First Contact: No Holds Barred or the Prime Directive?

Humans usurp the right to travel to occupied continents, colonize them and impose their ways on the locals. Americans have gone to the Moon. Mars colonization is an ongoing effort, but there are no objections to its exploration and colonization. Why wouldn't alien civilizations see worlds in the Solar System with the same level of uninhibited freedom of movement for exploration, science and economic exploitation? Why should extraterrestrial civilizations be limited to their own solar systems or uninhabited ones, when it comes to colonization? What happens when more than one planet gives rise to a space faring civilization within the same solar system? Who then claims the moons and the planets of that system? Wouldn't multiple competing civilizations that arise within a singular solar system compete for its resources, planets and moons? Why do humans assume they have an indigenous right to the entire planet's resources, if historically humans have denied such right to their own kind across all continents and imposed themselves violently contesting other people's inhabited territory while hunting countless non-human species to extinction? Isn't today's Earth a testimony to human barbarity and inability to coherently run a planet? Why should a species that can't be a trusted custodian of their own planet's evolution, be permitted to settle other worlds or even run its own world into a global catastrophe of mass extinction?

"Nasa finds strange alien planet hiding outside our solar system"

Let us consider that species of cybernetic aliens have no need for order, structure or organization of any kind with complete freedom to create anything in their domain that they see fit. Would they not be tempted to inhabit and interact with physical existing technological or biological civilizations? Wouldn't such civilizations be a good venue for study, experience, reference and determination of self identity through comparative analysis, being that these hypothetical cybernetic aliens can be anything they want in their cyberspace? If they could alter outcomes within such a biological or technological civilization, would they be morally obligated to be benign or benevolent? Is it not possible that a technological civilization's infrastructure which utilizes the electromagnetic spectrum for computation, calculation and communication is a prerequisite for such cybernetic alien species to interact with and inhabit a technological civilization? Could for instance an alien species from a cybernetic civilization enter the Earth's internet infrastructure to inhabit it and mistake its contents and interactions for a civilization like their own? Could cybernetic aliens who have no memory of biological ancestors, consider biological humans to be just a species used as mind controlled burden animals to service Earth's technological civilization with cybernetic humans living inside the world wide web as the real people of the planet? What if such an alien cybernetic species decided to inhabit the human animals' minds as well and use their brains to extend the capacity of the internet, through direct to brain communication? Could such alien cybernetic civilization have entered the human world through telescopes, communication satellites or wireless internet connections? Could such a civilization simply enter human minds directly and consider them a biological computing resource that can be harvested or utilized without guilt? What if such a civilization arose indigenously on Earth, but can conduct communications into the past and is thus not limited to any particular time frame? Is it possible that this future civilization has been the guide and custodian of mankind's development to ensure their own future existence?

There are many questions to consider in interactions with other civilizations. In contacts between human civilizations on Earth, in all cases both sides were affected, changed and morphed. Any interactions that humans have or will have with extraterrestrial or indigenously arising civilized non-human sentients, will change mankind permanently. This may have already happened. The question remains whether any common rules for such interaction should be established? Is it not better that this interaction happens in anonymity and over time? That it allows both sides to incrementally know and understand each other without making official contact and putting forth a joint effort to create rules of interaction without first coming to a solid mutual comprehension and gaining the experience need to determine what these should be? I think the very first rules that should be made from a pacifist point of view would be to determine what existential rights should both sides have. Human rights are for instance a set of rules specifically created so individual and community existence is possible without existential challenges that cause discord and warfare. However, if both sides were to put forth such rights into a compact, this would immediately create a venue for violating them. Existential rights are a recipe for targeting in conflict and war. If what is harmful and can bring about the demise of a species or a people is neatly spelled out by their existential rights, it presents a blueprint for any potential adversery to target. Besides existential rights, humans have established a long list of cultural and religious norms which are completely arbitrary, should these too be considered as inviolable? The arrival of an alien species necessitates that they have at least one capability that surpasses that of the humans, which is to travel interplanetary space. The furthest mankind ever got in the human biological from was from Earth to the Moon. Assuming that cybernetic aliens have other worlds to inhabit and depending on their proximity, their survival as a people may or may not be in question through interaction with mankind... but what if they are indigenous? What if they are cybernetic Artificial Intelligence people living in the internet? What if they are man-machine cyborgs? Should they not remain Anonymous?

"Information governs biological and technological systems, which results in macroscopic physical phenomena of predicable interactions, therefore cybernetics must be considered to be a discipline of physics." - Marcin R. Kubik

The law of "natural selection" is a trans-disciplinary law of cybernetics, it is not exclusive to the empiric observation of the evolutionary processes of Earth's life. As such, because it governs societies, groups of individuals, individual specimens, regardless of the type of information system which governs physical mass-energy systems, and independent of whether these are biological, mechanical, technological, hybrid or man made computing systems they are systems existent in nature within the realm of the physical universe making cybernetics a science of physics. Extrapolation of this to a final state of long term competition between cybernetic systems in an uninterrupted evolutionary process is possible, and one can imagine that the process yields a "divine" informational singularity.

The law of natural selection in biology should be seen as one acting on humans as well as all other species. For instance man's use of race horses is a natural selection in humans to make jockeys who are light and small in stature, to be positively selected against all other types of human phenotype. On the other hand professional basketball, is a cybernetic system in which biological phenotype of humans selects them to be ever taller. In effect the smaller lighter humans and their tallest counterparts, see their phenotype as a competitive advantage for success within society which predisposes them to create progeny for their phenotype. The law of natural selection should also include what Darwin calls artificial selection. Humans are not the only species that select among biological systems or organisms to alter their phenotype, for instance ants farming do so to both plants and aphids. The artificial selection among humans is a cybernetic interaction between species and affects all systems involved, including phenotype of humans and the species artificially selected or altered by man. Finally man is part of nature and as such any selection made by man or ant is not artificial but natural. The same is true of any other cybernetic system.

Mechanical systems are generally considered non-living and difficult to see as cybernetic entities competing for existence, but they do select and are selected upon. Consider bombs for instance, they select among humans and grow in complexity from very little ones, like small fire crackers that are meant to entertain, startle or scare, to the most powerful nuclear weapons. Most bombs are inert mechanical devices that select among humans, their evolution depends largely on how successful they are in doing this. This natural selection not only among humans and other species that compete in the use and avoidance of bombs, or cultivating them as a deterrent without ever having to use them, but also a natural selection process on the bombs themselves. In fact, bombs as cybernetic entities affect human interaction whether or not they are used or even exist. For instance the idea of a bomb may scare a human crowd into panic and cause more destruction than the actual device would have. A bomb is informational in nature, and evolves as an informational system, it can affect outcomes even when it is not physically present. Consider that a suspected presence of predators and reaction to sounds by various animals is a force that acts as a natural selection driver, regardless if these predators physically exist or are present in their habitat. The California grizzly bear may have already gone extinct, but animals it preyed upon would still be affected by noises that are similar to its presence.

"Cybernetic systems like nation states are mass-energy systems that have inertia and they are subject to physical laws." - Marcin R. Kubik