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By Root 1323 0

more backward? In the early sixteenth century a high civilization flourished in central Mexico. The Aztecs had monumental architecture, elaborate record-keeping, exquisite art and an astronomical calendar superior to that of any in Europe. Upon viewing the Aztec artifacts returned by the first Mexican treasure ships, the artist Albrecht Dürer wrote in August 1520: “I have never seen anything heretofore that has so rejoiced my heart. I have seen … a sun entirely of gold a whole fathom broad [in fact, the Aztec astronomical calendar]; likewise a moon entirely of silver, equally large … also two chambers full of all sorts of weapons, armor, and other wonderous arms, all of which is fairer to see than marvels.” Intellectuals were stunned at the Aztec books, “which,” one of them said, “almost resemble those of the Egyptians.” Hernán Cortés described their capital Tenochtitlán as “one of the most beautiful cities in the world … The people’s activities and behavior are on almost as high a level as in Spain, and as well-organized and orderly. Considering that these people are barbarous, lacking knowledge of God and communication with other civilized nations, it is remarkable to see all that they have.” Two years after writing these words, Cortés utterly destroyed Tenochtitlán along with the rest of the Aztec civilization. Here is an Aztec account:

Moctezuma [the Aztec Emperor] was shocked, terrified by what he heard. He was much puzzled by their food, but what made him almost faint away was the telling of how the great Lombard gun, at the Spaniards’ command, expelled the shot which thundered as it went off. The noise weakened one, dizzied one. Something like a stone came out of it in a shower of fire and sparks. The smoke was foul; it had a sickening, fetid smell. And the shot, which struck a mountain, knocked it to bits—dissolved it. It reduced a tree to sawdust—the tree disappeared as if they had blown it away … When Moctezuma was told all this, he was terror-struck. He felt faint. His heart failed him.

Reports continued to arrive: “We are not as strong as they,” Moctezuma was told: “We are nothing compared to them.” The Spaniards began to be called “the Gods come from the Heavens.” Nevertheless, the Azecs had no illusions about the Spaniards, whom they described in these words:

They seized upon the gold as if they were monkeys, their faces gleaming. For clearly their thirst for gold was insatiable; they starved for it; they lusted for it; they wanted to stuff themselves with it as if they were pigs. So they went about fingering, taking up the streamers of gold, moving them back and forth, grabbing them to themselves, babbling, talking gibberish among themselves.

But their insight into the Spanish character did not help them defend themselves. In 1517 a great comet had been seen in Mexico. Moctezuma, captured by the legend of the return of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl as a white-skinned man arriving across the Eastern sea, promptly executed his astrologers. They had not predicted the comet, and they had not explained it. Certain of forthcoming disaster, Moctezuma became distant and gloomy. Aided by the superstition of the Aztecs and their own superior technology, an armed party of 400 Europeans and their native allies in the year 1521 entirely vanquished and utterly destroyed a high civilization of a million people. The Aztecs had never seen a horse; there were none in the New World. They had not applied iron metallurgy to warfare. They had not invented firearms. Yet the technological gap between them and the Spaniards was not very great, perhaps a few centuries.

We must be the most backward technical society in the Galaxy. Any society still more backward would not have radio astronomy at all. If the doleful experience of cultural conflict on Earth were the galactic standard, it seems we would already have been destroyed, perhaps with some passing admiration expressed for Shakespeare, Bach and Vermeer. But this has not happened. Perhaps alien intentions are uncompromisingly benign, more like La Pérouse than Cortés. Or might