partis Wrote:I dont think they would see us as we see chimps, if they are more intelligent than us they must be able to recognize our significant intelligence too, at least the gap wouldnt be so large as between man and animal and they would also understand that… this is assuming there is highly intelligent and evolved aliens.
Though they can only be life forms, maybe they just find us dangerous
It's hard to speculate about a truly alien mind. However, pigs being so much smarter than cows doesn't keep them off the menu...nor dogs in some countries. Many love cats & dogs and they, like chimps, get tested on, sometimes in sadistic tests just to see the effects of a beauty cream.
Plenty of humans truly believe black people are a type of monkey, that is if they could they'd reclassified blacks (and perhaps other minorities) as such rather than humans. Our history is filled with the belief that various people don't have souls, or that souls are in the blood, or that other types of people (gender, nationality, etc) are somehow inferior. How much more likely to this be if it were a being from a completely different world? (Btw, had our history gone even just a little different then Nazi Germany may have been the ones to first plant a flag on the moon...)
Likewise, there are some clever chimps and gorillas who can sign, and at least in some cases it shows true communication. (Funny story I heard from a guy whose girlfriend used to work with I think Koko is that she asked, in Sign, what color something was over and over as Koko just kept touching his wrist and then she realized the watch she was wearing was the same color and asked, in Sign, "Same color as my watch?" The gorilla gave the most exasperated look that the idiot finally got it.
) Do you think they're truly sentient? That we should no longer be able to hold them in cage or do experiments on them? If you think no, they're sentient and deserve to be treated better than they are today then you're in a minority position.
And to me it isn't much of a stretch to see that just as most humans look down on chimps and gorillas who can only communicate with us by Sign (in a limited way at that) then an alien brain, especially one more advanced than ours in addition to being more technological AND is telepathic when we are not, could look down on us in the exact same way. Just because you feel smart from a HUMAN perspective doesn't mean you would be considered smart from an ALIEN perspective. And if the nature of alien sentience was anything like human sentience then they could even be dumber than us in many ways but they'd still see us as not being worth treated with dignity, at least not when it conflicts with the demands of whatever civilization they have.