A fascinating hypothesis, Ella. I have only a small problem with it and that is that rule #1 in anthropological science postulates that that you never judge another culture by your own cultural standards. I’d propose an even further condition and that is that any erstwhile sufficiently advanced civilisation (for lack of a more appropriate term) that we might encounter is likely so exponentially advanced beyond ours that we would probably be completely unable to fathom it to even the slightest nano-extent. The same argument holds true for popular earthly concepts like ‘supreme deities’ (gods) in that anything and everything that totally transcends our understanding would appear to us to be an awe-inspiring supernatural force or entity. And that presupposes that our earthly organs of sensory perception (thought, sight, speech, hearing, tactility, et al) were even capable of detecting and/or sensing the presence or substance of what that exponentially advanced civilisation consists of, or how it manifests itself to us.

We human beings are notorious for our tendency to draw upon our own primitively limited experiences to ‘project’ understandings, interpretations and ascribe meanings to unknown concepts and unfamiliar physical embodiments. We are doing this every time we discuss the ‘what ifs’ and ‘do you suppose’ possibilities of a theoretical ‘other’, such as we are here.

Taking this down a notch, my persona surmise is that we human beings also suffer from a severely ill-deserved and hyper-inflated sense of our own importance in the cosmic scheme of things. The reality of us, based upon the vastness of all that empty (for all practical purposes), unknown space out there and our sheer ignorance in light of it all, suggests that we are indeed not much advanced beyond the most primitive forms of bio-organic life on our own planet that existed millions of years ago, when it comes to ranking us with possible ‘others’ on a cosmic scale. After all, we’re dealing with a civilisation of supposedly highly-evolved, sentient life (Homo sapiens) that in actual regard to all the vast possibilities out there, it is reasonable to suppose utterly pales in the most generous comparisons conceivable.

Finally, given the absolutely wretched job we humans have done as custodians of our beleaguered planet since we emerged from sea-slime such a short while ago, I wouldn’t be at all unhappy to see our species eradicated by a more advanced form of life (either from our own planet or from another galaxy). The planet certainly wouldn’t be any worse off for all that, would it?

Thanks for a very, very engaging and reflectively thought-provoking exercise in regarding ‘us and them’ possibilities. Love to see more high level and extremely articulate subject matter like this from you!