Even in future timelines like Alien: Resurrection or the comics, humans still haven’t reach the tech level of Predators.
Makes me wonder if humans reach the same tech level of Predators, what would Predators do? Would they open up diplomatic relations or see us as a threat and genocide us?
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I’d think they’d behave like Klingons but there might be a couple wars until that was ironed out.
Probably see us as an even more appealing hunt.
The harder the hunt, the bigger the honor.
Predators have been hunting humans for many centuries. They see us as a worthy species to hunt even when we had primitive technology.
The better technology we have, the more challenging we become and therefore the more attractive.
The Engineers had technology on par with, if not greater than, the Yautja, and they didn’t have diplomatic relations. The Yautja just wanted to hunt them. That’s their whole thing.
What could end up happening is a large enough human faction proving themselves on par with the Yautja and adopting their hunt culture. If the Yautja accept them as worthy hunters, they will be allowed to join their hunts. That’s as best as you can get with them in terms of diplomacy.
This of course is ignoring “The Predator” because fuck that movie.
Eventually humanity would hunt them to extinction.
It’s a little difficult to answer straight. But in most cases the yautja willingly handicap themselves to technological parity with their prey. Nothing too outrageous to what their prey are capable of. Plasma casters are relatively slow firing and short ranged to be close to equal with human weapons for instance. But we know they have more technology like rapid fire plasma weapons and orbital lasers. Usually when technology of prey is close to what the yautja keep in reserve they’ll break out the big guns because it’s a fair fight then.
There’s a few caveats to this in other partially retconned timelines. In Forever midnight, the Hish openly hunt and kill humans to destroy their technology because it’s based on stolen hish technology. Though this has been outright removed from canon.
Earth War continuity the Yautja absolutely love hunting more advanced humans though they keep humans as a reserved prey species. Only proven hunters can go after them and they still reserve their best weapons for emergencies.
Rage War the yautja are slightly more advanced than humans but their technology is vastly different. It’s like comparing Fish to Insects where you can understand some of it but much is still alien. The Yautja happily use and steal human technology but also have their own secretive tech that’s unknown to most. It’s shown that only because they don’t see humans as peers and are extremely nomadic tribal culture that they don’t bother with organized activities. What is known is that they actively flee from human space when the frontier moves further and only return to it for trophy hunting. Though they do consider the Rage to be abhorrent and perverse even if the Rage have some technology that’s more advanced. To note this is the furthest set period in the timeline around the 2900s and humans are able to match yautja weapons and ships but not their FTL and construction techniques.
They bring out their more powerful wargear and welcome the challenge.
The stuff we see them using is their sport hunting gear. They’ve got much more powerful equipment that they just don’t bring out because they don’t need to.
In Pred culture, the less powerful equipment, the greater the challenge, and thus the greater honor.
Now is humans completely caught up with Pred tech, they would still hunt us. Again, for the challenge. But note that not all Pred clans hunt humans, only some of them do.
Adjust their hunting equipment and carry on.
The reason the Yautja aren’t making contact with humanity isn’t because of some Prime Directive style non interference policy but simply because they only see us as prey.
Worthy prey, but prey none the less.
I do think that they would stop raiding Earth once we get advanced enough to detect them flying in and out so they would probably shift their focus to frontier settlements that are easier to isolate and hunt in.
You don’t have to take this into account, but in the original script for Predators, written by one Robert Rodriguez in the 90s, there was an entire (dare I say) militia of humans who inexplicably possessed Predator technology, including spaceships, plasmacasters, and cloaking devices.
Guess what Predators* did.
Edit: The Yautja*
Hunt em. It would just be a more worthy hunt!
I suspect that if humans reached technological parity the Predators wouldn’t be able to genocide us, and if they kept hunting us they might find themselves on the receiving end of that until they knock it off.
Humans are highly social, they form nations and armies. Predators are solitary hunters. They would need to form armies too if they wanted to stand a chance against a peer-level enemy and that’s not very “Predator” of them, they’d face a huge cultural resistance.
Humans have a long history of rendering large predator species extinct. We don’t fight fair.
I wonder… I wonder… these Yautja chaps seem to have ritualized conflict to a perhaps unhealthy extent. They can get away with this precisely because their technology is so advanced.
If humans came out with equivalent tech, the Yautja might be appalled at what humans bring to the table. A culture obsessed with individual honor in the hunt is probably not really prepared for the guys who came up with the firebombing of Dresden.
End of the day, our Predators will probably go around muttering, “See? I told ya we shoulda listened to those HFY guys…”
They would change nothing and still hunt us, mind you the most advanced species in their universe are the Engineers, more than 5x as advanced as the Yautja, and they were still getting hunted (not that it affected their species tho, Ahab was just a freak).
The immediate reaction would be that hunts become less frequent, less out of respect and more out of practicality. They’re far more dangerous to hunt now, so only the more experienced hunters and hunting parties should engage them.
After a few decades I think the best relations could get (short of total integration of one or the other in some capacity) is an exchange of mercenaries and/or expeditionary forces. Yautja mercenaries hunt for humans if they have good intel or support and mainly work for trophies (possibly cash to a lesser extent). They’ll work for pretty much anyone, be they as raiders in a war or to retrieve some such resource, but it’ll almost always be in an offensive role. For the tribes that respect humans, it’ll also provide an avenue to “ethically” hunt them by aiding one side of a war. Human Mercenaries would largely prefer the opposite for rewards (mostly money/trade goods with a lesser preference to trophies), and mainly serve to bolster Yautja hunting parties on dangerous hunts, aid inexperienced Predators, act as scouts for a very large area, and/or serve as distractions for lesser prey. The sparse communication would be relatively helpful here, since it also means a slightly less honorable Predator could easily claim the Mercs’ trophies as their own with no one able to contradict them.
After about a century or two of interaction, diplomacy becomes somewhat normal but not quite to a nation to nation agreement. Humans would largely regard Yautja as Pirates, Mercs, and generally rough characters while Yautja would largely regard humans as cowards and children, with some rising to be more admirable than others. Some tribes may go as far as declaring thy any predator to kill a human (not just the proven hunters) is a bad blood, though it’ll take at least a few generations before the practice becomes common outside of a small handful of tribes. Relations are rocky to say the least, but they do broadly see each other as people (most of the time at least), and occasionally help each other. The ones who truly hate humans or still see them as animals are usually Elders, especially of the more isolationist tribes. The more “active” human-hunting tribes are likely to have died off by now though, either by human hands or their fellow, more friendly Yautja.