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The Cat Test: A Soft Signal of Civilizational Alignment
Epistemic note: This is a diagnostic prompt, not a theory.
When discussing alien intelligence, we often ask whether extraterrestrial life would resemble us physically, cognitively, or morally. These questions are important, difficult, and - too often - vague.
I want to propose a different question. One that is concrete, decisive, and of greater import than the others:
Do they have cats? And, of greatest import: can I pet them? This may sound frivolous. It is not. This is, in fact, a surprisingly dense heuristic lens.
Not because cats are special (though they are), but because a civilization's reaction to a “cat-like” niche - a small, semi‑independent predator tolerated near intelligent agents - compresses an enormous amount of information about ecology, social tolerance, and moral self‑conception into a single, inspectable fact.
And because it rates very highly on my utility function to hug them and scrunch their little faces—a feature that will later turn out to be surprisingly methodologically relevant.
Cats exist not because humans designed them, but because we accidentally built their paradise. Stored food created pests; pests created a predator niche; and instead of eliminating or fully controlling that niche, we tolerated it. Cats are useful, but not maximally useful. They are present, but not obedient. They are helpful, but on their own terms.
In other words, cats are a civilization‑scale admission that not everything nearby must be optimized, legible, or fully aligned.
This post proposes the Cat Test: the idea that, in biological civilizations with cohabitation and stored resources, the presence—or structured absence—of a cat‑like niche is weak but meaningful evidence about how that civilization relates to autonomy, guardianship, and moral ambiguity.
This is not a proof. It is not decisive. It will fail in many interesting ways.
But if we ever make first contact, and we ask if they have a mesopredator that evolved to eat pests of their food supplies and became semi-domesticated (and most importantly, if we can pet them), and the aliens say, “Yes, we have something like that—and maybe, if they let you,” then, speaking very seriously, I will feel much better about the long‑term future of the universe.
Especially if they sit on my lap and purr while I pet them.
1. Why Cats Exist (And Why That Matters)
Cats are not special because they are cute (though this will turn out to be relevant). They are special because of how they came to exist alongside humans.
Humans did not set out to domesticate cats in the way we domesticated dogs, cattle, or horses. There was no plan, no training regime, no selective breeding program aimed at obedience or productivity. Instead, we did something both simpler and more fundamental: we stored food.
Stored calories attract opportunistic species. Many members of such a species in one location creates a new niche. This new niche creates a selection pressure for predation. At some point, a small, solitary, highly efficient ambush predator discovered that human settlements were unusually reliable hunting grounds.
Because food storage, pest pressure, and opportunistic predation are all extremely generic features of biological ecologies, we should expect this dynamic—and thus this niche—to arise in a wide range of civilizations, conditional on biological existence with food-storage requirements. This conditional universality allows us to make weak but meaningful judgements based on how a culture reacts to it.
Once this niche emerged reliably, its existence stopped being a fact of ecology and became a question of response. At that point, humans faced a choice.
We could have exterminated the predators. We could have driven them away. We could have tightly controlled their reproduction and behavior. Instead, we mostly didn’t. We tolerated them. We liked them.
Cats were allowed to remain near us despite being partially opaque in their motivations, only intermittently useful, resistant to training, and indifferent to hierarchy. They provided enough value to justify their presence, but not enough to demand full optimization.
This distinction matters. Cats are not tools. They are co‑inhabitants.
2. Convergent Niches, Not Convergent Species
When I ask whether aliens “have cats,” I am not asking whether they evolved quadrupedal mammals with retractable claws and an attitude problem.
I am asking whether their ecology admits a cat‑like niche.
By this I mean a being or class of beings that is:
small relative to the dominant intelligent species,
capable of living near settlements,
partially autonomous and goal‑divergent,
tolerated rather than fully controlled,
and valued for a mix of instrumental and non‑instrumental reasons.
This niche plausibly appears wherever you have dense settlements, stored resources, biological ecosystems, and a willingness to tolerate local messiness.
Notably, this is distinct from dog‑like niches. Dogs represent cooperation, hierarchy, and shared goals. Cats represent tolerance, bounded misalignment, and coexistence without command.
That distinction will matter later.
3. The Cat Test (Stated Carefully)
We can now state the heuristic explicitly.
The Cat Test: In a biological civilization with cohabitation and stored resources, the existence of semi‑independent companion agents is weak evidence of autonomy tolerance, moral slack, and comfort with partial misalignment.
Several clarifications are important.
This does not mean:
that such civilizations are benevolent,
that absence implies hostility,
or that this signal should be weighted heavily.
It does mean:
this is a Bayesian nudge,
a compression of many background assumptions,
and a question that is cheap to ask but rich in implications.
Like most good heuristics, it is informative precisely because it fails in legible ways.
4. Benign Reasons the Cat Test Fails
Many worlds fail the Cat Test for reasons that carry no negative moral signal at all. This is a low-power, low-cost heuristic, intended to flag tendencies rather than deliver strong predictive claims.
For example:
A species that photosynthesizes or consumes inorganic resources may never develop storage economies.
Extremely fast decomposition environments may prevent pest accumulation entirely.
Cryogenic or ultra‑cold habitats may suppress small‑animal metabolism.
Colonial organisms may internalize food storage within specialized castes.
Technological pest suppression may render biological predators obsolete.
Post‑biological or distributed intelligences may lack cohabiting animals altogether.
In such cases, the absence of cat‑like companions tells us little.
The Cat Test only becomes informative in civilizations that could have such relationships but choose not to.
5. Guardianship and the Limits of Autonomy
One possible misunderstanding of the Cat Test is that it valorizes unrestricted animal freedom. This is incorrect.
Cats do not live with humans as fully autonomous agents. Their agency is bounded. Humans routinely override their preferences—keeping them indoors, controlling reproduction, limiting risk exposure—often against their expressed wishes.
This is not a failure of the relationship. It is the relationship, from our perspective—and the signal lies in our moral posture toward that imbalance, not in the animal’s endorsement of it. The moral signal here is not libertarian permissiveness, but the willingness to assume guardianship: the uncomfortable role of making decisions for another agent whose interests matter, knowing that:
the agent cannot fully understand the tradeoffs,
the agent might disagree even if they could,
and the decision‑maker is not free of self‑interest.
A civilization capable of sustaining such relationships must tolerate persistent moral tension rather than resolving it by domination or abandonment.
6. Cuteness, Affection, and Non‑Instrumental Value
It is tempting to describe all of this in abstract terms—autonomy tolerance, agency slack, alignment robustness—and stop there.
But there is a more embarrassing truth.
Cats are also kept because they are adorable.
Cuteness biases care toward small, vulnerable, and non‑threatening beings. It encourages investment that is not fully justified by utility calculations. It rewards affection even when instrumental value is ambiguous.
This is not irrationality so much as a built-in friction against totalizing optimization.
A civilization that allows itself to be influenced by such biases—even locally, even inconsistently—has not fully optimized affection out of its value system.
That is not a guarantee of safety. But it is a kind of moral shock absorber.
7. Do They Argue About It?
Up to this point, the Cat Test has focused on behavior. But behavior alone is not the whole signal.
Equally important is whether the civilization recognizes the moral tension inherent in these relationships.
Exerting power over a cognitively simpler agent for its own good is not morally trivial. It involves conflicts between autonomy and welfare, between present preferences and long-term outcomes, and between care and self-interest.
A civilization that ignores this tension—or treats it as morally settled—is revealing something important about how it relates to power more generally.
By contrast, a civilization that debates these questions—across cultures, over time, and in public—demonstrates moral dynamism. Disagreement, revision, and lingering discomfort are positive—necessary but not sufficient—signals here.
We should not expect unanimity. In fact, the absence of disagreement would itself be informative.
8. Civilizational Companions as a Mirror
As below, so above: the Cat Test generalizes across scales.
Many advanced civilizations may possess civilizational companions: uplifted species, legacy biological minds, subsumed cultures, predecessor intelligences, or partially autonomous subsystems.
We already see early, uncomfortable versions of this in our own history. Colonial encounters, the treatment of Indigenous peoples, the management of dependent populations, and debates over cultural preservation versus assimilation all revolve around the same core questions: when one group holds overwhelming power over another, is the goal optimization, control, abandonment—or guardianship? The fact that these questions still provoke anguish, disagreement, and moral reckoning is itself part of the signal.
The same questions apply:
Are these companions preserved or optimized away?
Are they protected, controlled, or abandoned?
Are they allowed to be inconvenient?
Are they mourned if lost?
How a civilization treats beings that depend on it—but are not tools—is one of the best available windows into how it handles power.
9. Implications for SETI (Kept Modest)
None of this should be operationalized aggressively. The Cat Test is not a filter, a policy rule, or a basis for trust.
It is a prompt.
If we ever encounter alien intelligence, we should ask not just about their technologies or their goals, but about their relationships with nearby, weaker agents—and how they think about those relationships.
The answers will not be decisive. But they may be revealing.
Conclusion: Moral Slack Shows Up Under Power
Alignment failures rarely begin at cosmic scales. They begin locally, in how power is exercised over the vulnerable, the dependent, and the inconvenient.
Cats—and their alien equivalents—are not guarantees of kindness. But they are evidence that a civilization can live with unresolved moral tension without resolving it by force.
So if the conceptual foundations of SETI end up including the question of whether the aliens’ little faces are adorable, and whether they let us hug them, that may not be unserious at all.
It may be the smallest, safest, and most revealing place to ask whether the universe is the kind of place where power learns to coexist with care.
This post was written with AI assistance; all ideas, edits, and structure were written and verified by me.
The Cat Test: A Soft Signal of Civilizational Alignment
Epistemic note: This is a diagnostic prompt, not a theory.
When discussing alien intelligence, we often ask whether extraterrestrial life would resemble us physically, cognitively, or morally. These questions are important, difficult, and - too often - vague.
I want to propose a different question. One that is concrete, decisive, and of greater import than the others:
Do they have cats?
And, of greatest import: can I pet them?
This may sound frivolous. It is not. This is, in fact, a surprisingly dense heuristic lens.
Not because cats are special (though they are), but because a civilization's reaction to a “cat-like” niche - a small, semi‑independent predator tolerated near intelligent agents - compresses an enormous amount of information about ecology, social tolerance, and moral self‑conception into a single, inspectable fact.
And because it rates very highly on my utility function to hug them and scrunch their little faces—a feature that will later turn out to be surprisingly methodologically relevant.
Cats exist not because humans designed them, but because we accidentally built their paradise. Stored food created pests; pests created a predator niche; and instead of eliminating or fully controlling that niche, we tolerated it. Cats are useful, but not maximally useful. They are present, but not obedient. They are helpful, but on their own terms.
In other words, cats are a civilization‑scale admission that not everything nearby must be optimized, legible, or fully aligned.
This post proposes the Cat Test: the idea that, in biological civilizations with cohabitation and stored resources, the presence—or structured absence—of a cat‑like niche is weak but meaningful evidence about how that civilization relates to autonomy, guardianship, and moral ambiguity.
This is not a proof. It is not decisive. It will fail in many interesting ways.
But if we ever make first contact, and we ask if they have a mesopredator that evolved to eat pests of their food supplies and became semi-domesticated (and most importantly, if we can pet them), and the aliens say, “Yes, we have something like that—and maybe, if they let you,” then, speaking very seriously, I will feel much better about the long‑term future of the universe.
Especially if they sit on my lap and purr while I pet them.
1. Why Cats Exist (And Why That Matters)
Cats are not special because they are cute (though this will turn out to be relevant). They are special because of how they came to exist alongside humans.
Humans did not set out to domesticate cats in the way we domesticated dogs, cattle, or horses. There was no plan, no training regime, no selective breeding program aimed at obedience or productivity. Instead, we did something both simpler and more fundamental: we stored food.
Stored calories attract opportunistic species. Many members of such a species in one location creates a new niche. This new niche creates a selection pressure for predation. At some point, a small, solitary, highly efficient ambush predator discovered that human settlements were unusually reliable hunting grounds.
Because food storage, pest pressure, and opportunistic predation are all extremely generic features of biological ecologies, we should expect this dynamic—and thus this niche—to arise in a wide range of civilizations, conditional on biological existence with food-storage requirements. This conditional universality allows us to make weak but meaningful judgements based on how a culture reacts to it.
Once this niche emerged reliably, its existence stopped being a fact of ecology and became a question of response. At that point, humans faced a choice.
We could have exterminated the predators. We could have driven them away. We could have tightly controlled their reproduction and behavior. Instead, we mostly didn’t. We tolerated them. We liked them.
Cats were allowed to remain near us despite being partially opaque in their motivations, only intermittently useful, resistant to training, and indifferent to hierarchy. They provided enough value to justify their presence, but not enough to demand full optimization.
This distinction matters. Cats are not tools. They are co‑inhabitants.
2. Convergent Niches, Not Convergent Species
When I ask whether aliens “have cats,” I am not asking whether they evolved quadrupedal mammals with retractable claws and an attitude problem.
I am asking whether their ecology admits a cat‑like niche.
By this I mean a being or class of beings that is:
This niche plausibly appears wherever you have dense settlements, stored resources, biological ecosystems, and a willingness to tolerate local messiness.
Notably, this is distinct from dog‑like niches. Dogs represent cooperation, hierarchy, and shared goals. Cats represent tolerance, bounded misalignment, and coexistence without command.
That distinction will matter later.
3. The Cat Test (Stated Carefully)
We can now state the heuristic explicitly.
Several clarifications are important.
This does not mean:
It does mean:
Like most good heuristics, it is informative precisely because it fails in legible ways.
4. Benign Reasons the Cat Test Fails
Many worlds fail the Cat Test for reasons that carry no negative moral signal at all. This is a low-power, low-cost heuristic, intended to flag tendencies rather than deliver strong predictive claims.
For example:
In such cases, the absence of cat‑like companions tells us little.
The Cat Test only becomes informative in civilizations that could have such relationships but choose not to.
5. Guardianship and the Limits of Autonomy
One possible misunderstanding of the Cat Test is that it valorizes unrestricted animal freedom. This is incorrect.
Cats do not live with humans as fully autonomous agents. Their agency is bounded. Humans routinely override their preferences—keeping them indoors, controlling reproduction, limiting risk exposure—often against their expressed wishes.
This is not a failure of the relationship. It is the relationship, from our perspective—and the signal lies in our moral posture toward that imbalance, not in the animal’s endorsement of it. The moral signal here is not libertarian permissiveness, but the willingness to assume guardianship: the uncomfortable role of making decisions for another agent whose interests matter, knowing that:
A civilization capable of sustaining such relationships must tolerate persistent moral tension rather than resolving it by domination or abandonment.
6. Cuteness, Affection, and Non‑Instrumental Value
It is tempting to describe all of this in abstract terms—autonomy tolerance, agency slack, alignment robustness—and stop there.
But there is a more embarrassing truth.
Cats are also kept because they are adorable.
Cuteness biases care toward small, vulnerable, and non‑threatening beings. It encourages investment that is not fully justified by utility calculations. It rewards affection even when instrumental value is ambiguous.
This is not irrationality so much as a built-in friction against totalizing optimization.
A civilization that allows itself to be influenced by such biases—even locally, even inconsistently—has not fully optimized affection out of its value system.
That is not a guarantee of safety. But it is a kind of moral shock absorber.
7. Do They Argue About It?
Up to this point, the Cat Test has focused on behavior. But behavior alone is not the whole signal.
Equally important is whether the civilization recognizes the moral tension inherent in these relationships.
Exerting power over a cognitively simpler agent for its own good is not morally trivial. It involves conflicts between autonomy and welfare, between present preferences and long-term outcomes, and between care and self-interest.
A civilization that ignores this tension—or treats it as morally settled—is revealing something important about how it relates to power more generally.
By contrast, a civilization that debates these questions—across cultures, over time, and in public—demonstrates moral dynamism. Disagreement, revision, and lingering discomfort are positive—necessary but not sufficient—signals here.
We should not expect unanimity. In fact, the absence of disagreement would itself be informative.
8. Civilizational Companions as a Mirror
As below, so above: the Cat Test generalizes across scales.
Many advanced civilizations may possess civilizational companions: uplifted species, legacy biological minds, subsumed cultures, predecessor intelligences, or partially autonomous subsystems.
We already see early, uncomfortable versions of this in our own history. Colonial encounters, the treatment of Indigenous peoples, the management of dependent populations, and debates over cultural preservation versus assimilation all revolve around the same core questions: when one group holds overwhelming power over another, is the goal optimization, control, abandonment—or guardianship? The fact that these questions still provoke anguish, disagreement, and moral reckoning is itself part of the signal.
The same questions apply:
How a civilization treats beings that depend on it—but are not tools—is one of the best available windows into how it handles power.
9. Implications for SETI (Kept Modest)
None of this should be operationalized aggressively. The Cat Test is not a filter, a policy rule, or a basis for trust.
It is a prompt.
If we ever encounter alien intelligence, we should ask not just about their technologies or their goals, but about their relationships with nearby, weaker agents—and how they think about those relationships.
The answers will not be decisive. But they may be revealing.
Conclusion: Moral Slack Shows Up Under Power
Alignment failures rarely begin at cosmic scales. They begin locally, in how power is exercised over the vulnerable, the dependent, and the inconvenient.
Cats—and their alien equivalents—are not guarantees of kindness. But they are evidence that a civilization can live with unresolved moral tension without resolving it by force.
So if the conceptual foundations of SETI end up including the question of whether the aliens’ little faces are adorable, and whether they let us hug them, that may not be unserious at all.
It may be the smallest, safest, and most revealing place to ask whether the universe is the kind of place where power learns to coexist with care.