“Getting Real About
First Contact – The Conquistador Hypothesis”
By James and John
Gaines
In the
first installment of this series, “The Ferengi Hypothesis,” we promised to
return to the possibility that aliens contacting the Earth may do so, not to
eradicate or consume humanity, but to enslave them. This topic already has a very large science
fiction footprint, ranging from movie classics such as “This Island Earth,”
where humans are to be a subservient race to the more advanced Metalunans on a
colonized Earth, to the laughable “Future War,” where humans have been abducted
to serve silly cyborgs on a distant world.
Popular culture has further explored the prospects of various kinds of
alien abduction, often with the goal of “high-jacking” the human race through
the introduction of alien DNA, a long-running theme in the television series,
“The X Files.” Such widespread interest
shows that this contact hypothesis, though in many aspects not the most likely,
does deserve a deeper scientific and anthropological investigation.
Science
would suggest that the usefulness of humans as off-planet slaves would be
pretty limited. Preparations for a trip
to Mars have shown that even for such a short journey, in cosmic terms, our
species is not well-suited. We require
rather large amounts of food, moisture, breathable air, and waste treatment
facilities that make interplanetary travel – at least with our present
imaginable technology – very difficult.
“2001, A Space Odyssey,” which had the advantage of Arthur C. Clarke’s
probing mind, proposed to solve these problems by keeping the larger part of an
interplanetary crew in some form of suspended animation. NASA’s plans for a Mars mission do not
include this scenario, but it is still unclear how our physiology would stand
up to the everyday effects of space travel.
Much of the experimentation on the International Space Station and other
orbital missions has concerned the deleterious influence of prolonged
weightlessness, but this problem is probably less serious than that of
prolonged exposure to cosmic rays.
Recent prospects of enveloping a manned Mars vehicle in layers of common
plastics may prove useful, but their overall efficacy has yet to be
proven. Furthermore, these short-run
considerations are only part of the problem, because as the film “Avatar”
postulates, mankind’s abilities to function even on “earthlike” planets may be
limited by all sorts of toxicities in alien ecosystems. In addition, humans on an alien world would
be subject to attack by alien micro-organisms and could easily suffer the fate
of the Martian invaders in Wells’s War of
the Worlds, felled by the most humble of unfamiliar life forms. It would appear that, all in all, the value
of human beings as space slaves would probably be rather low.
More
plausible is the possibility that aliens may desire to exploit the human race in situ, keeping them on Earth to
perform various tasks the aliens judge unsuitable for themselves. This is the key to what we call “The
Conquistador Hypothesis.” As with “The
Ferengi Hypothesis,” we believe that useful speculation in this direction can
take place in consideration of previous examples on our own planet, especially
first contacts made during the Age of Discovery, when Europeans began
exploiting native cultures. While
noteworthy comparisons can be made with some parts of Asia, Africa, and the
Pacific, the most massive examples come from the New World, where Spanish and
Portuguese colonies sought to set up slavery-based economies for the benefit of
the “mother countries” across the oceans.
The
large-scale enslavement of Native Americans became a priority concern of the
Spanish as soon as Christopher Columbus’s second journey to the Indies. He longed to enslave the hostile Carib
tribes, despite initial opposition from the Crowns, but also took over a
thousand Arawak slaves and sent several hundred to Spain. The fate of these transported slaves was
similar to what is described in previous paragraphs about humans transported to
other planets: they died in huge numbers during and immediately after
shipment. In fact, they proved less
movable than African slaves who were already being imported as house servants
and luxury court servants by the Portuguese.
However, in the meantime, Columbus was pioneering another sort of in situ slavery to collect the newfound
gold on the island of Hispaniola. His
scheme deserves close attention because it is fiendishly systematic and
applicable on a large scale. After
corrupting or intimidating all the leadership of the Native American tribes,
Columbus established a gold quota that each individual had to render to the
Spanish, in exchange for which they obtained a metal token to be worn for
identification. Any natives without a
token were subject to cruel and immediate execution. As administered by Columbus, this system
failed, inasmuch as it provoked often violent resistance from the enslaved,
rapidly destroyed the very infrastructure that made implementation possible in
the first place, and produced very little profit. Within a generation, most of the Native
American population of Hispaniola was eradicated. On the other hand, this failure was due to
cluelessness and stupidity on the part of Columbus and his minions. An alien power contacting Earth could easily
avoid the pitfalls by carefully maintaining human elites to administer an
exploitative system, sweetening the pot for them by distributing a fraction of
the profits, and managing terror in a more selective process to ensure the
compliance of human slaves. As we
suggested in “The Ferengi Hypothesis,”
the mere possibility of such an approach makes it absolutely essential
in the case of first contact that tight cooperation be maintained among human
leaders and that protocols to avoid corruption be in place before contact
occurs.
Columbus was only the first of the
Conquistadores, and tactics changed as the Spanish Empire moved onto the
American continents. In Mexico, Cortes
raised the divide-and-conquer strategy Columbus had dabbled with among native
tribes to a fine art. Recent historians
such as Peter Koch, in The Aztecs, the
conquistadors, and the Making of Mexican Culture, have shown how Cortes would pretend to befriend one
tribe, offering military and economic assistance in order to obtain information
and logistical support, then move on to an adjoining area where the process
would be repeated. His most brilliant
coup was to inveigle the Totonacs, Cempoallans, and even the originally hostile
Tlaxcalans into aiding his advance against the Aztecs, since these harassed
peoples had bitter scores to settle with their oppressors on the other side of
the sierra. The Aztecs, prey to political and spiritual
confusion, allowed the Spanish and the allied horde to approach until it was
too late. Aztecs had maintained their
dominance over surrounding tribes through a combination of bloody terror
through human sacrifice, combined with a strangely benign form of “flower wars”
that obtained slaves without destroying the main source of needed manpower. Perhaps they thought the Spanish would
continue their strategy in such a way as to offer them, in turn, military
support against other peoples. In any
case, their response – a combination of bluster, mumbo-jumbo, gifts, and honors
– was a pathetic failure. Once the
Aztecs had been slaughtered in a series of battles, all Mexico lay at the feet
of the Spaniards and they systematically asserted rule by mollifying native
groups at first and then ruthlessly crushing any opposition. Though the Aztec king Monteczuma has been
critiqued and psychoanalyzed by generations of scholars who blamed him
personally for the downfall of his regime, today’s world leaders show that they
have learned little from history. The modus operandi of the current American president in particular shows
marked similarity to Monteczuma’s approach to “international” problems, and
there is no indication that Barack Obama would behave differently in an interplanetary
situation. In fact, his recent
insistence on “American exceptionality” would invite any tricky alien
strategist to use a typical Cortes policy co-option to obtain his aid in
subduing any parts of the planet unwilling to comply with the “advantages”
being offered them.
Of course, the goal of the Spanish
invasion of Mexico from the beginning was precious metals. Cortes was only sent to conquer them after
intelligence had provided adequate proof of a fortune to be dug out of the earth. The development of large-scale mining , as
well as the construction of a European-style infrastructure of palaces, forts
and churches, required huge pools of physical labor in a country where the
wheel had not yet been put to economic use.
Other types of labor-intensive exploitation, such as harvesting lumber
and cultivating plantations, accompanied the administrative projects. In most cases where the Aztecs had already
established the bases for slavery, it was simple for the Spanish to redirect
manpower to their own priorities. When
necessary, less docile elements of the Native American population could be
forcefully “settled” around mission churches, where the priests, under the
guise of spiritual conversion, would also provide intelligence and surveillance
for the forces of order, at the same time instilling an ideology of total
obedience and an idolatry of poverty among the populace. Humans could expect, in the event of a
Conquistador-type contact, that the same process would be followed:
divide-and-conquer politics, assimilation of existing earthly channels of
authority, phased economic domination, and installation of an ideological
system (perhaps based on digital communication?) to ensure the progressive
elimination of resistance and the transformation of the consciousness of the
slave population. Again, the only
obvious way to impede such a program is a pre-coordinated opposition from the
very earliest point of encounter.
Pizarro’s conquest of Peru in many
ways mirrors the Cortes strategy in Mexico and that of other minor
conquistadores in other parts of the Americas, but adds one glaring addition:
kidnapping. Pizarro’s expedition was in
some aspects much more vulnerable than that of Cortes, at least until he
arranged to be admitted to Cuzco and in a commando-like operation kidnapped the
Incan king Atahualpa. Rafael Varón Gabai
describes in Francisco Pizarro and his
Brothers: The Illusion of Power in Sixteenth-Century Peru the intricacies
of the carrot-and-stick approach employed by the Spaniards while the Incas were
locked in internal feuds. When Pizarro
demanded ransom for the king’s release, it appeared to offer the Incans the
prospect of reestablishing the status quo
ante and perhaps ousting usurpers
from their territory. Yet the very value
of the ransom they raised assured that the Spaniards would never do any such
thing. The rooms full of treasure so
ignited the greed of the conquistadores that they were incapable of
relenting. Of course there was a certain
amount of palace intrigue involved in Atahualpa’s fate, which in some aspects
bore more resemblance to The West Wing
or House of Cards than to the type of
human-versus-alien shootout that is the stock of sci fi thrillers. Yet it is not impossible that a first contact
encounter on the conquistador model might involve a small number of operatives
entering the White House or the Pentagon and engineering a kidnapping
situation, either on a small or large scale, that would occult their ultimate
goal of systematic enslavement and exploitation. There is no reason to think that this would
involve a ransom in the form of gold or other precious metals, but rather
perhaps items that might not seem so valuable to the man in the world’s
streets. After all, for the Incans, gold
was not really an article of everyday utility or a staple commodity, but rather
a substance reserved for certain politico-religious purposes. If first contact occurs, we should not
blindly assume that the scale of alien values will resemble our own.
While Cortes and Pizarro set up
structures that were effective in assuring vast amounts of human labor for the
New World mines and for the plantations that followed, it is worthwhile, in order to glean some possibly useful
lessons, to look at one more conquistador who failed. De Soto’s expedition, no less impressive in
military might than that of his earlier countrymen, set out from the vicinity
of Tampa Bay with a goal of subduing all of present North America. He actually covered more ground than either
Cortes or Pizarro, but wound up dying miserably (perhaps at the hands of his
own men) without obtaining precious materials and, more importantly, without
establishing a superstructure for slavery.
His army annihilated several tribes in the Southeast, especially the
Mobiliens whom he hoped would be the Aztecs or the Incas of North America. They eradicated many more indirectly through
imported diseases, since the majority of the tribes identified by him had
ceased to exist by the time subsequent explorers visited the area. The pigs he brought along for food even
changed the ecology of the region when they escaped and began to breed in the
wild. For all this, though, he failed to
achieve dominance on a human level. The
main reason seems to be that the majority of Southeastern tribes seem to have
been wary of his motives, uneager to interact with him, and capable of ongoing military
resistance against a vastly superior technological force. The first two factors are probably the most
crucial. De Soto was never able to
assemble auxiliary enforcers like the Tlaxcalans or to worm his way into a
local power structure. When he did try
to do this with the Mobiliens, they eventually reacted with fanatical fervor,
preferring death to the last warrior rather than submission. Their sacrificial example served as a
powerful deterrent for other people who might have fallen under De Soto’s
sway. Despite the fact that Southeastern
Native Americans represented a panoply of ethnic and linguistic groups, they
were able to achieve a majority, if not unanimity, in their rejection of the
newcomers. Though this seeming victory
was impermanent and came at a heavy price, twenty-first century humans owe it
to themselves to be aware of this history.
Enslavement of indigenous groups
was not universally successful under the conquistadores. In some colonies, the Spaniards were able to
use priests to implement and enforce an ideology that they were actually
improving the indigenous peoples by “making them work” in virtuous ways, as
Richard Lee Marks points out in Cortes,
the Great Adventurer and the Fate of Aztec Mexico. But where local conditions prevented the
brainwashing of the Native Americans, there was an alternative. For the Portuguese in Brazil and for the Spanish
in the Caribbean area, a hybrid form of slavery was developed, as African
slaves were massively moved to the Americas.
The history of African slavery, over-simplified in current school texts
and in the media, was actually too long and complex to trace here in
detail. The main point pertinent to our
discussion is that members of a different “race,” but of the same species, were
enslaved to function in a slavery system originally conceived for Native
Americans. Given the conclusions reached
in preceding paragraphs about the difficulty of transshipping human slaves to
other planets, we should not forget that it may be easier for exploitative
aliens to transship humans to other parts of the Earth in order to exploit
their economic program. In fact, it would
be much easier to do so today than in the sixteenth through nineteenth
centuries, since large population elements from some parts of the globe are already
yearning for migration according to their personal economic imperatives. It is not inconceivable that a
conquistador-type alien power would actually offer to facilitate population
migration as part of a larger enslavement plan.
This was already done to some degree by human colonial powers with
residents of India who were enticed or coerced to migrating to other lands as
part of an imperial scheme, leading to the presence of Indian ethnicities still
active in the Caribbean, Africa, and the Indian Ocean islands. A conquistador contact might seek large-scale
re-engineering of the Earth’s populations in ways quite different from the
Spanish Asiento system that accounted
for the biggest percentage of African slavery in the past. There is a danger that this could be combined
with a form of creative outsourcing that would invite existing corporations on Earth
to take advantage of the colonizing profit, above and beyond the control of
existing human governments. It would be
silly to believe that aliens capable of travelling from star to star would have
no other way of controlling humans than putting a collar around their neck,
especially if the lure of a living wage would induce them to cooperate of their
own volition with schemes that might be far beyond their comprehension.
This last point, the vulnerability
of Earth’s current population to manipulation through simple material demands,
brings up the larger issue, already hinted at in the first installment, of the
necessity for a social preparation for contact on our pre-contact planet. While hunger, disease, environmental
degradation, and ignorance to unaddressed all over our world, gaping
opportunities are arising for an external force to seize. The best preparation for ill effects of first
contact is probably not to invest in exotic military programs that might prove
as useless as the Maginot Line in World War II, but rather to upgrade our
planetary population generally by forging a more fit, intelligent, and cohesive
human race. If we don’t, it could be
that our neglect is preparing us instead to walk right into the shackles of an
unknown kind of servitude from beyond our Solar System.
