We’re SO doomed!
Getting back to the Cortez Aztec Montezuma concept, maybe we can do something with our drinking water. Especially if that is what they are after.
I’m saying if they do the hover over our cities thing, they aren’t likely here for purely benevolent motives (or even reasonably disinterested motives). (Although, to expand on Der Trihs’ suggestion, they could be here to evacuate us–involuntarily if necessary–before the planet blows up/the inter-dimensional rift opens/the all-consuming Galactic Horde arrives).
Since aliens with interstellar spacefaring capacity aren’t likely to need us as slaves (or food), or need any resources our civilization could provide; yet if they wanted to just kill us all, they could just nuke us from orbit–the “hovering over our cities” scenario implies some need to dominate us (but not kill us); and the best explanation I can come up with for wanting to dominate (but not necessarily kill) a species with a vastly lower level of technology and no resources you need is some kind of religious or quasi-religious motiviation.
It could also be that they’re paranoid and xenophobic, but not completely unethical. They fear a scrappy, violent race like ourselves will learn the secret of star travel and come out there and mess them up (the old John W. Campbell-style “Nuclear weapons less than two half-lives of Carbon-14 after developing agriculture?!? This upstart race of bipeds is clearly a threat to Galactic peace!”). At the same time their own sense of ethics prevents them from just dropping big rocks on us. So they go for the “spaceships hovering over your major cities” gambit and attempt to (perhaps semi-benevolently) dominate us. Naturally, this will almost certainly turn their fears into a classic self-fulfilling prophecy: If they’d just left us alone, we’d have probably blown ourselves up or died off after poisoning our own planet, but now, driven by our own xexonphobic and tribal nature (“me against my brother; my brother and I against our cousin; my cousins and I against the entire galaxy”) we quickly master the secrets of the Galactic Federation and wind up conquering the lot of them in a couple of generations at most.
Aw, I was hoping I learned a new word. But Google says this thread is the only place this word exists on the entire Internet.
I think that when (or if) aliens ever come near our planet they will probably do something that completely baffle us: blows our planet up for no reason, release a virus to kill every life form so they can “seed” our rock with their own version of life or they greet us and are astoundingly kind (in a completely bizarre way). I think we need to understand that these are aliens and have absolutely different concepts of how to behave and how to react to situations then we do.
I also wonder if this event would finally unite humanity in a common cause or if it would divide us even more, each country would be jumping for the aliens attention and stepping over each other…
Yersenia Pestis, I don’t think aliens will have an entirely alien way of thinking, to us.
Frankly, any intelligent organism or machine would have to have the same basic thought process, Potential Risk v. Potential Reward.
What we should really do is cough on them. That’ll teach them.
I said Superman, not SuperRoger!
A notice that their ships have to be registered and licensed by what ever state that they are hovering over. They are now non smoking zones and may not operate zip cars, shuttles, away boats under the influence of alcohol.
Declan
375 parking meters.
That’s a lot of dimes.
The problem with taking a suspicious attitude, is that we would have no chance of actually surviving a hostile encounter with an alien race advanced enough to cross interstellar distances. You’d just be risking an accidental war with a potentially benevolent alien race if you take that approach.
If they want to kill us, then we are dead with no chance of fighting back. We have nothing to gain by “locking our weapon systems” on them, and we have everything to lose. The potential cost of a mistaken firing would be total annihilation. If they want to kill us, then having our weapons ready won’t do us any good. I’m not saying we should be naive enough to trust them, but every possible method of keeping the first contact peaceful should be taken until we actually learn more about their motivations.
If they are peaceful, we should receive them with peaceful methods to avoid starting a war over some stupid reason. If they come with hostile intentions, we should still start with peaceful methods until we learn more about what they want. Any encounter with hostile aliens would end in annihilation if the aliens so wished. The fact that they didn’t start with total annihilation suggests that they either don’t want to kill us, or want something from us before they kill us. Even if the invaders are ultimately our enemies, our best chance of doing anything would be to buy more time.
Yes, but their risks and rewards may be completely alien to us. And not in some comic sense like “oh they get drunk from eating dog food”.
It might be where they come from. Although for some reason I think most lifeforms would have an instinctive fear of millions of tons of superalloy metal and space-age polymer suspended precariously above their heads.
And every single one between the alien ship and the horizon would probably be instantly vaporized by whatever energy weapon they happen to use.
Ray Bradbury wrote a short story that was made into a film with the hideous title, It Came From Outer Space.
Aliens need to repair their damaged ship and leave. They don’t want to hurt anybody, but they must have some stuff like copper wire to repair their ship.
I’d compare it to a Catalina PBY making an emergency landing in say New Guinea in WWII. You need to repair your aircraft and get the hell out of their. You’ve machine guns, but there are a hell of a lot of sneaky natives with spears and blowguns who don’t know why you’ve come.
Aliens might not want to eat or convert us. They might just need some gas and not have death rays or plasma rifles.
And scared to death of us with our F 16s and nuclear weapons.
Yeah I was thinking of that , when I read this reply. Since these ships take up quite a bit of airspace, then we can probably add paying property tax to the list. Some saucer , the size of independence day parks over central park and New York city could probably make some decent coin out of it.
Declan
Anyone here read the “Rama” series by Arthur C Clarke?
In the first book, a clearly alien ship, practically un-maned (un-aliened??) ship hurtles throught the solar system, slowing long enought for us to take a look at it. (yes I know this is a simple way of stateing the plot of the whole first book.)
The second book takes place 70 years later. The first thing it lets us know is the sociological outcome to our world, learnig their is life “out there”. In short, we got F*&%ed. Economies crashed, Mars and Lunar colonies became abandoned, society almost fell apart.
I am inclined to believe something like that might happen. Something we would not be able to predict. Think about the whole “butterfly and tornado” thing, and extrapolate that onto society at large…franly it would be scary
It’s the fear of foreigners or aliens taking flash photographs.
And if they don’t fear that, you probably really don’t want to get that close without making sure they’re friendly.
“Giant alien ships are floating over our cities!”
“Very well. Make sure you save a few pieces for investigation before you throw them into the Sun.”
[quote=“sohvan, post:31, topic:517322”]
The problem with taking a suspicious attitude, is that we would have no chance of actually surviving a hostile encounter with an alien race advanced enough to cross interstellar distances. You’d just be risking an accidental war with a potentially benevolent alien race if you take that approach.
If they want to kill us, then we are dead with no chance of fighting back. QUOTE]
Piffle,
The analogy of Cortez and the Aztecs is particularly useful. IANA historian, but if I recall correctly, Cortez had gone renegade, was off his mission, without back up, and conquered the New World with bluff, bluster and small pox. If the Aztecs had had a real leader and landed on the Spanish decisively things might have been very different.
How do we know we’re not facing a defeated army on the run, or some criminals, or some miners without any real weapons that are using holograms to rip off us rubes?
I recall a ST:TNG episode along those very lines, this chick was a pirate, researching less advanced worlds and using basic technology and their credulity to rip them off.
Sure, a true invading army can probably kick our ass, but how do we know that’s what we’re facing, no need to just roll over and put our butts in the air.
The fact that they are here at all. That means they have power. The simple fact they can reach us at all means they control enough energy to destroy our civilization.
The analogy of Cortez and the Aztecs isn’t useful at all. The Spanish and the Aztecs were still fighting the same type of war, even though the Spanish obviously had a technology advantage.
A more fitting analogy would be the US army against a Stone Age tribe. A primitive tribe has no defenses against Nuclear Bombardment, napalm or fighter jets. Likewise we have no defenses against orbital bombardment by asteroids, biological attacks or whatever other dozens of horrible ways they have to kill us that we haven’t even imagined yet.
If they can travel to our solar system, they can certainly drop some asteroids on us to cause a mass extinction. Nature has provided plenty of it’s own Weapons of Planetary Destruction in the solar system. Armageddon ignored as it should be, we would have no defenses against bombardment with asteroids.
No one said anything about rolling over either. If they start shooting, we’ll obviously start shooting back. Until that happens however, we should do whatever it takes to avoid portraying any hostility toward them.
Our best bet overall is to avoid being seen until we gain sufficient technology to at least have a chance of defending ourselves. While I’d personally love to know whether there are aliens somewhere in our galaxy, I’m not hoping to meet them in my lifetime.