I don't know the answer either, but I sure as hell know it's not my decision to make for somebody else.

Your point about possible alien intelligences is an excellent one. How would we want to be treated if the shoe were on the other foot? I don't know my answer -- I suspect I would be all for change even if it were uncomfortable. But I absolutely know that I would be the one to make my personal decision about the matter. That's not for others to decide for me.

We have a word for a situation where beings are allowed to live in fake isolation, while we secretly observe them and feel great about ourselves for letting them live as close to their natural state as we can allow. It's called a "zoo"

I don't know what they're going to do here. The isolated tribe in India live in a protected zone, but the government regularly offers them a chance to make contact, and the tribe drives them off with weapons.

That's a way forward that is neither dragging them into the 21st century nor running a zoo. I'm not advocating for that, of course, just pointing out that contact/isolation is a false dichotomy.

Yeah, I was aware of the peculiarities of this particular case (the tribe not wanting contact) and chose to ignore them in order to make the larger point.

Science fiction is great. It lets us look at some of these issues without (perhaps) so much emotional heat.

So let's assume that in the 1950s, aliens contacted the president of the United States -- a theme which recurs over and over again in sci-fi. The president decided that we were too primitive and paranoid to handle contact with a galactic civilization, so he told them to leave us alone.

What I'm saying is that whatever the nature of the leader, whether they are the president, or prime minister, or head of NATO, or head of the UN, or whoever else, it doesn't matter. They don't have the moral authority to be making decisions like that for me. No part of the social contract allows leaders to make decisions of such huge import and keep them secret.

So while I support any individual's right to be left alone and live however they like, I do not support people who are presumed leaders keeping information of that magnitude from others.

Just to speculate a bit, if you're the chief of a tribe, or part of the power structure, it probably sounds pretty good to be left alone. After all, who wants change? However if you're a mother who just watched her 5-year-old kid die from something that was easily prevented? You might have different ideas. Keeping the mother uniformed so that you can continue exercising your power over her is immoral and I do not support it.

As you point out, in the real world, these kinds of things are murky at best, with lots of little conditions and details you want to consider. All I'm saying is that it's not acceptable to simply throw your hands up and give up. From what little I know, I think the idea of repeated gentle contact -- as much as it can be done without annoying them too much -- is probably the wisest course of action. This would allow us to be sure we have made a reasonable and polite effort to inform them of the outside world, as well as trying to catch the newer members of the tribe as they are born and grow up. After all, even if you're left alone, it is reasonable to expect that you still have some kind of relationship to your neighbors.

I remember I said to my philosophy teacher, 'nobody considers native tribes to be poor or miserable, even though they lack material comfort,' and she replied 'I think the comfort of these situations greatly depends on whether you're male or female.'

Some members of the tribe drive them off with weapons.

Others are children who do not get to make a choice until AFTER they have been indoctrinated with the tribe's values.

We see the same problem in the Muslim world. In some countries, Muslim women are treated as property and not allowed outside without a chaperone. How can they make a free choice to join the West when their male guardians say "no" for them?

We see the same problem universally.

We're all brought up in societies which indoctrinate. We're all introduced to ideas at an early age, which we grow attached to. It's unavoidable.

I'd want to be left alone - give one example of colonialism that worked out well for indigenous people, and I'll maybe change my mind.

Ok.

India is now an "important" country. Burgeoning technologically and culturally, what it received from Britain was access to the intellectual firestorm of the Enlightenment. Hindu thinkers were involved in the formation of Universalism, the idea that all religions were different aspects of the same thing and could be united.

Of course, it cost them the pain of the Pakistan-India divide, the struggle of Gandhi, and a confusing cultural identity among a people that didn't necessarily have a singular cultural identity in the first place. But what price is too much?

South Africa paid the price, and is now among the most advanced of African nations.

Of course, most indigenous peoples just got royally fucked. Aboriginal Australians and the Maori. So I suppose your point in general holds.

It is a bit presumptuous to assume that India or S.A. would not have made progress or exchanged "intellectual" information without a country sailing over and lording over it for a hundred years.

Disclaimer: I am an Indian.

I'm not assuming anything, I'm making an assertion--an assertion that could be right or wrong. In particular I am not assuming/asserting that India or S.A. would not have made progress.

I am saying that the effects of colonial rule are so unstable and so varied that it can be difficult to the point of meaninglessness to say a country would be "better" or "worse" without it.

The Bengal Renaissance is a documented movement, founded and driven by people exposed to Western thought. That doesn't mean the movement wasn't theirs, that they weren't the ones producing "intellectual" information. But they were in a different place because of colonialism than they would have been without, one where Indians went to school in Britain and where people were writing letters to each other across the ocean.

Technically, I agree, but using this same logic, the effects of _any_ major historical incident are so unstable and so varied that "it can be difficult to the point of meaninglessness to say a country would be "better" or "worse" without it."

You should look at India's share of world GDP before the British came and after they left.

GDP is one measure of a country's power. I should point out that measuring the GDP of India prior to British imposition is a little bit hairy since India was not really a singular political entity.

Besides, my point was never that India didn't suffer; my point was to illustrate some of the advantages of colonial rule and demonstrate _just how muddy_ the interference of a technologically superior culture can become.

There are much less invasive options for contact than colonialism. Nobody said we have to move ourselves into some indigenous peoples' lands in order to offer them the chance to accept or reject a modern life.

But the effect is the same - their society would be absorbed, and probably forgotten.

It's like time travel - you can't go back because you don't know what kind of effects you'll have on the future. In this case you don't know what kind of effects contact will have on their (the tribe's) future.

So how about Japan for example? Do you think contact with the west was bad for them?

you're comparing different things, or do you think that a highly advanced CIVILIZATION like the japanese encountering the west is similar to a TRIBE of HUNTERS-GATHERERS.... damn!

No. I was referring to messages by lwhi and nitrogen. As nitrogen said, there are less invasive options to contact them than colonization and there are cases where it is beneficial to the (in some ways) less advanced civilization. It might not have been fun for the japanese when the westerners first came there, but in the long run it was a good thing. And while the japanese culture was certainly changed, it was not destroyed or forgotten.

Hong Kong.