Douglas Raybeck, professor of anthropology emeritus, contributed a chapter in a new book titled Extraterrestrial Altruism. The book was edited by Douglas A. Vakoch, director of Interstellar Message Composition at the SETI Institute and professor of clinical psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and was published by Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.
According to the publisher’s website, the book examines “a basic assumption of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI): that extraterrestrials will be transmitting messages to us for our benefit” as well as the “issue of whether there are dangers in transmitting signals into space to make contact with extraterrestrial intelligence.”
Raybeck’s chapter, “Predator: Prey Models and Contact Considerations,” focuses on whether or not “an intelligent alien will be beneficent, neutral or hostile.” Using ethological models derived from terrestrial predators and prey, Raybeck suggests that extraterrestrial behavior would be affected by cooperation and cohesion within the group and that “toward outsiders, the behavior of such organisms may well be far more exploitative.”
