59_214434_SP 16 [7.18.1963]

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Olf lCiAL
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throughout the whole system. Since the earliest known remains of
man have recently been dated at approximately one million seven-
hundred thousand years, a sustained drive for merely two hundred
thousand years may not be unreasonable. Of course, if we were to
run across representatives of this kind of interstellar race, they
would not be nearly as tame as the previously hypothesized chemical
Martians, and our policy would need to be revised accordingly.
Fortunately, travel time restrictions would inhibit their ability to
bring all forces to bear, in case we should develop differences of
viewpoint.
The third possibility, scientifically abhorrent, is that the Einstein
theory may only be an approximation, and an alien race which actually
travels faster than light exists. If we were to meet such a race, our
policy had better be to negotiate fast, because the implications of their
far better understanding and control of the fundamental forces of nature
would be obvious. If all the scientific speculation were to turn out wrong
and we were to stumble across an alien race, we would want to know
as quickly as possible which of the three types I have indicated it was,
as our diplomatic policy would damned well be influenced by the results.
CONCLUSIONS
Although all plausible scientific thinking suggests that we will not find
any other intelligence race, the probability that we will is finite, and
perhaps should not be completely ignored. Were we to find one, the
question of whether it was a race with primitive chemical space flight,
space flight equivalent to our best understanding of nuclear energy, or
space flight based on physics beyond Einstein should be ascertained as
rapidly as possible, since our policies would be affected in the most
drastically possible way. In any event, a policy of the immediate burying
of all Terrestrial hatchets would likely be in order. Even if we only
found tame chemical Martians, or merely the debris from some intra-
glactic survey mission, it would be a good idea to proceed on the assump-
tion that the human race would finally have found a bigger problem than
the ones it has created for itself. There likely is nothing to be done at
9FFIC~E ONLY