Oh, you shot up your parents then. Noted.
And if you try to stand between me and my new alien technology inspired high tech VR sex doll, you will be in serious trouble my friend.
Some of the responses here remind me of Kirk and the Klingon commander being really pissed off at the Organians for stopping the war. Sure NK is run by dangerous psychotics, but they are our psychotics, so don’t interfere. Ditto with extremist religious sects who shoot their opposition.
I think Shodan had the best suggestion in the thread. Learn, learn, learn, so we could take our place as quickly as possible in the Galaxy.
Just make sure that they aliens don’t look like devils, and, if they do, keep an eye on your kids.
What do devils look like?
You’re just beggin’ to get RickRolled
If aliens have the rational secular humanist ethical system of basically the Golden Rule and what benefits the majority is usually the best they will of course believe Kim Jong Il and Osama Bin Laden to be evil.
Why would they have a “humanist” ethical system?
Because our vocabulary for such things was codified under the assumption that people = human.
“Sapient ethical system” or “Intelligent being ethical system”. You know what I mean.
Yeah. That’s a fair implication of what I said. :rolleyes:
You are proposing that there is some sort of “universal” ethical system?
If we are lucky, aliens will treat us like cats and dogs. Neutering line forms on the right, spaying line to the left.
…but they might have bigger fish to fry. Ref: The Congo (worst war in the past 50 years), Sudan, or maybe some of these issues. If you’re going to liberate the Chinese, start in Beijing, not on the Mongolian border or some remote province like Henan. Again, the Taliban and N Korea are strictly marginal geopolitically and even ethically at least when there is no famine.
Oddly enough, I suspect that the aliens would be pretty well bunkered. Crazies and lunkheads don’t tend to think too deeply about consequence or futility, so I suspect that human collaborators would be targeted, even if they were lawful or democratically elected. Somebody has to pay, or so the thinking goes.
Thank you for responding, Curtis. I appreciate it.
I see no reason to believe aliens would have anything akin to human motivations for actions they take or decisions they make. However, you did say “if”. Okay, so if we stipulate that aliens, inexplicably, have the same ethical underpinnings we consider all “good” people do, how do you know they wouldn’t arrive at different assumptions than yours, based on circumstances as presented? Who knows? Maybe aliens would find America’s undying support for Israel ridiculous, selfish, and not at all in-keeping with what benefits the majority. Think about it. Aliens wouldn’t have any of the emotional and theological baggage humans do. Without that, and armed solely with facts, don’t you think they’d conclude, for example, that Iran has every right to feel as it does about America and Britain based on a series of transgressions under which it suffered since the 1950s when BP tried reestablish its control over the Iranian oil industry, culminating in the US-backed coup resulting in Mossadeq’s (sp?) ousting?
I think aliens’ conclusions on who the good and bad guys are would be very surprising to you.
Well, I’m a Keith Laumer fan.
And God bless each one of them
The Monitors…
I think this is more a matter of youth & inexperience in thinking “outside the box” than religious affiliation.
It’s a reference to a novel by Arthur C. Clarke.
Yeah, for me this whole scenario swings on how they remove dictators and the taliban.
Even assuming that they have some godlike way to know exactly who the bad guys are, do they get a trial? Do they get rehabilitated, or just poofed?
The remaining population would almost certainly not thank the aliens for their intervention (e.g. in north korea, thanks to the propaganga, KJI is like a messiah), what would the aliens do about that? Keep killing people until there are no supporters of the old regime?
If we omit the stuff about removing bad guys without prior consultation, I’d see the scenario as cause for cautious celebration.
As I’ve said on previous threads, the scenario of aliens attacking is far less likely than many assume, IMO. And even if they were to attack, there’s no reason for them to lie about it – they’d just attack; we’re no threat.
Citizen Kang type scenarios are fun, but they aren’t going to happen.
My WAG, and the best possible scenario I could envision, is that they remove the ability of anyone to harm anyone else or coerce them by force. So it’s not that they’d actively remove regimes so much as defang them.
The question there’s unfortunately no way to answer is, how many people actually *believe *the propaganda, versus go along with it on the surface because that’s the only way to survive?
I once read an enthusiastic review of it which hoped for a movie version…
would you believe it was by C.S. Lewis? Yep!