On Varieties of First Contact
-Contact with other tribes/civs/religions/etc on your own world that are different in some fundamental way or just different enough to justify slavery/extermination/etc.
-Contact with repeatable, reliable psionics when your population's "psions" are easily dismissed by many as hoaxes due to the unreliable nature of the abilities.
-Contact with sentient species and/or machines from other planets. Real world people have suggested that rather than another alien life you might instead make contact with a machine meant to explore the universe on behalf of a species chilling at home.
-Contact with entities that are energy rather than matter-based.
-Contact with something that seems to originate from beyond our reality or something that has passed through other realities.
-Contact with Post-Singularity level civ. Contact with Kardashev level civ higher than one's own.
-Contact with a species whose nature has led to vastly different ideas of morality/society/etc. A race where 1 in 10,000 people seem to be able to reliably talk to the dead could be quite different from ours, as would one in which one "gender" is more like an insensate plant that either fertilizes or incubates.
Aliens with exceedingly high birthrates might value life less than us (and vice versa). Strongly empathic aliens whose power is at least partially involuntary might also be nicer or more willing to crush freedom to minimize suffering in the long run. You can gas whole worlds to death and if everyone goes to sleep forever while experiencing euphoria the feeling will be pleasant for those particular psions.
Aliens might also strongly challenge our ideas of what is "Masculine" and "Feminine", and maybe there are entities who long ago decided sentience is actually a spectrum not a hard demarcation so anything at the human-level of intelligence or below could be kept as pets or used as livestock... yet oddly enough after inverting our abattoirs they sought the wisdom of our pigs and sheep...
-Contact with repeatable, reliable psionics when your population's "psions" are easily dismissed by many as hoaxes due to the unreliable nature of the abilities.
-Contact with sentient species and/or machines from other planets. Real world people have suggested that rather than another alien life you might instead make contact with a machine meant to explore the universe on behalf of a species chilling at home.
-Contact with entities that are energy rather than matter-based.
-Contact with something that seems to originate from beyond our reality or something that has passed through other realities.
-Contact with Post-Singularity level civ. Contact with Kardashev level civ higher than one's own.
-Contact with a species whose nature has led to vastly different ideas of morality/society/etc. A race where 1 in 10,000 people seem to be able to reliably talk to the dead could be quite different from ours, as would one in which one "gender" is more like an insensate plant that either fertilizes or incubates.
Aliens with exceedingly high birthrates might value life less than us (and vice versa). Strongly empathic aliens whose power is at least partially involuntary might also be nicer or more willing to crush freedom to minimize suffering in the long run. You can gas whole worlds to death and if everyone goes to sleep forever while experiencing euphoria the feeling will be pleasant for those particular psions.
Aliens might also strongly challenge our ideas of what is "Masculine" and "Feminine", and maybe there are entities who long ago decided sentience is actually a spectrum not a hard demarcation so anything at the human-level of intelligence or below could be kept as pets or used as livestock... yet oddly enough after inverting our abattoirs they sought the wisdom of our pigs and sheep...
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