Malign Entity

This is an awkward threat as at the moment we know of no other highly intelligent entities other than our own home-grown version. The likelihood is that there were high intelligences that developed in the past, but moved on, no longer really interested in what we do except for a certain sense of nostalgia, hoping that the current inhabitants will survive and thrive. It’s likely that it would be a hands-off approach in the same way we treat a band of apes trying to survive in the wild. They would probably have much more useful and predictable mechanisms than mankind at their beck and call, so unless you have a number that go in for vintage and collectable species it is unlikely they would step in except if things were to go really wrong and we were going to, or something else was going to wipe out everything else.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we were a target of observation and maybe amusement with an option to temporarily experience what it’s like as a human avatar, maybe seeing the effects of a research program, inserting their personality in a limited fashion. To have too much of it, or too much outside knowledge would simply be playing at being human. ‘To think like an ant, first you need to be an ant.’ So, no clever additions, certainties, or reset buttons.

If a civilisation or race is sufficiently advanced then most of the human motivations would not apply. If they required certain things they could simply take them and use machines far beyond our capability to stop them, so the idea of being simply ‘king of the ants,’ would mean very little. There would probably be non-intervention rules they would follow, those that didn’t being seen as prone to primitive and aberrant or abhorrent impulses and regarded in a fashion we consider psychopaths.

But what of non-human intelligence? They would be by definition not driven by the human motivations and possibly not hampered by human sensitivities. Intelligence pre-supposes human modes of thought, such things as a hive mind maybe having other plans than a logical one. What is logic to them may not be logic to us. There may be other ways of dealing with things like numbers, other than human mathematics, ways of dealing with the physical, other than human physics,  human designed systems. They may use multi-dimensional colour and shapes for this purpose, so a translation into numerical models may not work.

The idea is a that any creature or being that is advanced with have an advanced multi-faceted mind, but it may be that a successful entity may simply have a simple and elegant system that is superior in effective form, but less complicated than humans. Simple methods and algorithms may take the place of more complicated ones with their inherent overhead and drawbacks. We work on the form like 2a^c3+d3-f6x23.2345-fxcxs=2, compared to 1+1=2 in another entity. Complexity, speed and evolutionary age doesn’t necessarily mean more advanced, a dinosaur more coherent than a complicated jelly fish, a calculator faster than a human brain, an Aspidella of a billion years ago more advanced than a single celled organism of today.