Sorry everyone. One of those ships of theirs would probably be able to take over the planet on its own. Supposedly these ships have been observed disabling nuclear missile silos. If they were communists, they would probably want to liberate us. They would likewise be able to do so right this moment. But they don't. Therefore, they aren't communists. Facts and logic :expert-shapiro:
How could a non-communist society send ships to other solar systems? It's possible. Something like Breakthrough Starshot could conceivably happen before a communist revolution on Earth. The USA, a fascist dictatorship, sent people to the moon.
If the UFOs are real, I think that they're some kind of automated probe(s) which were actually sent here hundreds if not thousands of years ago. (The earliest recorded UFO sighting was in 1440 BC.) As mentioned on the most recent episode of Guerilla History, UFOs might have been triggered or made more active somehow by the first detonation of an atomic bomb.
The civilization which built them might not even exist anymore, but their technology is evidently still way ahead of ours, which means it could be quite some time before we ever figure out what these UFOs actually are.
Something is definitely going on, though, whatever the fuck it is. The podcast mentions a guy I had never heard of named Ron Westrum. He gave a talk here mentioning how alien abductions probably aren't all in people's heads, since they sometimes happen to multiple people at the same time or are observed by others who are not abducted.
All of this generally shows that in spite of what people tell you, nobody really knows what the fuck is going on.
I think people in the communist alien society would still think about space stuff. I just also think that their planet is also beset by the same things as ours. Pandemics, natural disasters, possible climate problems, etc. Also their global society could have enough counter-revolutionaries to make their communism precarious, like ours is. The aliens into space stuff would understand the situation because they analyzed the contradictions of their society and won't ask to consume large amounts of resources for the sake of a mild curiosity. I think we can all agree that traveling several, dozens, hundreds, thousands of light years requires massive amounts of resources.
As I said previously, every bit of technology used for interstellar spaceflight requires significant social organization in order to be produced. It's not as simple as just having the materials on hand to do it. If you travel back in time and decide to invent the light bulb, you can't just do it. You need all the stuff that was around when the light bulb was invented. Everything has an incredible amount of socioeconomic baggage. This is the part of historical materialism where nothing can be examined in isolation. Things can only happen exactly when and where the conditions are right. That's to say that if you remove some part of that chain of history, then it doesn't work out the same way.
Plus even if you do know where and what you need, there are still more than technical problems. There are political problems. If you need tungsten to invent your light bulb but the only accessible bit is under the sacred tree of blue cat people, then that's a political problem. Having all the technological solutions won't help you. You can either do politics or just give up and find another technological path to take. But that doesn't mean Edison could have just invented the LED light if he gave up on the tungsten bulb. LEDs have their own socioeconomic baggage and require a different set of conditions. So just because there are alternatives in retrospect, doesn't mean those alternatives were always possible.
Applying this to the aliens, if they're communist, they may not ever have industrialized or at least not to the degree we would expect. Imagine if the Soviet Union never had to compete with global capitalism. Imagine if Deng never had to liberalize in order to also compete. Imagine there was never capitalism and so communist societies never faced the external pressure that caused them to rapidly industrialize. They would only develop technology as needed to reduce labor and make people in society happier.
If people are happy being artisans and farmers, then they wouldn't need the technology. We know that industrialization alienated people from the products of their labor. That caused dissatisfaction. If the people are satisfied with their contribution to society being a shoemaker, then they would probably not enjoy being automated out of that lifestyle. They only would if they saw an appreciable increase in quality of life due to that advancement. Since this is an alien communist society, they always make sure the quality in life goes up when there's an advancement. So technology then trends in ways that eliminate tedious, hard labor in exchange for a better social life. More time to spend doing what they wanted and less time doing labor. Better food. Better water. More entertainment. Yes some aliens would choose to wonder about space and what exists in it. But humans have been coping with that question long before we could actually answer it. There's plenty of ways to cope without actually doing it.
Soviets were really into science and technology because they were under such pressure to industrialize. They had to produce and because they had to produce there was a cultural coping mechanism in this modernism that Lenin held. The desire for an advanced futurist society achieved through the kind of mass production that ensured their continued survival. Another bit of historical materialism: everything exists in relation to the mode of production. It's all connected.
Under capitalism we do the same thing. A large part of these UFO discussions always comes down to our cultural projections. We value an advanced technological future because that's what capitalism sold us all our lives. Better living through science. Science isn't unique to capitalism but it was definitely formalized and institutionalized under it. The past 70 or so years has been marketing trying to tell us that the future is bright and the only way forward is technological advancement. Because that stuff was attached to huge government contractors after WWII and was a source of profit. If everyone desires this technofuture then consumption increases and that drives production which makes more profit. They were selling room-sized computers under the idea that one day you could have one in your home. And now you do. It's not that they were prescient, it's that the propaganda of techno-capitalism drove desire and that in return demanded consumer electronics. Minor increases in the features of consumer electronics gave a false sense of cultural advancement. Media played up futurism in movies and literature. The future has to be futuristic. It's not a bright future without robots doing everything and self-driving cars and all the things we know has socioeconomic baggage.
What I'm getting at is that aliens don't have to be advanced. They could exist thousands of years in some kind of agrarian society that doesn't prioritize technological development because they never had capitalism. They never had to pay the price we're paying by creating a climate disaster in exchange for all that lovely high-tech production. If the aliens are like that then they won't be traveling here in space ships.
If they do come here in ships, their society has either rapid or slow industrialization. If it's rapid, then what other than the for-profit motive causes that? What causes you to rip oil out of the ground? What causes you to slaughter indigenous aliens for metals? If they never had to do any of that because from the start they were cooperative and purely communist, then I go back to the point that they wouldn't have these huge interstellar ships. If they went through slow industrialization because they were the chronically agrarian society I described, then I say it's unlikely. The longer you exist, the more existential threats you face. Pandemics, natural disasters, etc. So if you face that constantly you're probably going to redirect your resources to countering those things. No society is stable forever. Communism will come with its own contradictions as everything that exists has contradictions. I don't think it's likely they could maintain communism for thousands of years of agrarian society and then through slow industrialization and then to spacefaring. Maybe that can exist, but I don't think the first aliens to visit would be those guys. It would be the Dengist aliens at best.