I have read an account by an old Maori man of Captain Cook’s arrival as he saw it as a young boy. While there were a lot of intervening decades between his experience and it being recorded, the tribe doesn’t seem to have regarded it as an out-of-context event (though they did think the sailors were goblins because they rowed with their backs to the direction they were going in, and thus presumably had eyes in the backs of their heads).

The Maori did relatively well in contact with Europeans – this appears to be because the chieftain Te Raparaha and a mate of his went to England early on to visit George III. Te Raparaha asked for muskets, George III refused but gave them gifts which Te Raparaha exchanged for muskets in Sydney on the way back. Back in NZ, he started a war of revenge and invasion that threatened other Maori tribes (iwi) so badly that they shortly either managed to trade with Europeans for more muskets or wound up dead and/or enslaved. The Maori adapted their tactics to muskets and figured out how to build musket-proof forts.

So when the Europeans started arriving as settlers they were surrounded by tribes of armed and experienced warriors. This made things a bit politer and there was a lot of inter-marriage. The British army only won the Land Wars a couple of decades later because they had better logistic support and some Maori iwi sided with the British.

Of course the Maori were devastated by European diseases, which weakened them militarily as well.

Judging by this experience, if we can draw any conclusions from one event, if someone makes first contact with Earth, our priority should be to get our hands on their weapons as soon as possible.

1) The contacter group must necessarily have recently made technological advances or grown in wealth which allowed it to access previously inaccessable areas.

2) In nearly all cases, the contacter is more powerful, technologically, than the contactee. Otherwise, it would have happened the other way round (though occasionally, I suppose that does or could happen).

3) In almost all human societies, we see evidence of malicious as well as benign leadership and behaviour among the individuals, therefore we have no reason to believe that any single person or society’s motives would be entirely harmless. In the best case scenario, the contacter would work in its own best short and long term interest. However that is also very unlikely.

Therefore, it seems very likely that if you are the contacted, you would have two options: either exterminate the contacter entirely, so that they could send nobody back, or hope to make a beneficial peace for your own personal benefit, at the expense of your tribe. I think that Diamond has also noticed this, which is why in TTC he pokes fun at people eager to make “first contact” with extraterrestrials.

However, I would say that this is very much a case isolated to first contacts. You would not want to adopt this approach in the case of sudden increased contact, because there is the additional likelihood of mutually beneficial cooperation among more equal societies, especially if both can see that the other society also sees the benefit.

At first glance it seems impossible to decipher a language with no common vocabulary. But after a while you begin to pick meanings out of the jumble. I speak several Indo-European languages well, with a bit of experience in some other Indo European languages, but on my recent trip to Hungary I thought at first I would be stumped… but after a short time I could begin to pick out works, and make a few rudimentary connections. In short, it became less intimidating (I know that this is not exciting news to those who speak Japanese for example)

Diamond went to PNG, where tribes are familiar with cannibalism neighbors, and perhaps also heard but the horrible stories of white colonists.

In other parts of the world, first contacts are in general very benign.
1) native american assisting Mayflower
2) Zheng He’s trip in Indian ocean had more friendly encounters than fights
others such as Colombus’ landing in the Carribean.

If you try to documents these encounters in history, you should find first contacts have been quite benign.

things only turned sour when there is competition for resources. (again in PNG, resources are more limited than in the Americas when colonists arrive)

Was the Japanese encounter with Perry an Outside Context Problem? Didn’t the Japanese government had contact with intermittent ships before and some sense of their own technical inferiority? Contrast with Bank’s example of an OCP or his actual plot involving one in Excession.

I think PTJ is writing an piece on OCPs for Clyde Wilcox’s new book on politics and science fiction.