Here’s
something that I have said for years. When a technologically superior
civilization encounters a technologically inferior civilization, that
technologicalyl inferior civilization ceases to exist. We have seen numerous
examples of this through the course of our history. We don’t have to look very
far into the past to see it.
Sitting
Bull, the Hunkpapa Lakota medicine man warned the Lakota to leave everything on
the battlefield after the defeat of the five companies with George Custer. His
point was that they, the Lakota, did not have the technology to reproduce those
artifacts, whether they were guns, steel axes and knives, or even the cooking
utensils. He knew that an iron pot was better for cooking than a clay pot and a
steel ax was sharper than one created from stone. He knew that the Lakota would
become dependent on those things and that would alter their society… probably
not for the good.
It
was in 1960, I believe, that the Brookings Institute published a document in
which they made this observation. The superior technology would overwhelm the
society without the technology and that would doom that technologically
inferior society.
I mention all this now because I just reread a book that my mother bought for me when I was ten. It was a Fawcett Gold Medal science fiction novel entitled Four from Planet Five. It is about four children who arrive at an Antartic research station in what seems to be a spaceship. Clearly, anyone with a spaceship, back in the middle of the twentieth century anyway, had a superior technology.
Normally,
this wouldn’t be of interest to anyone into UFOs, and one or two of the things
in the book wouldn’t be of interest to those who read science fiction. However,
there was something I found on page 59 that might be of interest to both
groups.
To
quote from the book:
And
he had an immense, a fascinated yearning to work with the innumerable
possibilities the technology of the children’s race suggested.
“I
don’t like any of this,” he commented to Gail. “If they children’s people find
out where they are I don’t see how we humans of Earth can survive the contact
with so superior a culture. The American Indians collapsed from meeting a
civilization not nearly so far ahead of them. The Polynesians died of mere
contact with a whale-ship culture. But we’ve got to face something a lot more
deadly.”
You
can argue that these examples aren’t just of contact but of warfare. Yes, there
was fighting between the expansion of the Europeans into the native
territories, but it was the superiority of the technology that actually doomed
the indigenous peoples. The rifle and pistol were superior to the bow and arrow
but the Indians couldn’t make them. They had to rely on the technology of the
Europeans and the Americans for those items.
And
it wouldn’t have been just weapons. All sorts of items would be introduced and
even if the contact had been benign, the end result would have been pretty much
the same. The technology would have won.
But
the real point is that this concept, which I have quoted often in the past, was
out there, in the world of science fiction before the academics had put it down
on paper. Oh, there might by other examples of this in the anthropological
history of the human race. I just found it interesting that the concept was
part of a science fiction novel published in 1959 that has an impact on the
world of the UFO.
