So you've all seen that Stephen Hawking says aliens, if they show up, are likely to be dangerous to us.
Possibly. I don't see how you can lay odds on that. All we have is a sample of one.
I do know that I wouldn't want to be on the planet where Earthlings landed.
We are not to be trusted.
Just ask the Iroquois. They thought they'd made some new friends.

I also don't know if they'd just plunder the Earth.
Gabe at Ace's is right, there are better places to get stuff, places like asteroid belts without hostile aliens (us) and a gravity well.
I think Gabe's wrong about space being too big. First, multi-generational, interstellar travel is possible. What if they sent a probe thousands of years ago, it checked out Earth and  saw a nice planet without intelligent life, it sent something back with the message and now they're almost here?.
Or maybe faster than light travel is possible. I hope so.
Or they send something in suspended animation.

You can't really place odds on what they'll be like, but there's a few possibilities it seems to me.
1. They want to live here. That means they live with us either peacefully or enslave us, kill us; eat us  or any or all of the 4.
2. They're interstellar traders and they just want to trade for stuff.
3. They're raiders. Imagine if the interstellar equivalent of the Dread Pirate Roberts just happened to end up here? They'd have a blast and we wouldn't know how to dial interstellar 911.
4. They're the galactic version of Jehovah's Witnesses and they just want to talk to us about Jesus.
5. James Hogan has a book about aliens sending out robotic factories that use the resources to make a lot of factories, spread across the planet and then send stuff back to the home world. Hopefully an alien civilization who made that would have the scruples to make sure it doesn't plunder places with life, but who knows?

I'm absolutely sure there's lots of aliens out there.
I think the universe is infinitely large so there are an infinite number of planets so there are an infinite number of planets with life on them so there are an infinite number of planets with intelligent life on them.
When we meet the ones close by, I want it as equals, not with us as planet-bound inferiors.

Posted by: Veeshir at 08:14 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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