Humanity in a few hundred/thousand years - an analogy for our potential relationship with other more advanced societies?

Let us assume that our society survives climate change, that we eventually stop fighting each other and begin to live in a more stable, structured global society where waste is minimised and resources are allocated as efficiently as possible. Population control is done in a largely ethical manner and we are able to maintain our technological advancement to the point where we are able to develop a new kind of propulsion which allows us to travel between stars at a relatively fast pace, although not instantaneously.

Assuming that we don't find a way to create energy out of nothing or to produce technologies without actually spending resources, at this point we may be beginning to outstrip the resources of our solar system, as most of what we are able to mine may already have been incorporated into our infrastructure, or may simply be too expensive to extract. We are now engaging in interstellar travel in order to find new resources to exploit. Our scientists discover an earth-like planet rich in all the resources that we would require to sustain our society for another ten thousand years and which is within reach of a viable mission, and so we set out to explore and establish our claim over this new world.

Upon reaching this new world we discover that a relatively primitive society exists upon its surface, and that there are some very nasty diseases that we are not prepared to handle. We now face a difficult situation; we either give up and go back home, dooming our society to decline and eventual collapse, or we try to find a way to use the native society to our benefit (bear in mind that we are not going to have a giant army of robot workers lying around, as we are currently constrained by our limited physical resources). They seem superstitious by our standards, but we are able to persuade them that we can provide marvelous technological advancements that will greatly improve their society if they are willing to sign a free trade agreement with us. These advancements are basic technologies to us and would be a very good trade for access to the resources of their world.

Over time we establish a series of resource extraction operations and adapt their native infrastructure to suit our needs. In order to assure our supply of resources from this source (they may be a tad unstable) we make sure that the native peoples incorporate our technology into their society and are unable to reproduce our technology themselves. We have now effectively established them as a client state and we are able to sustain our society by exploiting theirs.

Submitted March 25, 2016 at 07:53AM by WonkeyChikin http://ift.tt/1LM74eO