What if their advancement is sufficient that they are incapable of recognizing us as of sufficient intelligence to be treated with respect beyond the level accorded any animate object.
I just read John Varley's The Ophiuchi Hotline, a SF novel from the '70's. In it, some aliens come and wipe out humans on Earth, leaving some small colonies around the solar system to struggle to survive.
They didn't really kill the humans so much as destroy everything humans had built on Earth, starving most of 'em within a year or so.
In any case, the invaders, which are never seen, are described by other aliens as being the top of 3 levels of intelligence, with dolphins and the like being the 2nd level, and humans and those other aliens as the 1st level.
I can easily conceive of something else being to consciousness as consciousness is to inanimate matter. We presume our essence is the top of all there is to be, with only increasing our intelligence (which may have nothing to do with consciousness directly) as the one and only scale along that "top line". Small mammals and maybe octopi or something at the dumb end just before it drops off into non-sentience, humans at the top, and transhumanism in the theoretical future.
But that may not be it at all.
Does this suggest there will never be a way to traverse the universe faster than light? Or does it suggest civilizations usually destroy themselves before they learn such techniques?
Well, the usual supposition is one of these three must be true:
A. That we exist shows intelligent life is likely.
B. Therefore we probably aren't the first
C. Even with restrictive physics, the universe should be clogged with people billions of years ago.
D. It doesn't seem so.
So what's wrong?
Besides assuming unlikely things, like every intelligent race exterminates itself, or goes into hiding, or decides not to leave their solar system, there's a new idea -- that future advanced races would run "ancestor simulations" ala The Matrix. And that the people poulating those simulations would greatly outnumber the number of "real" people.
Therefore we are probably in such a simulation.
In other words, the real universe, whatever that is, is long since choked, and simulations are the common order of the day.
Some of the futurists who reason along these lines tend to get bogged down in extrapolating our physics to develop the simulations, which would be difficult but possible. However, there's no reason to believe the simulated physics need resemble in any way whatsoever the "real" physics. One would only need that if one were doing something that depended on the physics modeling accurately. For all we know, the "real" world is a completely 3-D Euclidean space, and all this relativity is a weird physics designed just for the simulation.
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