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...

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