Going back to the Bill Gates argument; I think if we're going to be fair, an interstellar alien race coming over here to take our resources is like Bill gates crossing the street to pick up a penny from a moldy puddle, while standing on the side with bushels of cash in nice, convinient packages.
Now, let's suppose that unbenownst to us, earth has a creamy nougat filling and the aliens know this. What do we gain by learning that aliens are coming to destroy us all?
Even worse, if the aliens are fifty years away, our options are:
1: Don't tell anyone and don't care, and spend the next fifty years perfectly normally and with the moderate comfort that our current way of life gives us.
2: Tell everybody and give proof and spend the next fifty years in anarchy.
3: Tell everybody and give proof and just watch as, in five decades, the entire planetary defence system that trillions of dollars and to co-operation of every nation on earth went into the making of, gets vaporized in several microseconds, shortly before the earth is.
After all, if there WAS something worth having inside of earth, the best way to deal with the gravity well problem would be to get rid of it.
But, and let's not forget this, there is nothing inside of earth that is not available elsewhere, in many orders of magnitude greater quantity, that is many orders of magnitude easier to access.
Maybe more like Bill Gates climbing down a well to get a sliver of raw copper protected by a bacterium.
And Slaves? What is this, the 1950's? Aliens don't want HU-MON slaves for the same reason we don't put saddles on grasshoppers.
And even though FTL is probably impossible, the galaxy SHOULD have been strip-mined already by STL vessels many times over.
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Topic: Stephen Hawking is afraid of aliens (Read 18815 times)