PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 62 Blindsight
effective against the intelligence that had pulled off the Firefall? If
the unknown was hostile, we were probably doomed no matter
what we did. The Unknown was technologically advanced—and
there were some who claimed that that made them hostile by
definition. Technology Implies Belligerence, they said.
I suppose I should explain that, now that it's completely
irrelevant. You've probably forgotten after all this time.
Once there were three tribes. The Optimists, whose patron
saints were Drake and Sagan, believed in a universe crawling with
gentle intelligence—spiritual brethren vaster and more enlightened
than we, a great galactic siblinghood into whose ranks we would
someday ascend. Surely, said the Optimists, space travel implies
enlightenment, for it requires the control of great destructive
energies. Any race which can't rise above its own brutal instincts
will wipe itself out long before it learns to bridge the interstellar
gulf.
Across from the Optimists sat the Pessimists, who genuflected
before graven images of Saint Fermi and a host of lesser
lightweights. The Pessimists envisioned a lonely universe full of
dead rocks and prokaryotic slime. The odds are just too low, they
insisted. Too many rogues, too much radiation, too much
eccentricity in too many orbits. It is a surpassing miracle that
even one Earth exists; to hope for many is to abandon reason and
embrace religious mania. After all, the universe is fourteen billion
years old: if the galaxy were alive with intelligence, wouldn't it be
here by now?
Equidistant to the other two tribes sat the Historians. They didn't
have too many thoughts on the probable prevalence of intelligent,
spacefaring extraterrestrials— but if there are any, they said,
they're not just going to be smart. They're going to be mean.
It might seem almost too obvious a conclusion. What is Human
history, if not an ongoing succession of greater technologies
grinding lesser ones beneath their boots? But the subject wasn't
merely Human history, or the unfair advantage that tools gave to
any given side; the oppressed snatch up advanced weaponry as
readily as the oppressor, given half a chance. No, the real issue
was how those tools got there in the first place. The real issue was