Would Visiting Aliens be Benevolent or Malevolent

[Main_Brain]

MHh well regarding Our History Africa, South America,North America, Australia I would guess our cards are not so good...

[Lung]

Originally posted by Lonestar


Already posted.

Where? I apologise if it's already in this thread, but i hadn't noticed if it is.

[Lonestar]

Originally posted by Lung


Where? I apologise if it's already in this thread, but i hadn't noticed if it is.

It's fairly short, and I was just countering GePap assetation that it's impossible for technology advancement to slow to a crawl after a certain point.

[Jaguar]

Originally posted by Spiffor
If they develop good enough machines to come all the way down here, they must be a highly scientific kind. I'm sure they will observe us before taking any steps (and observe Earth in general).

If we have resources they are interested in, they will calculate the cheapest thing to get them : either they'll trade us some worthless things, or they'll attack / enslave us.

You're pretty much on the mark. I imagine that we would end up forking over lots of resources so that they could create stuff with them. Sort of like a 3rd world country/1st world country relationship. Then their lefties would protest the (insert interplanetary equivalent of "globalization" here.)

I doubt they'd attack, because their lefties would be up in arms. I also doubt they'd enslave us, because their machines would outperform us at everything.


Yes, I sincerely believe that aliens also have left-wingers and right-wingers.

[mindseye]

alien species would be more technologically advanced than us by virtue of the fact that they were able to get here from beyond our current means of space travel. From this it was deduced, quite logically, that they would therefore be less barbaric and be harmless to us.

I'm sure that's exactly what Native Americans thought when the mysterious floating cities filled with technologically advanced white-skinned aliens appeared off their coast.

If human history is any indicator, "more advanced technologically" usually = "more likely to annhiliate us and plunder our resources."

Our only hope is if human history is a poor indicator of alien tendencies!

[Al B. Sure!]

I think any aliens would feign benevolence just to get our trust and then systematically try to destroy us. Cortez and Pizarro were very successful in doing something similiar.

[Vince278]

All depends on their reason for coming here. I think it would be more interesting to discuss whether WE would be benevolent or malevolent once we are able to visit other worlds.

[Al B. Sure!]

Vince:

it depends who discovers aliens, how they are discovered, and what they're like... if it's scientists who get a response over millions of miles with that SETI thing then we couldn't be aggressive but if some kind of rogue militant oppurtunists land on an alien planet then we'd have a repeat of the conquistadors.

[Vince278]

Originally posted by Albert Speer
Vince:

it depends who discovers aliens, how they are discovered, and what they're like... if it's scientists who get a response over millions of miles with that SETI thing then we couldn't be aggressive but if some kind of rogue militant oppurtunists land on an alien planet then we'd have a repeat of the conquistadors.

I hope we learn from the mistakes in our past before we reach out to anyone. We may run into someone who will squash us like a bug if we are not careful.