Humans evolved to live in groups of a few dozen people,
maybe a few hundred at most. Our social instincts are flexible enough to allow us to live in cities and form nations of millions of people, but that's something of a lucky coincidence. It's easy to imagine an intelligent species that
didn't have that sort of luck; a species where if you locked a few hundred unrelated male strangers in an airplane for a few hours you'd get a panic-fueled bloodbath, a species that could never live in large towns or create civilizations. For all we know, our own ancestors might have been like that a hundred thousand years ago; the Eemian interglacial had a nice climate, but for some reason humans didn't respond to it by inventing farming and creating civilizations. I've occasionally wondered if this might explain the Fermi Paradox; maybe the universe is full of intelligent beings who are individually as clever as us but who cannot live in towns, cannot create empires … and therefore could never build a moon rocket, let alone a starship. I've depicted beings like that in a couple of my stories, e.g.
Bright Eyes.
Imagine what humans would look like to beings like that. I remember one sociobiologist saying something like humans are apes who started living like ants, take a step back, picture that from the perspective of an intelligent vaguely ape-like being that didn't,
couldn't make that transition, and think about how weird and scary and mind-blowing it might look to them, and of course it would be a source of great power to civilized humans, power that beings constitutionally incapable of civilization could never acquire.
Some thoughts I had on what the species like that in
Bright Eyes might think of us:
- A deep unease at the idea of human kings. What strange power do these people have, that thousands of strangers obey them, that someone who's never seen their face will do their bidding without even coming into their presence? I think it really would seem like witchcraft to them.
- They're smarter than us as and physically superior to us as individuals, and they know that, and they also know that our capacity for vastly greater cooperation is giving us dominion over the world; they have enough of a sense of history to know that we're steadily pushing them into marginal lands and so on, they know the essence of our power and they know that if they could somehow acquire it for themselves they'd outcompete us, but they also know they're just constitutionally incapable of copying the "killer app" that makes us so successful. I imagine the sense of frustration and tragedy this creates might loom large in their culture (especially like, the ones who live in the desert on the margins of the fertile zone of their world's not!Egypt, who have especially hard lives and can always look down from the barren arid desert into the beautiful inviting green land full of human peasants working their fields...).
- They're hominids, closely related to us biologically, and their reaction to human physical appearance and mannerisms is pretty much
this comic about how wolves might see dogs.
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On a different note, you know all those philosophical arguments about whether an upload or a transporter clone is
really you? I suspect an intelligent species for whom unconsciousness was naturally super-rare might have similar philosophical arguments about whether the person who wakes up from anesthesia is
really you. Such a species might find human sleep cycles
very conceptually disturbing. It wouldn't really qualify for the subject of this discussion, because it wouldn't give us any particular power, it would just make our existence as a species very disturbing and potentially distressing to them ("oh my god, they're born in the morning and die at night and then a new person with their memories wakes up in their body the next morning and starts the cycle again and this happens to them every day, thousands of times in the lifespan of their bodies!").
