Damn, this is funny! 
:**opens cover, reads flyleaf:
“This book contains numerous tasty ways to cook 30-50 feral humans, some of which take only 3-5 Earth minutes.”
You missed it totally. The meaning was that white skin is a disease and they can now fix it so whites have dark skin. It’s basically an anti-racism message. These days we might call it trolling racists.
I only vaguely remember that story. I wonder if it was written long enough ago to be aimed at J W Campbell who died in 1971.
Pretty much anyone who knows anything about the book. The social analogy of the Eloi and Morlocks should be equally obvious.
I trust you are aware that Wells was a Socialist, right?
What is interesting about “War of the Worlds” was that it was the intervention of another, sort of, “alien” species, viruses and bacteria, which killed off the Martians.
What reason would they have for visiting?
Based on humanity’s motives,
Exploring - in this case, there are no “undiscovered” lands on Earth. The aliens would want to justify their expense in travelling here, so they’d take some samples to show that this planet is worth coming back to. If they find something of worth that’s more valuable than travelling expenses, they’d want a lot of it.
Mining resources - They’d want to establish a mining colony for whatever resource they want, so that means attracting their own kind in superior numbers and moving us pesky humans aside.
Destiny - They’d manufacture some sort of justification through a dominant belief system to accomplish this, and if they’re capable of reaching our planet, their tech would be as superior to ours as European rifles are to spears.
Relocation - Living conditions got so shitty on their world, they had to evacuate. We’re already sick of immigrants, and our world is getting increasingly crowded. Unless they like desert climates, we got no spare room.
The OP has hit upon a possible resolution to the Fermi Paradox, which isn’t really a paradox, but that’s neither here nor there. The idea that there is intelligent, technological life out there but it’s kept hidden from us somehow and will reveal itself once we get our act together (whatever that entails, becoming multi-planetary, creating a one-world government, breaking the light-speed barrier, leveling up on the Kardashev scale, something else we haven’t even thought of yet, whatever). It’s certainly possible. In fact it is exactly as likely as any other possible resolution.
You can have a lot of fun with this resolution. Tons of SF stories start with, “We discovered X and then the aliens revealed themselves to us.” The problem is that you can’t do anything practical with it, just like every other resolution. The question “why haven’t we seen high-tech aliens?” can’t be answered definitively until we find them or find that the galaxy is devoid of them. There might even be multiple answers. Life might be rare, and intelligent life even more so. Life might be common, but intelligence is rare, technology beyond stone-age rarer still, and high-tech species that don’t self destruct are one per galaxy cluster. Or maybe there’s another filter that will filter us out before we find out for sure. There’s really no way to know, but it sure is fun to think about.
It only takes one. I refer the reader to the modern cautionary tale involving Jared Kushner, Saudi Arabia, and a bag of nuclear secrets (not a political jab, a semi-current events story).
I get a kick out of Star Trek and other sci-fi playing the notion of a planet having a single, reasonably homogenous civilization. Every real life example we know of is more like “We don’t have time for an interplanetary war, we’re too busy stabbing each other in the back.” Which pretty much comports with natural selection laws where pack/tribe level cooperation is seen, but the shenanigans start once you start talking about larger groups. There’s not much reason to believe those rules and impulses wouldn’t dominate the rise of every other species that makes it far enough to pull off interstellar travel. To evolve that kind of intellect/competitive advantage would require a set of ethics that leaves the unambitious behind.
My thoughts on the OP are along the lines of the plot in They Live. They’re already here, among us, and we already know as much about them as they want us to know–which is generally not a damned thing. Think about it. If you’re developing the tech to get out there in whizz about between stars & galaxies, why would you complicate matters and increase competition/reduce your own security by sharing that tech with anyone else?
This is exactly what I was going to say. We are the Ancient Aliens that you are seeking. The universe is only 13.5 billion years old. It’s still really young in the grand scheme of things. Solar systems will still be formed 100+ billion years from now.
Arthur C. Clarke, “Reunion” (1971).
That’s it! Thank you!
Trying to figure this out. How can the age of the universe be young “in the grand scheme of things?” Isn’t the universe the grand scheme of things? What are we comparing the age of the universe to?
To its eventual age where stars formation ends around 1000-1500 billion years from now.
I’m no scientist, but I think it has to do with the lifespan of stars and the sorts of elements available. Like, there wouldn’t be much in the way of carbon until the first generation of stars were born, burned, and then supernovaed to produce a bunch of neat elements that will hang around in a cloud until another star forms and that debris accretes into planets which might have the right proportions of stuff to make life. Might take a few generations of that to get enough material suitable for life forms that could evolve into high tech beings.
Of the 13.5 billion years everything has been here, our solar system has been working for at least 5 billion. So we’re as good as gets around here after 5 billion years. Maybe someone somewhere else had better luck at avoiding mass extinctions & resetting evolution, buying them a couple hundred million years, or maybe we’re the ones who have been lucky. And here we are, staring down a mass extinction, ostensibly of our own creation–how many times do you think THAT might happen while a planet tries to make an organism capable of interstellar travel. AND it’s got to do it before its own star blows up. Long odds. Billions and billions of chances, but against long odds.
ETA: I read Dingbang’s question differently than it may have been meant. I was thinking in terms of who else we might be competing with, and why we may be among the first to invent the plastic straw.