Doesn't explain how a pre-industrial society of intelligent beings can hope to escape a Malthusian catastrophe.
Surely you jest, it's more like 4000 years. Faster if we didn't have the various Dark Ages. (and equivalents in non-european areas)
(and protection from when humans manage to colonize the star system and some extremist group borrows a tugboat >.>)
Well yea, I guess they never did seem to get sick, but their lifestyle does seem prone to injury. I would assume they avoid malthusian catastrophe by starving and fighting when populations overshoot available food resources. Or else they just make less babies to keep population constant, which seems exactly like the sort of biological technology that they would be given to make all the horrible parts of traditional lifestyles disappear
![Lips sealed :-X](http://97.107.128.126/smf/Smileys/aaron/lipsrsealed.gif)
Humans have been extracting and using copper for at least 10,000 years and non-sedintary agriculture probly started before that. The aliens have better stuff then copper, clearly, but the knowledge of how to extract it and work it is still something they would need along the way to whatever their industrial level society would look like. And yea they probly will want an industrial civilization someday, if only to protect the traditional lifestyle they prefer. Its not reasonable to assume that benevolent humans would even be able to protect them if a couple of space conquistadors decided to drop the hammer of physics on them for whatever reason. Somehow I don't see people parking a UN Space Fleet there for all eternity to keep the curious or greedy from messing with the place.