>>949967103Most would agree that Humans are a very violent species, and some think that aliens are aware of us and our violence and avoid contacting us for this reason. A lot of people naively assume that aliens are going to be far more peaceful than we are. I think this assumption is flawed, because by the very nature of being a civilization and the master of its home planet a species had to by necessity become the most dominant species of that planet. Its hard to conceive how this level of dominance could have been achieved in the first place without violence. If you're a peaceful herbivore species like a deer, you're probably not going to evolve into an advanced civilization on your world. Predators are inherently more intelligent than Prey, because they have to be. Being a predator is a prerequisite for becoming sentient and developing a civilization in the first place.
That being said, it might be possible for a civilized species to shed its violent tendencies after it managed to reach that threshold, but I think being violent is necessary to get there in first place. Maybe an alien civilization shed its violent past, but I think in studying their evolutionary history there will always be a lot of hunting and warfare before it got to that point. Even if they do manage to eventually shed that, it is naive to take it as a given and just assume that they would. That's why I think it is a terrible mistake to try to speed-rush our way towards making contact with some alien species. We don't know what is out there, but whatever is out there that has risen to the top of the foodchain of its planet has managed to do so for a reason and that reason is probably NOT because they are benevolent pacifist hippies. Don't be naive.
