With this constraint, I now think it’s overwhelmingly likely that first contact will be from a compassionate civilization. It wouldn’t be very logical for an aggressive civilization to announce, *“we’re comin’ to git ya, sucka.” *
…I should have clarified in the OP, *First Contact of a Close Encounter of the Third Kind. *
I disagree: if, for whatever reason, they decided that they want us gone they could simply send directions for building some kind of super-machine that would wipe us all out and convince us that building it would be beneficial. You know we’d build it…
If we build it, they will come. But we won’t be here anymore.
Stupid super-intelligent beings?
Anyway, what if they don’t see us as the equivalent of dolphins? What if we’re more like vermin?
Yeah it seems generally unlikely to me that an overly aggressive species would be successful at interstellar voyaging. They’d destroy themselves, be distracted by infighting, or just generally fail to have the team work needed for such an endeavor.
And there’s not really much benefit to it. It’s easier to get resources elsewhere. The only benefit is livable real estate, but it costs much much more to move someone to a new planet than to just combat over population directly.
The only way I could see it happening is if they were conformist religious fanatics who believed they were divinely compelled.
Or possibly if they were a rogue offshoot of an otherwise friendly race.
Well, I’m smart and I d…I know other smart people who do stupid things.
Vermin! Nobody calls me vermin and gets away with it. [Cagney] Come out and take it, you dirty, yellow-bellied rat, or I’ll give it to you through the door! [Cagney/]
[FONT=Trebuchet MS]Vermin? No. They’ll treat us like dogs, but in a good way. Most will enjoy our companionship, be amused by our tricks and rap us on the nose with a rolled newspaper when we’re bad or bark to much (they’ll soon learn that the female of our species are incessant barkers). But, frankly, I wouldn’t mind being leash trained, so long as I’m well fed, able to nap when I please and occasionally break loose to hump a few neighborhood bitches. [/FONT]
Are you saying we’ll make great pets?
Well, I will. I don’t know about you. You don’t butt-scoot across the carpet or anything do you? :mad:
I’ve always thought this was one of my more charming attributes.
This part in that show definitely bugged me. There’s just so many assumptions wrapped up in it and, frankly, I disagree with a lot of those assumptions. For instance, I would argue that humans are distinctly less aggressive now than in the past, particularly the more technologically and socially advanced cultures. Yes, we possess more destructive power, so the actual aggression that does happen is magnified, but I think the actual amount of aggression is a lot lower. Consider, even a few hundred years ago, countries were constantly at war fighting over small amounts of territory or relatively minor grievances. Now, much of the world is pretty cooperative and working together in a global economy. We’re less aggressive because we’re actually more of a single society.
The more advanced our technology and society becomes, the more we become like one people and the more we learn to overlook differences like race, culture, religion, and all these sorts of things. I think that if this trend continues, by the time we actually have the technology to practically travel through interstellar space, we’ll pretty much have to be a single society. Hopefully, most in-fighting will be gone and we’ll have learned enough from our own differences that we can learn to deal with differences of alien species.
So if they’re at all like us, then I’d think they may follow a similar trend. If they’re not at all like us, then assuming that they’re aggressive because we are doesn’t follow at all.
I think this very much goes with my above point. I think WW2 and the Cold War was a major turning point in that sense for humanity. We finally had truly threatening power where we could easily fall into a path of mutually ensured destruction. We had a choice to either follow that path or learn to better deal with our problems. If we chose the former, we may very well not be here even now. Instead, it looks like we’ve tended to realize the true horror of it and work towards more of a single community. Of course, there are still some who want to wipe others out, but they’re a small minority.
Either way, I have trouble seeing a race of aggressive aliens making it through such a stage in technology except by pure luck, or somehow progressing in technology in a bizarre way that they learn to live together from technology without ever actually having faced that dilemma, but that might as well be pure luck as it’s hard to imagine an aggressive race of aliens that doesn’t find ways to weaponize just about everything they can.
This is the least believeable scenario. By the time they got here, they’d have passed by SO many other sources that wouldn’t require them to be aggressive at all and we’d likely have detected them first. Hell, they could easily harvest Mars or the Moon or something before having to get to us. And why would it make them aggressive? If they were going through resources that fast, that we can’t really detect them now and then they’re on us before we know it, well, it’s not so much aggressive as just bulldozing an ant colony when building a new housing development.
The only way this really makes any sense is if we somehow have something here that is actually extremely rare and can’t get easier any closer. That just seems really unbelievable.
This wouldn’t make any sense. If they really wanted our organic resources, couldn’t they more easily just grab a few of use and raise us in captivity like we do with livestock? Unless perhaps that’s exactly what Earth is, some kind of interstellar farm or zoo or science experiment.
I agree that this is the most interesting possibility for a few reasons. First, terraforming very well could require even more advanced science, certainly if they wanted to do it quickly. That is, even if they have the technology along with the ability of interstellar travel, it may be more time or resource efficient to take over another already developed planet than spend tens, hundreds, or thousands of years terraforming another planet. This could especially be true if they have some kind of disaster like perhaps they very well do nearly wipe themselves out with advanced technology and render much of their planet uninhabitable and they need a new home right now.
A more interesting possibility might be that, in fact, we very well ARE a planet they’re terraforming. Obviously, that gets into the whole ancient aliens stuff, but maybe they found a planet with suitable resources, seeded it with some life, and let it go about its way. Maybe we arose by accident, or as some inevitability, or maybe they deliberately put us here as part of that process. So, maybe they’ve been terraforming Earth for some even longer period of time and they’ll just show up and take it over.
Overall, though, I just don’t see aggression being very likely. I think it’s much more likely they’ll either try to have friendly relations with us, not unlike how we do with creatures we see as similar to ourselves, or they won’t even have a thought about us when they do whatever they do, not unlike how we are with creatures very dissimilar to ourselves.
I’m sure it is.
(Wisconsinites, I swear, all that cheese must irritate their anal sacs!)
I love the premise of the OP, but we know so little about extraterrestrial life, if there is any, that anything we speculate as being a rule for them may be completely inaccurate
True, which just goes to show how silly the whole “they’ll be just like the conquistadors” idea is.
It’s only a step up from the 1950s image of aliens lusting after human women (specifically).
I’m not ruling anything out however.
We do, we do, but they’re all stored in Area 51 . . .
Is that so farfetched? If we make First Contact with Starfish Aliens, within a week there will be human-made porn of them.
I can just see you now, Tibby, making love to the beautiful Zandora, who has a pair of fantastic knockers, and who takes you out in a spaceship so you can experience zero-gravity sex. And when it is all over and you are floating around enjoying the afterglow, Tandora says: “I am going to stay on Earth as a refugee. On my home world, guys like me who have sex with other males are horribly persecuted. No, Tibby, that wasn’t my vagina. I never said it was. Of course Zandora is a man’s name on my planet. Tibby, what’s wrong? You look upset :D”
[FONT=Trebuchet MS]See, now I’m confused, are Zandora and Tandora twins?—because I could definitely get into some of that action. And, as long as the appendage I was engaged with sexually wasn’t tubular in shape and extending outward, and it had a fantastic pair of knockers…well, you can call it a girl, or a guy, or a pie in the sky—I’d do it. 
[/FONT]
Aliens would quite probably have different biochemistry to us, so we wouldn’t taste nice to them, or vice versa. The dfferences might be subtle, or they might be radical; if they emerged on a planet almost exactly like Earth their biochemistry might resemble ours; otherwise forget it. See this interesting online book; The Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems.
For the same reason our habitable planet and biosphere would be of no use to them, unless they were determined to remove our biota and replace it with their own.
I just assume they come here to kidnap our earth women
Well, one can buy into the Arthur C. Clarke mindset that ET visited a long time ago, tinkered with us benevolently and then boogied onward.
Or there is the opinion (I forgot who said it first) that ET visited, then left and posted signs all around the galaxy warning others to stay away from the insane asylum on the third planet.
Or the John D. MacDonald opinion that Earth is a melting pot wherein the future leaders of the galaxy are being trained through adversity.
Or the opinion that we are nothing more than a giant experiment that somehow went wrong, and when the scientist comes back and sees what happened, he’s gonna be pissed and pour bleach all over the mess.
All four theories make sense in their own ways.