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Besides the supremely unlikely "because they're just cool like that". Any pretenses towards the selfless or altruistic sharing of their vast cosmic wisdom just for the sake of welcoming us into the galactic neighborhood or whatever should be dropped at the door. What are some practical reasons aliens might want to uplift us to near their level of science and technology?

The ones I'm most stuck on are that they're doing it for either scientific or military purposes, and while the former is valid, "because we felt like it" doesn't usually make for a compelling story. So that leaves military purposes, like the Salarians uplifting the Krogans in Mass Effect. But why? Surely robots would be more efficient soldiers? Or is there some benefit to having human soldiers over swarms of mass-produced drones?

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    $\begingroup$ Scientific is more plausible, in exchange of letting them know our culture/history they give us some access to technological advantages. $\endgroup$
    – Chinu
    Sep 1, 2016 at 4:03
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    $\begingroup$ They want to prevent this: youtube.com/watch?v=OcPqk-O-fD4 $\endgroup$
    – Thucydides
    Sep 1, 2016 at 18:06
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    $\begingroup$ In David Brin's Uplift series there are multiple sentient alien species who uplift less evolved aliens, making them into "client races". Plus humans have uplifted dolphins and chimps. It's a cool idea, and perhaps does a better job than other explanations of the common trope of the galaxy brimming with aliens all existing at roughly the same technological level (eg, Star Trek or Star Wars). But it was never made clear why technologically advanced aliens would need client races, aside from vague altruistic reasons. $\endgroup$
    – RobertF
    Sep 1, 2016 at 19:44
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    $\begingroup$ Grumble, grumble. The term "uplift" has typically referred to enhancing or improving the intelligence of species. To apply it to what is simply technology transfer only muddies the waters. Write out 100 times on a blackboard. "This is technology transfer and not uplift." $\endgroup$
    – a4android
    Sep 2, 2016 at 10:08
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    $\begingroup$ I wouldn't write off general benevolence, tbh, unless that's just not the story you want to tell. We don't have a clue what kind of social standards and ethical systems aliens would have, but this doesn't necessarily mean that they wouldn't have at least a few things in common with ours. $\endgroup$
    – Devsman
    Sep 2, 2016 at 12:49

38 Answers 38

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Because our solar system is full of resources, but extracting them is a huge pain. To strip-mine a planet or similarly harvest resources you would need millions or billions of workers, and you may not want to do the work yourself.

So instead, you give Earthlings a helping hand. By increasing the technical capabilities of humans (but not quite to your level) you create trade partners who will extract resources and maybe even invent new things for you. Teach them how to get to Mars and mineable asteroids quickly and easily, and give them new tools.

When it comes to obtaining those resources from the humans you will still have to trade something for them, but you didn't teach humans everything you know - you stayed a solid 1,000+ years ahead tech-wise. So now you're trading hundreds of tonnes of refined ore for services which your technology can render in a heartbeat.

Maybe one idea is that you did not teach humans advanced genetic techniques because of its ability to run amok - but if they can refine out 1,000,000 tonnes of Iridium for you then in trade you'll give them a cure for cancer.

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  • $\begingroup$ Which resources - please improve your answer by specifying that. Also specify why our particular system, but no any other in our Local Bubble which should have similar composition $\endgroup$
    – MolbOrg
    Sep 2, 2016 at 2:09
  • $\begingroup$ @MolbOrg - Pretty much any stable element on the periodic table (and potentially even some unstable ones, if they gave us enough technology). The most easily mined body would be the earth itself, followed by the moon, Mars... and perhaps even a planet like Europa. Asteroids could provide rich sources of elements such as Iridium (as suggested in text). It's not necessarily that the ores are unique to our area, just that the aliens don't want to do the work themselves. Perhaps similar to Americans and migrant farm workers (who are given just enough technology to do their job efficiently). $\endgroup$
    – GrinningX
    Sep 2, 2016 at 15:44
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I remember science fiction where the advanced species had accidentally started a series of supernovas at the galaxy core, and therefore needed to flee the galaxy to avoid them, but had lost the low level experience needed to survive on a new planet and therefore needed to take along another species with that low level experience.

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  • $\begingroup$ This is probably Stanley Schmidt's THE SINS OF THE FATHERS (1976) and its sequel LIFEBOAT EARTH (1978). The Rao-Chang tachyon drive was a nifty concept. $\endgroup$
    – a4android
    Sep 2, 2016 at 9:25
  • $\begingroup$ The best I can remember, it was in Larry Niven's Known Space universe, which also had Ringworld. $\endgroup$
    – user6030
    Sep 7, 2016 at 4:42
  • $\begingroup$ Ah ha! In that case, it might be part of the series of five novels written with Edward Lerner & starting with FLEET OF WORLDS (2007), and ending with FATE OF WORLDS (2012); "the Fleet of Worlds series consists of four prequels to, and one sequel to, Ringworld." $\endgroup$
    – a4android
    Sep 7, 2016 at 4:55
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Bureaucrats needed.

Ruling and administrating the galaxy is such a chore! Why can't somebody else do it?

Hm, over there is a planet full of beings that actually like ruling! Odd things, but useful. Let's educate them so they can take over the job.

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Fattening us for the slaughter.

Say this alien race requires, say, hosts, or slaves, or food, or whatever - but in vast quantities, in the trillions. Humans are a perfect candidate to supply this - maybe they're hardy laborers, or well-suited to parasitic takeover, or just tasty. But there's only a few billion of us. How do they make more? They could capture us and try to massively breed us in captivity, at great expense, for generations - with no guarantee we'd cooperate. Or they could take the easy way - give us the technology to easily expand beyond the petty confines of Earth, give us the medical technology to make sure we all stay alive and fertile for decades, give us the agricultural tech to eliminate hunger. Let us do what we've always done best: multiply. In next to no time, we've covered several solar systems and populated every planet to bursting. Then, the aliens swoop in with the slight technical edge they've retained under the guise of you humans wouldn't understand how to use it yet and take the entire race prisoner.

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It's quite simple. Thanks to their powerful technology and short tempers, the aliens fear that their species is headed for extinction and they don't know how to avoid it. As their population dwindles, the aliens think their best chance is to find a species that knows how to handle dangerous technology without self-destructing, and copy their methods. So they have been sharing their technology with one species after another, but after hundreds of negative outcomes, they are starting to lose hope.

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The aliens would sort of like our planet. Stupid rules prevent them from killing us directly. Share technologies that if developed are easily misused. So with a few simple components, if one of the earth people happens to hate their neighbor they can cook up a virus that will kill the neighbor and his entire family. They aren't very good with the technology, and a few mistakes are made. So sad, no more people. Well it would be a shame to waste a planet, and with no objections ....

A gentler and kinder cold war. Instead of having the nastiest weapon to insure your protection, you give your foes the nasty weapon and wait to see if they destroy themselves. If the plan fails we can always leave and see if they will kindly vacate their planet in some other way. With cameras, you can document their fate. It plays well on Galaxy TV reality shows. Seems like a win-win scenario for the aliens.

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Impatience, and a recognition of the pitfalls of "Not Invented Here". So they want to contact us and don't want to wait.

There's one aspect of the Salarians worth noting that could applied to your advanced alien race - they have a shorter life span than a lot of the other aliens races out there. They populate fine, so they're not going to go extinct, but a single alien wanting to meet a new alien race can't wait 1000 years for them to catch up and acclimatize. It's part of, but not the entire reason, that Salarians chose to just uplift Krogan to fight the Rachni, and the Turians to fight the Krogan. They either don't have the time, or don't want to burn the time, doing slow methodological contact with a new alien race, especially if they're finding a bunch of other, unlifted species.

So, they decide to take their universal translators that worked for a bunch of other races after a while, and go to Earth. It doesn't work initially on any languages here, but the easiest way to get it to learn is to be in the field, so...they drop down in France.

Once in France, they learn enough to communicate to the French there, and then walk a little out of the borders East to Germany. Wait - the universal translator has to train again? Well, this is annoying - let's go South - wait, Italy has another language?

Well, this is annoying - let's get to orbit and go somewhere more East. Wait- now we have to do this translation for Mandarin, Cantonese, 3 different alphabets for Japanese texts? This is getting ridiculous - let's go South-West, that seemed promising...or not.

Wait - this language North West of Mandarin and Cantonese is...using glyphs that are similar but mean different things than the ones in France and Germany?

"Hey, so one of these people pointed us towards an page on their 'internet' that translates 108 of their roughly 6,500 languages. We should just hand them our translation technology and help them integrate their existing translation capabilities into our systems, so we can easily talk to them, and they can figure out the implementation details."

Not every alien in their race is going to be Kirrahe and want to hold the line of doing the intelligence work and "Hold The Line" on giving the new alien race more technology than they need to achieve mutual goals. Others are more like Mordin, and prefer to "Get the job done and go home".

You can apply this to a whole suite of problems, but if they ever need to compare what time things happened historically, it'll be easier honestly for them to give us their hardware and software and say "Right - this is how our timelines worked for our planets, this is where we currently are in the timeline in our representation - can you just figure out how to map your things to ours?".

This, of course, ignoring the ways to interface with newer technology, and the variable ways to make it accessible for other humans, that would likely have also come up with other, similarly under-advance alien races. After enough situations, an advanced alien race just says "Right - let's just help them make our tech backwards compatible with theirs, or theirs forward compatible with ours. We don't need to hold up our pride on our particularly specific implementation - we want it to work in 1-2 years, not on the timescales of decades or centuries.".

TL:DR; It's just quicker and easier to let an under-advanced alien race help an advanced alien race interact with them, even if they have to give up dangerous technology to do so.

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Glad to help you out

I work at GRPH Advanced Filters, I remember an alien engineer visiting our factory in 2012.

Now we know what had happened. The alien expedition ship did have engineers on board, but no equipment to make grapheme foil. They knew of Earth's technical developments around grapheme and about our company's effective way of producing foil, so they landed a personnel shuttle, in secret, in the vicinity of our factory. Afterward we were told the aliens took a few weeks to spy on our methods, without us noticing them.. but none of their engineers had the knowledge to use our equipment to make the grapheme. And we run production 24/7 with supervision.

So they decided to order the product.

At first, they used a mailbox on Madeira and sales got a bit suspicious: they ordered a single piece, plus one copy: advanced stuff, a non-standard size.. and sales did not know of any company on Madeira or elsewhere that could use these products. As a result, the order got stalled upstairs. It did not reach our lab.

One morning, my collegue Mitchell found Ytyzzu, one of the alien engineers, nosing in our manuals. Now my collegue Mitchell is a strange fellow and in fact the perfect person for a close encounter. And.. Ytyzzu excused himself for his unusual presence and appearance, in perfect English. Mitchell simply asked what he was doing and Ytyzzu explained the situation. One spare engine part was missing, that is: a grapheme foil needed to desalinate fuel for their impulse engine. Ship stranded on Ganymedes, no impulse.

In the end, we (me, Bob and Mitchell) got enthousiastic about the prospect to help Ytyzzu. It would take 3 days. We put it as "research", avoiding issues with sales and management.. Ytyzzu himself could be easily hidden (squirrel sized aliens are)

Ytyzzu's visit did not reach the newspapers.. we were happy to help, and they payed us with some useful tips about grapheme. My collegue Bob took the credit for that knowledge, Ytyzzu was very happy and gratefull we were prepared to keep things secret. Ytyzzu left in the night, with his precious engine part.. no one has seen him since.

Bob made promotion and we all got a raise, recently. We're very gratefull to Ytyzzu.. his suggestions allowed the factory to improve several filters, and maybe create a new type of battery.

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