Can you blame her? His friend rapped poor ET to death. I mean if he’d jazzed, popped, easy listeninged, or classic rocked ET to death, maybe we could give him the benefit of the doubt…
Quickly, before his friends show up.
If you think you can do this legally, then imagine a scenario where you attempt to kill it, fail, and it kills you. Does your family have any recourse or do you still apply the ‘laws dont apply to aliens’ bit? Something tells me the immunity ends once it stops being convenient for people, so you can assume the immunity isnt real or cant be justified in court.
I think my family may have a cause of action for wrongful death, but serving process in the Delta Quadrant is likely to be a pain in the ass. Anystate, USA requires process to be served within 120 days of filing, or the case can be dismissed.
If process is served, and the jury comes back in favor of the plaintiffs, collecting a judgment from ET is gonna make serving him with process look easy. My family would probably have to identify any of ET’s assets in Anystate first, then elsewhere on Earth. Failing that, they’d have to travel to ETWorld, register the judgment for enforcement in that jurisdiction (if allowable under local law), and identify any available assets to execute the judgment.
Let’s see: An intelligent, and extremely technologically advanced being has the ability to traverse a few light years in space breaking what we assume was inviolable basic physical law, lands here with a ship, and you want to shoot him/her/it/Bob?
I wouldn’t want to be around when his/her/its/Bob’s friends show up.
My advice is to sell them Manhattan for a few million bucks and run.
Reminds me of the Vonnegut story – an ET arrives who communicates by tapdancing and farting, and is promptly beaten to death with a nine iron.
I don’t want to shoot it. I’d rather watch football in peace. When ET lands on my lawn and revs his engine, he’s disturbing my football watching, which leaves me little choice. The Saints are undefeated this year. I’ve been waiting over 40 years for a Super Bowl. Ain’t no bug eyed interstellar hoodlum going to deprive me of watching the games.
If this came to pass (meaning the OP scenario), I assume the laws might be changed to cover “humanoid” aliens, or aliens “posessing human-like qualities of intelligense, emotion, and reason” – an interesting thing would be, per the “animal” angle…that we might have multiple alien species around, some of which are “like us” enough that we empathasize with them, and cover them under murder laws…and maybe the “animal” aliens are just covered under cruelty laws.
I predict it’s going to be harder to re-write the laws than you think. There will be a bunch of earthly species that will have instant human lobbying groups spring up to define them as human – dolphins, chimps, various and sundry of ape and monkey species. The more we know about other species, it seems, the less different they are from us. I think there will have to be an enumerated list of protected aliens species, and not a set of general characteristics which will determine which animals, alien or not, qualify as sufficiently ‘human’ to earn human rights.
Though I do think there will be some panel of experts somewhere which will use such criteria to add species to the list. Aliens with laser cannons will go right to the top of the list. Dolphins, who might even meet the general criteria, won’t. Because nobody is going to be willing to charge any deep sea fisherman who snags and drowns a dolphin in his nets with murder.
When dolphins get laser cannons, or can argue their case, in English, in front of a judge, that might change.
Robert J. Sawyer wrote a whole novel on the “alien commits murder and gets charged” subject, called Illegal Alien. Not a bad book at all.
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You’re in the clear. The ET is a wild organism, and an invasive species, so he has no protection. Like fragmatti or zebra mussels.
But to be on the safe side, follow the rural rule of thumb. Shoot, shovel, and shut up.