There is technically nothing scarier than an alien looking at earth and then just leaving us tour own devices. That implies there they are too callous or stupid to have material analysis but not too stupid to have warp drives. Utterly terrifying what that would mean about the universe
I truly think that in order to travel the stars, a civilization would have to have some empathy. Empathy is linked to intelligence and I think if they didn’t have empathy they would have wiped themselves out before reaching interstellar flight.
To be fair to our hypothetical alien friends, to encounter a planet like our own would have to present THE most profound technically, morally, and socially difficult problem in the universe, if they messed it up they could easily trigger a nuclear holocaust and ecocide
Even if they were somewhat competent, they would still most likely trigger a World War, and with the people they’re trying to save being potentially labeled “alien collaborators” and massacred, to say nothing of the global guerilla war these hypothetical aliens would face should they pull a ‘Soviets in Afghanistan’ move
I believe any species that would take material analysis and historical materialism seriously would elect for utmost secrecy and remote observation and wait for more advantageous conditions to arise
And that’s not even getting into the more “economic/logistical” aspects of successfully overseeing a planet like this; how many ships are required, how many personnel, how much material, how far is earth from the closest “civilized” hub, how high are we on the list of galactic priorities? These are all questions any rational and historically minded species would have to ask itself and work out
Nah, our system is held together by gum and tape at best.
For any reasonable level of intergalactic technology they could could sort it out. Buss the oort cloud. Turn a handful of those iron rich asteroids into drones. Turn the carbon rich ones into food and hand it out for free. They could have it all sorted in a year with less deaths than we normally have in a year
There is technically nothing scarier than an alien looking at earth and then just leaving us tour own devices. That implies there they are too callous or stupid to have material analysis but not too stupid to have warp drives. Utterly terrifying what that would mean about the universe
I truly think that in order to travel the stars, a civilization would have to have some empathy. Empathy is linked to intelligence and I think if they didn’t have empathy they would have wiped themselves out before reaching interstellar flight.
Yes, we are well onto going that way ourselves. If the universe is weirder than we’d hope though that is a possibility
To be fair to our hypothetical alien friends, to encounter a planet like our own would have to present THE most profound technically, morally, and socially difficult problem in the universe, if they messed it up they could easily trigger a nuclear holocaust and ecocide
Even if they were somewhat competent, they would still most likely trigger a World War, and with the people they’re trying to save being potentially labeled “alien collaborators” and massacred, to say nothing of the global guerilla war these hypothetical aliens would face should they pull a ‘Soviets in Afghanistan’ move
I believe any species that would take material analysis and historical materialism seriously would elect for utmost secrecy and remote observation and wait for more advantageous conditions to arise
And that’s not even getting into the more “economic/logistical” aspects of successfully overseeing a planet like this; how many ships are required, how many personnel, how much material, how far is earth from the closest “civilized” hub, how high are we on the list of galactic priorities? These are all questions any rational and historically minded species would have to ask itself and work out
Nah, our system is held together by gum and tape at best.
For any reasonable level of intergalactic technology they could could sort it out. Buss the oort cloud. Turn a handful of those iron rich asteroids into drones. Turn the carbon rich ones into food and hand it out for free. They could have it all sorted in a year with less deaths than we normally have in a year