Aliens would come talk to humans if they were here watching us, it might take a couple decades for people to fully comprehend any suggestions they may have as to what would be the best way to progress as a population, but it would be worth it as long as there was a committed effort to collaborate with humanity and not control it, otherwise it would be a nightmare and probably cause a detraction not progress. If there was this massively superior alien race with superior computational capabilities and cognitive analysis, they would be able to calculate every single probable progression humans could take to move towards a more advanced civilization from their current state, present these options to humans while making their formal public notice and explain the processes that would be taking place if humans decided to take the actions of a particular direction. Humans would be much more willing to take the advice of these massively superior beings without the need to be coerced or controlled and still be able to feel as though we were maintaining our autonomy or at least I would be much more willing as opposed to the theory that aliens are here secretly manipulating individuals one by one without letting their presence known to the public at large. Maybe every human on the planet wouldn't react in such a way, but why would EVERYBODY have to be in a perfectly healthy and rational state of mind in order to begin the process? Sure you could say that in the abstract, superior alien races could 'control' massively unintelligent humans through manipulating basic cognitive biases or other processes through framing the explanations of their analysis so that 'other' alternatives would not be considered that might be more in humanities better interest, however as long as no physical manipulations were to occur and only verbal, written or other visual communications were to be restricted to (which would be the most efficient way to establish a positive relationship and fastest path to collaboration and integration), why not? Humanity could decide to take a few decades thinking it over for ourselves if we needed to, perhaps some individuals moving faster than others... if this superior alien species exist and are currently watching humanity, at what point would they decide humanity deserves to know the truth since that is the inevitable outcome even if it would take another thousand years, why not just skip a few steps and do it now? The incentives for an alien species to help humanity progress would be obvious as far as being able to utilize the innovative creativity humans provide, especially after the increased functioning which both species can benefit from, as well as the prospect of fostering a new and open interstellar relationship for its own sake. Any sort sort of material incentives would be irrelevant given the technological breakthroughs it would take to travel across the massive distances in space in any sort of reasonable amount of time and survive.
My Devils Advocate pops up and says that perhaps this alien civilization gains some sort of entertainment value by watching this pathetically inferior primate species run around and act as if they know something, sort of like a reality TV show where the audience has been encouraged to laugh at the expense of the contestants.
This may be true, however it does not give a reasonable explanation as to why this alien race would not have made contact by now. While running this sort of thought experiment in my head of what humanities reaction would be like if an alien species were to make contact, as in they were to 'prove' that they were superior to the human race both intellectually and technologically through some sort of exhibition of the toys they let child aliens play with in a 'public setting' that could be independently verified and scrutinized, I easily imagine that large portions of the population would decide that, wait a minute, I want off of this roller coaster ride just as the Amish do today, they decided they weren't ready to progress and humanity allowed them to stay in the time they were comfortable with, the same sort of situation would happen in this scenario.
I do want to make sure however that there is no confusion as far as what it would mean to have pockets of humanity holding out from this kind of progress. The Amish are not allowed to fence off their population from the rest of the world, they are not allowed to make it so their offspring are never told or shown how the rest of humanity lives and they aren't allowed to prevent their members from having the option to move out of that designated area to the 'modern world'. In fact, moving from the Amish world to the modern world with all of the technological advances does not require an enormous amount of effort, its perhaps a few hours ride on the donkey pulled carriage. I have not personally looked into the matter, but I'm willing to bet there are programs to help integrate Amish refugees into the modern world, the same sort of thing would take place in my alien scenario. The hardest part for an Amish person to make the jump is to get over the mental conditioning they've gone through in their regressed culture, its not like getting to the nearest modern city is like jumping off a cliff. These pockets who decide to 'get off the ride' so to speak, would still provide the potential entertainment value for this hypothetical alien reality TV if that was what these aliens cared about while still allowing the rest of humanity who wanted to continue forward, continue forward. Humans aren't exactly the most variable in the galaxy, there are probably a couple hundred thousand variations (if I were to be very generous) as far as personality and emotional reactions given certain stimulants in the external environment which would be more than covered by these pockets for their reality TV show given the billions who currently live on earth.
So back to my imaginary world where aliens have decided to openly and publicly contact humanity, there would be zones that individual pockets of humanity could retreat to while the rest of humanity decides to move ahead with the guidance of the superior analysis. This might not be instantaneous for everybody, but it would be an honest and open process of reflection and consideration of what people wanted to do, perhaps some pockets of humanity would move faster than others, showing what it would be like for everybody else, but it would be open and non-secretive.
My Devils Advocate pops up again and says, perhaps the aliens figured that the best way for humans to progress would be to present themselves secretly to governments and allow governments to make the decisions for their populations as a whole as far as which direction to evolve.
I've considered this argument and the idea doesn't seem to be in alignment with observed reality, as well as the logical implications of what it would mean to sacrifice the open dialog. If aliens presented themselves to the governments of earth, and governments are secretly hiding this from their populations in order to slowly prime people for the truth, why is it that we are still fighting wars with one another? Why would aliens believe governments were trustworthy with this sort of knowledge and power given the past few thousand years of almost nonstop war? Why is it that we can't seem to work together to get some of the most basic problems under control given the assumption that governments secretly know that aliens are watching humanity such as making sure everybody has enough food to eat which currently, out of the 7 billion humans on the planet, 1 billion are starving? Why would aliens who wished to help humanity not have realized that the fastest and most efficient means to global unity and cooperation between humans would be a collective understanding that we were not alone in the universe? There are quiet a few obvious questions that I'm not going to bother writing which don't seem to have coherent answers either which makes this kind of conspiracy theory ridiculous. Also the idea that aliens would give governments this information with the intention of creating chaos is also ridiculous since there would be much more efficient methods to induce mayhem given the superiority of an aliens technology and cognitive abilities, in other words the world would look a lot different if that was their goal.
This reasoning makes it hard for me to believe that aliens have visited earth and have decided to keep their presence unknown, which makes me confident that all of this effort put into alien conspiracy theories is not that well thought out, I could be wrong though and will be adding more to my post when the thoughts come up. Feedback is always welcome.
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