The Praetorian
http://praetorian.diplomunion.com/e-t-comes-in-peace/
Sunday, April 30th
By Jack Lucca
Extraterrestrials permeate our culture in a way few things do. From film to television, and books to Roswell, their influence is everywhere. And one time they lived in another medium: radio. The War of the Worlds, as dramatized for the airwaves, panicked millions in the United States. A later recitation in Ecuador caused a similar panic, except that when the truth came out, the panic turned into a riot, causing six deaths.
Let’s be realistic, though. If aliens came to Earth, they won’t kill that many – at least, not intentionally. Many fear wicked intentions from any aliens that may visit Earth – a legitimate worry, considering that they would presumably be omnipotent by comparison to our technology and that we would be helpless. As Arthur C. Clarke said: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”
However, there are many reasons we have no need to fear hostile intent from aliens. Would they come for resources? There are literally billions of other planets in our galaxy for them to harvest – they need not resort to Transformers logic in deciding to endanger a planet inhabited by an intelligent species. Are they here to enslave us? For what reason would they? The best source of information we have in deducing how alien races might act is our own history as a race. We as a species have already decided that slavery is abominable, and inefficient, and that respect for sentient beings is absolute. We aren’t yet a space faring species and already we see the value in respecting the rights of a dolphin or chimpanzee. Certainly that same respect would be afforded to a species capable of what we are from an extraterrestrial. What if they intend to subjugate us, for its own sake, akin to other imperialist empires throughout history? Unlikely. Such imperialist tendencies in our own species are already fading dramatically as technology has made motivations such as resources or territory obsolete. What if they seek a garden world, because their home world is overpopulated, or dying, or some other reason? We have existed as but a blink of an eye in Earth’s history. Recent studies suggest that there may be a vast amount of habitable planets out there, and they are probably uninhabited by any intelligent species, given how long we humans took to come around, so why would the aliens not expand there versus an occupied planet? Even then, what says they couldn’t cohabitate here?
Then why do we imagine the idea of an alien invasion? Presumably, we are the most aggressive a species can be before it annihilates itself. One such event, the Cuban Missile Crisis, put us on the edge of extinction, so we can infer that no intelligent species that survives to the space age will be more aggressive than us – only equally so or less. And we do not harbor fantasies of conquering alien species, only of contact and intellectual exchange. The only aggressive fantasies we do carry with in our minds is that of defense against an invader – not one where we are the assaulters. Looks like E.T. should be the one fearing us if they come around.
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