North Sentinel Island is part of the Andaman archipelago, belonging to India, in the Bay of Bengal. The island is home to the Sentinelese, an indigenous people strictly isolated from the rest of humanity. They are protected by Indian law, and any approach to the island closer than five nautical miles (9km) is prohibited. This is to protect the tribal community (estimated to be up to 400 strong) from contact with infectious diseases. The area is patrolled by the Indian Navy, which maintains the strict no-contact policy with threat of force.
The Sentinelese have attacked vessels that stray too close to the shore with arrows, as well as firing them at low-flying helicopters. In 2018 an American Christian missionary, John Allen Chau, was killed by the islanders after bribing local fishermen to take him there. Responding to Chau's death, the Indian government implemented even stricter regulations to protect the isolation of the Sentinelese and prevent any further attempts at contact. The Indian government has made it clear that the Sentinelese people should be left alone and that any attempts to make contact with them are illegal.
I mention the Sentinelese in the context of alien life in our galaxy and Fermi's Paradox. This is the 'zoo hypothesis', which states that alien life intentionally avoids contact with humans to allow for our natural evolution and sociocultural development, and avoiding interplanetary contamination. This is the most widely posited theory explaining the apparent absence of extraterrestrial life on Earth, despite its mathematical likelihood (see the Drake Equation).
The North Sentinel Island metaphor is useful; casting ourselves - a technologically advanced civilisation thousands of years ahead of this indigenous tribe - in the role of interstellar (or perhaps interdimensional or time-travelling) non-human intelligence. Flip this on its head and you see it from the aliens' point of view.
Despite our technological superiority - are we qualitatively better than the Sentinelese? We can only assume that their lives are shorter, less comfortable and more brutish than ours - but are material luxuries the only things that count in our human lives? It would be fascinating to learn about Sentinelese spiritual beliefs and practices; how they see the world around them - those white lines drawn high above them by winged craft in the blue sky, the distant, giant ships at sea, the stars in the heavens at night.
But we won't - and it's for their good.
Contact with more-advanced and less-advanced peoples does not end well the latter.
The most benign form of contact with the Sentinelese that I can imagine would entail not so much technology transfer, but transfer of best practices suited to their current technological level; improved hygiene using nothing more than what they have to hand, improved agricultural and animal-husbandry practices, improved social interaction based on the notion of win-win and improving trust (assuming they don't have this already). But not flooding them with consumer goods and providing them with electricity and household goods. Such contact would require specific protocols to be deployed, standard procedures for ensuring no unintended long-term harm. Certainly spreading the word of Jesus Christ, or any other theological or ideological construct would not be allowed.
Now, returning to any advanced space-faring civilisation that might view us as we view the Sentinelese, I consider it highly likely that some form of 'no-contact' policy is in place with regards our species.
The only form of contact that I could posit would be in the form of consciousness-to-consciousness communication, non-physical - indeed metaphysical - which would grow in frequency, regularity and intensity over centuries or indeed millennia. All the while, Homo sapiens would develop technologically and spiritually, evolving away from a bipedal mammal prone to anger and territorial warfare towards a more angelic being.
Lent 2022: Day 24
Memory, identity and reincarnation
Lent 2021: Day 24
Reconciling science and spirituality
Lent 2020: Day 24
Refutation (II)
Zoo animals tend to be the ones that are not very tasty or domesticable.
ReplyDelete"All the while, Homo sapiens would develop technologically and spiritually, evolving away from a bipedal mammal prone to anger and territorial warfare towards a more angelic being".
Proto Humans fell into a separate evolutionary path from photo chimps , diverging over 7 million years ago. There is no evidence that the last common ancestor of chimps and humans was into territorial warfare, chimps could have evolved into this state given the environment they lived in, just as humans could have evolved into more cooperative behaviour given the environment that early humans thrived in.
Why could not the LCM of Chimps and Humans may have been the purest angelic form that has fallen from grace from the garden of Eden. Perhaps one should be wary of the the seduction of Narrative!
On a separate note this video is worth a watch;
Vlad Vexler - Putin: The Problem of Evil in Politics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diZQCY4Ird0
Marek
@ Marek
ReplyDeleteNothing known about the behaviours of the LCA of Man and Chimp... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee%E2%80%93human_last_common_ancestor
Here's Chat GPT's answer to my question...
"Researchers have used various methods to infer some aspects of the LCA's behavior based on what we know about the behavior of modern humans and chimpanzees, as well as the anatomy and genetics of the LCA.
For example, studies of LCA fossils suggest that it had a relatively small brain and a body adapted for tree-climbing, which suggests that it was likely arboreal and lived in forested areas. Genetic analyses also suggest that the LCA had a diverse diet that included both plants and animals.
It's also believed that the LCA had some behavioral traits that are shared by modern humans and chimpanzees, such as sociality and tool use. Both humans and chimpanzees are highly social animals, living in complex social groups, and it's likely that the LCA had similar social behaviors. In addition, tool use has been observed in both humans and chimpanzees, and it's possible that the LCA had the ability to use tools as well.
Overall, while we can't know for certain what the behavior of the LCA was like, we can make some inferences based on what we know about the behavior of its descendants and the available evidence from fossils and genetics."
The AI jury is still out!