CoyoteNature

I can evision a hundred different possibilities for possible contact and all of them equally realistic. Realistic in the sense of our own preconceptions. I mean if you look at the history of the species, it has been about conflict true, but also about cooperation, its not about war or peace but both. But this applies only to our own species, we are rarely as nice to other species as we are to our own. History has shown our greatest strength to be the quick and efficient annihalation of our competitors on this planet. In effect we are so high up partly because we killed off anything that could hurt us, and amusingly enough we did this cooperatively. I can evision a future when man is reasonably unified however, bear in mind that this does not imply peace with other races, we from our perspective might not countenance a threat to our survival or any threat however small. Especially when one considers the destructive yield any civilization at or above our current own is capable of.

Currently we are capable of within ten minutes of wiping out all of human civilization on the planet, that a most of the larger animals and plants on the planet. However this in the grand scheme of things is not really that big, fact is life has gone through extinction events before it survives, life reevolves new possibilities. But anyway the only way I could think of to really elliminate all life with possible current capabilities or extensions of them would be successive bombardment of multiple directed asteroids at the size of the dinosaurs or more. Other possibilities with a crash program could possibly involve a low C relativistic bombardment of the planet. Or give a few thousand years of concerted effort, it might be possible to construct various technologies which could cause the Sun to go nova, and thats just with current technologies and our current knowledge, assuming nothing new gets developed at all and we just keep on breeding and spreading.

But think about the possibilities of Mass destruction when you get into High C, Antimatter or Nannite replication, all technologies not impossible, such technologies could destroy our system within days with the High C versions, or months with Nannite versions. So given the possibilties of such a threat and given the near impossibility of deflecting such technologies, it would make sense to destroy a up and coming civilization before it demonstrated a capabilty to harm us.

To paraphrase the Colt motto, "All species might not be equal but WMDs make all of them superior."

Or some such pardon the butchery of the saying.

Just giving a possible reason for them not necessarily evil or anything just wishing survival.

From a viewpoint of conquest, that is rather silly, the only species that would care at all is us or possibly our ancestors genegineered species, or A.I. derivatives. Thus we would only worry about conquest from ourselves, you know raping pillaging, stuff like that only applies to humans wanting to take territory resources, etc. from others of our kind, and in general those resources would coincide but be different from true aliens.

But this does not mean simple pest extermination is out of the question for survival's sake.

Not to say they couldn't be equally agressive just that their interests might not necessarily coincide.

I mean we have the capabilty to build starships and we haven't elliminated conflict genoicide, etc., why should we think they have either (Starships is not referring to high C ships, just very low C ships or even generation slowships which we might be capable of building with a crash program).

An aside I think the French were very successful in integrating themselves peacefully into Indian culture, of course it was fairly unique circumstances, the French were outnumbered and thus rather had to resort to other methods more subtle.

From a viewpoint of them conquering us, well it might be rather harder, I mean conquest presumes you wish to keep the realestate in a reasonable condition, it means you couldn't use any of a hundred methods possible for total annihalation because you might damage what you want.

For conquest resistance might be fairly possible, I mean we evolved here, we know the area, we have the technologies adapted to our environments they don't, and technology is always a adaptation to environment, it forms because of environmental needs whatever those are.

To use the Indian analogy again, the Pilgrims would never have been able to survive if not for the help of the Indians with their technologies, their maize products, tilling hunting, knowledge of territory, all of their supposably more advanced technology was of a little help during the winter and the years after.

Actually from a a viewpoint of the entire European invasion, if the Indians had united and had not helped the colonists there was a good chance they could have staved of the invasion long enough to develop other capabilties, I mean the facts are the Europeans at the time were at each others throats and cared little for the Indians themselves as a threat.

Plus at the beginning technolgies were such that it made true conquest very very hard and nearly completely dependent on native help.

Cortez to use another example would have had little success conquering the Aztecs if not for the help of many other rival indian tribes who wanted the Aztecs dead. I mean Cortez wasn't exactly the most competent of leaders, sure he had a few blunderbusses, and heavier armor,but nothing technolgically that could not be corrected a few decades, but his men were limited in number, and to boot were stupidly greedy, so much so there was a tale of how in trying to escape from being killed his men left the city, in the process several of them died drowned from the weight of the gold on them.

The beginning of colonization was very dependent on native help without which it would not have been able to survive at all, facts were the colonists had to live of the land in a entirely new environment all without little hope of fresh resources arriving from home ( a very similar analogy where conquest is involved, except we talk about years or decades before further help could be realized).

Tactically and Stategically the natives, in this case us, would have to kill of the colonists quickly, while at the same time denying them access to information about the environment and without helping at all.



But that said a true invasion would have to be wiped out relatively quickly