There are many social exclusive carnivores here on earth:
* Lions
* Hyenas
* Dolphins
* Orca Whales
* Meerkats
* Wolves
Humans are also apex predators but NOT exclusive carnivores. With a 98% meat diet, the extinct Neandertal and living Inuit would be the best hominid examples of the types of early social carnivore societies that could evolve into space-faring ones.
Natural Selection and Technological Innovation
Both Neandertal and Inuit life required extreme intelligence to survive harsh environments, predict the behavior and location of very large prey animals (whales and mammoths), develop weapons, tools and strategies to take down large prey, and most importantly, work together like lions to ambush said large prey. We can safely assume that our extraterrestrial predator societies live in a very harsh environment with extreme pressure from natural selection due to climate, prey size, overpopulation, or a combination of these factors.
The combination of high intelligence and extreme environments drive natural selection and rapid technological innovation. The Neandertals were likely the first to invent fur clothing, hafted weapons, and levallois technology, while the Inuit are considered the most advanced pure hunter society to have ever existed, with complex toggling harpoons, oil lamps, sleds, boats, kayaks, waterproof clothing, and sunglasses. However, a highly advanced pure predator society could not technically be considered a civilization, as it would lack agriculture or animal husbandry.
Religion and Morality
A high-tech hunter society would likely evolve toward agnosticism or a dark version of panentheism, as the general population would maintain a much higher IQ than individuals in an industrial agriculture society who are largely free from the pressures of natural selection. A high-tech, high IQ hunter would recognize the Universe as it is a -- hyper-violent place where we kill and eat everything, bacteria eat us, black holes eat stars and everything else, and plants feast on the ashes.
The very act of hunting would probably be considered the highest form of communion with the Universe. "Morality" as such would consist mostly of a celebration of life, pleasure and adrenaline. To achieve a mass society, killing relatives would likely be frowned upon, but honor / revenge killings, warfare might be acceptable or even encouraged. Other than incest taboos, a pure hunter society would likely not have many anti-sexual morals -- nudity would be viewed as normal and natural in warm climates or indoors and both males and females would be inclined to have more than one sexual partner. In fact, to build the kind of mass society needed to cooperate on space projects, sex might serve as the primary social lubricant to reduce innate predator aggression, which is precisely what we see in huge dolphin societies that work together en masse to trap fish in "bubble nets."
Social Structure
The most striking difference between human civilization and a space-faring carnivore society might be the near total lack of the concepts of money, jobs or even employment. 802
There would be no need for it, as the act of getting food (hunting) would be considered the highest "spiritual act" and the only accepted way to feed oneself. The crew of a spaceship would likely be an extended family -- parents, children, cousins, aunts and uncles. Survival and celebration of life, rather than profit would be the primary motivating factor for individuals. Pure hunters, especially high-tech ones, would have enormous amounts of "leisure" time (a mammoth could feed one person for 8 years). All this down time could be spent mining and processing ore and assembling tools and devices.
Another prominent difference would likely be extreme gender equality with a matrilocal residence pattern (daughters stay with mothers throughout life). Although most existing human hunter societies have pronounced gender roles due to a division between hunting and gathering, in a predator society, EVERYONE hunts -- men, women and children. This is seen in all non-human carnivores, somewhat among the Inuit, and is heavily attested to in the skeletal record of the Neandertals -- both males and females bear patterns of healed skeletal fractures indicative of violent but successful encounters with large prey animals.
Plausible Technologies
It takes millions of people and lots of trade to build a single human computer or rocket (all the way from mining ore to making the billions of transistors in a single microchip). It is unlikely that our predator society would take this route -- for one, their technology would likely be more robust, understandable, and repairable (think analog and vacuum tubes). They might use balloons to raise much smaller rockets to the edge of space, then progress under solar sails. However, it is also possible due to their high intelligence, that they might skip the rocket stage of space travel development entirely and discover a form of quantum drive that could send a small ship into space with very little need for mass cooperation in raw material acquisition. 159