled close together on their sofa in the 2002 horror film Signs.

The Hess family, disturbed by crop markings and strange midnight sightings of fast-moving humanoid shadows around their farm, has clearly bought into the panic surrounding the alien theories reported in the news that week.

Gibson’s character is a sceptic at first. Then come the personal encounters with the creatures who have been consigning themselves to the darkness. The glimpse of a long and slender hairless leg in the middle of a pitch-black corn field, deer-like with its cloven foot. A large, shadowy hulking mass standing beside the chimney, staring down into his daughter’s bedroom one night. Then, the encounter at Ray Reddy’s house, the acquaintance who trapped an alien in his pantry before calling Hess because he didn’t know what else to do.

‘I can’t be sure, but I got the distinct feeling that it wanted to harm me,’ Gibson’s character says of the experience, back at his family home. Using a kitchen knife as a mirror, Hess pushed it under the door frame of Reddy’s pantry to see if he could get a glimpse of what was on the other side. Frustrated at not seeing anything, he turns to leave before changing his mind and bending down to look once more, and then it happens. First contact. The alien hand reaches out from underneath the door, angrily grasping for the knife. Hess panics, bringing the sharp blade down onto the clawed hand, slicing off a finger.

This is a typical alien encounter trope found throughout the majority of these kinds of films: the evil alien species that has come to invade Earth and harvest our resources or enslave the planet, or both.

There are, of course, a handful of outliers: movies like ET, a friendly, somewhat goofy alien who just wants to go back home; or Arrival, featuring an intelligent seven-limbed species referred to as the Heptapods who come to Earth to teach humanity about their language and non-linear perception of time — but these films are few and far between.

Humanity’s fascination (and fear) with the idea of extra-terrestrials is not difficult to understand. Perhaps the greatest unanswered question we all have is if we are alone in the universe. It is a question that has enthralled us for at least a couple of centuries if the art and literature are anything to go by, but likely the question has plagued humanity far longer.

The beginning of alien appearances within the cinematic realm started with the 1906 film The Man in the Moon in Santa Claus’ Busy Day, with the heyday of the genre coming in the 1950s. Movies like The Thing; The Man from Planet X; and Invaders from Mars terrified movie-goers with their depictions of horrifying ways an alien species can wreck havoc on our world.

With literature, we can go back even further to the classic alien invasion stories written by HG Wells — and further still with Voltaire’s 1758 novella Micromégas, telling the story of a giant that visits Earth to impart knowledge.

But why are fear and destruction typically such seminal features of these kinds of stories?

One potential reason may be due to humanity’s experience with Western powers ‘discovering’ new lands, and how that always ended badly for the native peoples. Maybe the West’s shared sense of guilt (almost always the big blockbuster alien invasion movies are produced in the Western world) causes these films to reflect our fear and guilt of colonialism cosmologically. Much of our feelings are based on precedence, after all.

If the aliens are anything like us and our disregard for civilisations that differ from our own, we’d have solid grounds on which to fear them.

This line of thinking is even shared by the late Stephen Hawking, who once claimed: ‘If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans. We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet.’

The indigenous population of the Americas encountered a deluge of violence when the European settlers first made landfall. Not only did they have their lands stolen, but they also suffered a series of catastrophic abuses including women being raped, people slaughtered en masse, horrific enslavement, their possessions and goods looted, children kidnapped, and the spreading of diseases from settlers to the natives who had no natural defence against the pathogens.

Some estimates put the number of Indigenous Americans prior to Columbus at the high end of 60 million, others more conservatively at around 5 million. It is hard to know for sure, but what is known is that by the end of the 19th century, there were fewer than 250,000 remaining.

In the 21st century, natives can still suffer in the pursuit of scientific interest. Native Hawaiians are forced to continually resist the plans of astronomers wishing to build deep-space telescopes on the sacred volcano of Maunakea — chosen by stargazers due to its lack of light pollution, therefore making it an excellent place to explore the night sky.

Even in historical instances when Indigenous communities were supposed to be ‘protected’ by the contactees (and colonial engagements were strictly prohibited, as in the case of James Cook’s 1768 voyage to map the visible movement of Venus across the Sun from Tahiti), the contacted peoples still suffered great violence. On his return voyage, Cook was ordered to map and claim as much land as possible by the British Crown. This put into action the violent conquests of Australia and New Zealand.

Chelsea Haramia is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Spring Hill College and a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Bonn. She’s working as part of the UK SETI Research Network’s Post-Detection
Hub, tackling the thorny issue of how best to prepare humanity for the effects of a successful detection of alien technology. Currently, Haramia is writing a book titled “Ethics and Extraterrestrial Communication: The Moral Responsibilities of Cosmic Messengers” – focusing on the moral responsibilities of cosmic messengers, looking at what ethical questions and arguments arise when a subset of humanity intentionally speaks for the entire planet and all of its inhabitants: past, present, and future.

With regards to first contact and the potential for violence, she believes that: “ We should be prepared not only for the possibility that first contact is far worse or far better than we have imagined, but also for the possibility that it is far more boring than we have imagined. For example, what if they’re just really, really far away, and we can only send radio pulses to each other with no real hope of greater communication? Furthermore, I think we should prepare for the possibility that the reality of first contact is in fact unimaginable for us (before it happens).

“It is worth noting that there is no perfect historical analogue to
discovering or contacting extra-terrestrial others, and the lessons we learn from our own past — though they ought to be learned — can only take us so far terms of preparation. As such, we should think carefully about not only the ways in which potential first contact scenarios can be informed by past ethical lessons but also about the ways in which potential extra-terrestrial contact scenarios have no true historical precedent and must be approached as uniquely analysable.”

Thankfully, it’s highly unlikely (at least, according to some) that a civilisation capable of interstellar travel would be intentionally hostile or would want to invade Earth for its natural resources.

Any species that has figured out the ability to travel between star systems or galaxies will have technology hundreds, thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands of years beyond what human beings currently live with. They will, if such instances occur, easily be able to find planets and meteors rich in whatever natural resources they require that does not currently harbour life.

For a species to have grown to the point where space travel is a common and advanced method of exploration, it is reasonable to assume they will have grappled with and figured out a whole slew of problems that currently plague humanity — namely climate change, the development of artificial intelligence and how it’s controlled, and how to alleviate mass unjust suffering.

Coming into contact with a potential civilisation such as this could have immeasurable benefits for Earth and its inhabitants, akin to receiving a great galactic teacher endowed with a wealth of useful knowledge. Even so, the debate regarding whether or not Earth should be sending out signals actively looking for life due to the chance of extra-terrestrials being hostile is a contentious issue among space experts.

If first contact does eventually happen — which many scientists believe on a long enough time scale with advancing technology it should — how will it go? And what are the parameters of engagement?

Due to the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015, which grants the U.S a legal right to profit from space tourism and planetary resource extraction, there is the horrifying, albeit small, possibility that corporations such as Amazon could be the first to find signs of extra-terrestrial lifeforms. Is this something worth worrying about?

“The search for extra-terrestrial intelligence and technology today involves a variety of organizations, disciplines, institutions, equipment, and locations,” says Haramia. “But common to all SETI projects is their fundamentally scientific basis. So, the way I see this question framed is one of commercial activity in space versus scientific activity in space. Of course, the line between the two is often blurred, but let’s consider the following. What if corporations find evidence of aliens before scientists do, or vice versa?

“First, I don’t think that either would be guaranteed to handle such a discovery properly, nor would either be guaranteed to handle it poorly. So much would depend on the details, and we just don’t know what we’re going to find, nor do we know what things will be like here on Earth if and when we do find evidence of alien life or technology. But what if, given present knowledge, a layperson like me somehow had the power to choose who made the discovery? All else equal, I’d opt for the scientists. Science (in its idealized state) has better goals. The overarching goal of scientific study is to increase our knowledge and understanding of the world. Knowledge is arguably valuable in and of itself, and scientists are also more likely to share their discoveries with everyone as they happen.”

Some prominent astrobiologists think it likely that by the end of the 2030s, we could have already found compelling evidence for extra terrestrial life from one of the several scientific programmes searching for alien signatures.

An astrobiologist working at the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science in Seattle, Graham Lau, believes that if there is life out there among the stars, ‘We must be close [to finding it].’

NASA’s Perseverance rover, currently rolling its way across the Martian surface, is collecting rock samples to return to Earth in the 2030s which scientists will be able to study for signs of life. Around the same time, NASA will launch its Europa Clipper mission to search for signs of life beneath the icy surface of Jupiter’s forth-largest moon — potentially the most likely place for life within the solar system outside of Earth; Saturn’s moon Titan will host the space organisation’s Dragonfly — a drone which will fly to dozens of locations on Titan looking for prebiotic chemical processes. The potential for discovering life within our solar system, or beyond, is likely to become a reality in the next century or two.

“I was at a conference a few years back when, during a plenary session, a scientist casually mentioned that, if we find compelling evidence of life in another solar system, ‘of course’ we will immediately send a probe,” Haramia says. “What bothered me was the ‘of course,’ the idea that it wasn’t even worth pausing to consider the full implications of the monumental decision to directly interfere with an extra-terrestrial environment.

“There’s a lot to consider here — not only bias but also hubris, risk, degradation, misrepresentation, disrespect, and much more. I can’t speak with confidence on exactly what we ought to do if we find evidence of extra-terrestrial life — and I think a lot of the prescriptions will depend on specific circumstances of which we are currently unaware — but I am confident that we should consider carefully what our responsibilities are when we are in fact faced with that decision, and I am confident that those who have the power to decide what happens in these situations ought to take seriously the voices of a diversity of relevant experts and perspectives and incorporate them into the deliberations about how to proceed.”

If we do make such a discovery within the coming decades, many believe it will be simple, single-cellular organisms that we discover first, rather than something like the complex ‘little green men’ lifeforms so commonly found within Hollywood’s movie industry. But even so, what are the ethical ramifications of such a discovery? Do extra-terrestrials really deserve our moral and ethical consideration?

“We humans are moral agents,” Haramia reasons. “This means that we are capable of evaluating our options and of being held morally accountable for our choices. And we have a responsibility to respect whatever has moral status or is deserving of moral consideration. This does not mean we could
never permissibly harm that which matters morally, but it does mean that we would need a very good reason to do so.

“[…] Commonly, many believe that alien life that is sufficiently “like us” will deserve our moral consideration. Critically, then, we can also ask whether restricting moral consideration to only that which is like us — or like life on Earth, more broadly — would be evidence of our own biased thinking. We
know already that we are highly susceptible to having our judgments clouded by bias. Even if we are correct in our recognition that we and our fellow Earthly species are special, that doesn’t mean that we are the only special things out there. Biocentrism is a branch of environmental ethics, and biocentrists argue that all living things deserve moral consideration just by virtue of being alive. So, this would include any and all extra-terrestrial life.

“ […] Finally, it is worth noting that we might not actually find living organisms out there even if we find evidence of alien life. For example, SETI searches aim to detect evidence of extra-terrestrial technology. If
successful, we will have found…well…technology. We won’t necessarily know whether the species that created it is extant or extinct. And if aliens successfully created something like artificial general intelligence, then we may interact with alien technology without ever interacting with alien life per se, and that raises its own set of ethical questions.”

In an article on Medium, Founding Director of Harvard University’s Black Hole Initiative Avi Loeb explains how his students were shocked when he revealed the truth of the contents of the menus within the restaurants around Harvard Square. They are filled with dead animals, of course. ‘We allow ourselves to eat them with no ethical remorse,’ he explained. ‘If we were to encounter extra-terrestrials who died in a spacecraft crash on Earth, would we eat their flesh? … [W]e might eat primitive lifeforms but not intelligent extra-terrestrials, right?’

Loeb’s point seems to be that humanity puts an intrinsic value on what it deems is worthy of empathy, as judged by an inherent sentience scale. Of course this is true, but how humans view this scale can be deeply flawed, which he seems to note, yet offers no real conclusion or consideration on this moral issue.

The ethicist Peter Singer, who has written extensively about non-human rights, stated in an article on the topic of alien rights that: ‘Most of us now accept that we have at least some obligations to avoid inflicting suffering on nonhuman animals, and the same would surely hold for any extra-terrestrial beings who we discover to be capable of suffering.’

“Humans’ treatment of non-human animals is such a glaring example of inconsistency in humans’ reasoning,” Haramia argues. “Side by side with genuinely morally indefensible and widespread human practices such as factory farming is story after story of human-animal relationships that contain profound acts of human kindness, care, and compassion. In my own Western culture, many people who would be horrified to discover that the meat they eat came from tortured cats and dogs are outright indifferent to the fact that the meat they do eat comes from tortured cows and pigs. Animal ethicists such as Peter Singer and Alastair Norcross have convincingly shown that all common attempts to justify this differential treatment of non-human animals (e.g., through appeal to intelligence, species-status, food-chains, etc.) don’t pass muster and reliably commit people to highly counterintuitive conclusions about whom we are permitted to torture or taste.”

Farmed animals rank incredibly low down in humanity’s collective empathy, likely due to centuries-long thinking regarding non-human animals as unworthy of respect or compassion. Despite strong evidence pointing to pigs being as sentient and intelligent as dogs the sale of pork products shows no signs of slowing down, emphasised by China’s opening of a 26-story sky-scraping slaughterhouse in 2022, capable of killing 1 million pigs per year.

“Animal ethicist Deborah Slicer recognizes this strange juxtaposition among humans’ treatment of animals, and, in a poignant work titled ‘Joy,’ she suggests that humans maintain this inconsistency in part because we are prone to stressing the differences between us and the animals we eat while at the same time stressing the similarities between us and our pets,” Haramia continues. “I have a hope and a hunch that, if and when we do find evidence of alien life, we will (at least initially) be especially (and perhaps inordinately!) interested in how they might be similar to us.

“If so, then we might be psychologically priming ourselves to default to respecting such life. But if we view any alien life we discover primarily as different or “other,” we are likely to psychologically prime ourselves to justify a lot of harm to them, including the kind of deep injustices and mistreatment that have historically been wrought upon any groups who have been dehumanized by dominant groups (including both human-groups and non-human animals).”

Humanity’s picking and choosing of which animals (or aliens, let’s say) deserve ethical consideration can easily lead to more harm than good. If we are to ever get to the point that exploring other worlds becomes possible, there must be concrete rules and regulations put into place by Earth’s space organisations to ensure protection of other worlds from human contamination and destruction of its natural ecosystem. It is right to have serious reservations about this potentiality. How we treat aliens may lie in our history with the treatment we afford to non-human animals. It is only within recent times that animal rights campaigners have made some minor legal headway in the fight to ensure sentient animals are afforded their relative rights.

Loeb also makes a point of claiming that humanity should avoid seeding planets which already have an indigenous population and instead focus on lifeless ones. Which brings up its own set of issues, namely that at one point in Earth’s history it was a lifeless planet. If a space-fairing civilisation had happened to come across it during this time and chose to seed it with their life, setting up a colony — our entire evolution from the first microscopic organisms rising up some 3.7 billion years ago, to the development of plants and photosynthesis, water, dinosaurs, the first hominid species, the building of the pyramids, all the way up to the creation of the modern world in this very moment, would have been snuffed out and a gentrified colony set up in it’s place.

To this point, Haramia quips: “How do we know a space-faring alien society didn’t do that to begin with? Just kidding (sort of).”

It’s a fair point, though it may sound silly. There is even the theory posited by intellectuals such as Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, a former colleague of the famous cosmologist Sir Fred Hoyle, of a ‘panspermia’ — i.e., a hypothesis that states that the seeds of life exist all over the universe and can be propagated through space from one location to another. Some have theorised that this may be what kickstarted life on Earth, perhaps from a natural process or as an extra-terrestrial intervention.

“It would be difficult and sometimes impossible to understand what extra-terrestrial trajectories we might be disrupting and thereby what valuable extra-terrestrial stuff we might be preventing from coming into existence (in that vein, what if we only exist here and now because aliens interfered with our planet’s trajectory long ago and prevented other stuff
from coming into existence?). That seems to be something that we should at least be factoring into the moral equation.

“On the flipside, we can also consider the value of that which comes into existence as a result of our redirecting a planetary body’s evolutionary trajectory. When thinking about our ethical obligations with respect to creating or bringing-into-existence that which would otherwise never exist, distinct and complicated ethical issues arise. And here we’re not just thinking about individual organisms or different species but entire planetary and evolutionary trajectories.”

Haramia also points out the important fact that so-called ‘lifeless’ planets may have their own integrity which we fail to take into account. “[I]ts being
‘lifeless’ doesn’t automatically mean that it is not valuable in its own right and worthy of some degree of respect from us. This is understandable, and philosophers such as JS Johnson-Schwartz have uncovered evidence of a pervasive life-bias in our debates about outer space. We tend to view sterile space environments for what they are not rather than for what they are. But I think we should recognize this potential bias and take the time to think carefully about the possibility that even sterile space environments might be valuable in their own right — perhaps as areas of true wilderness or because they are distinct manifestations of the creativity and inventiveness of the natural world.

“As with other morally valuable things, this would not mean that we could never harm or disrupt sterile space environments. But it would mean that we would need good reason to do so, and that, if we do so, we should simultaneously recognize that something truly valuable will be lost, even if it is replaced with other valuable stuff.”

Enrico Fermi understood that any sufficiently advanced species with the capacity to build intelligent rockets could colonise the galaxy in a few tens of millions of years. Which, granted, may sound like a lot, but given the age of the Milky Way galaxy (roughly 13.6 billion years) this would be a drop in the ocean.

So, why hasn’t it happened?

It is reasonable to assume any sufficiently intelligent space-fairing species holds compassion as one of its core values, otherwise it would have fizzled out long before it got to the stars. The very act of surviving to the point where you are capable of interstellar travel would indicate you are able to work collectively and overcome the kind of serious life and environmental issues which your species will ultimately face.

Perhaps any such developed species may come to the eventual conclusion that making contact with an alien lifeform is not worth the potential problems that could arise from it — whether that be environmental problems that could lead to an unintended degradation of a natural eco-system, or physical problems for themselves (is it really worth engaging with an incredibly violent species such as Homo sapiens?) and thus holds back.

It’s also possible that these figurative beings decide rather than colonising the galaxy they would much rather see what kind of natural life forms instead — keeping an eye on things out of scientific interest and only making contact when that planet is deemed ‘ready’, if at all.

But these are just more theories to add to the many that already exist surrounding Fermi’s paradox, which states: if life is so abundant in the universe, where is it?

Ultimately the search for alien life will go on, and the many unknowns will remain just that, at least until we have tangible experience to base future endeavours on.

After all, as a social activity, exploration has been essential to our survival and enduring prosperity across the planet. If our ancestors had never made the decision to move out of East Africa, there is an almost guaranteed certainty that humanity would have gone extinct from starvation.

“For those who search, have searched, or endorse the search for life in the universe, I think it stems in part from the yearning to better understand the world and one’s place in it. Of course, it’s bound to be more complicated than that, and surely there are those who have less noble motivations, but I do think that’s why at least some people want to search,” Haramia suggests.