If we were an advanced alien civilization capable of interstellar travel, how would we look at a planet/species like 2023 Earth?
Plot devices like aliens attacking Earth for her water really burns me up. The universe is brimming with water and materials. Why expend the effort to lift water out of a gravity well, when you can just gather it from comets and asteroids and not have pesky humans shooting at you?
As long as a species like humans is confined to their own rock, there's no threat of them doing much harm. Once they get to a second rock, there's a good chance they'll get to a 3rd, 4th and nth in another star system, within a couple decamillennia. It's exponential grown, limited only by the speed of light.
They'll probably start building Dyson swarms too and taking over stars that way, which is a lot more annoying than them taking over planets.
This is scary fast to observe if you're a long-lived species, or if you live around a gravity well and time dilation makes it seem like humans are buzzing along and taking over stuff at incredible speeds.
Our machine successors might. Or, might not see any reason to. Hot, rocky planets deep in gravity wells will in any case be of no more than academic interest.
And life that exists deep in gravity wells would be very interesting indeed.
Are there other known natural systems that push and mix pre-life molecules together?
Slarti: "Look at them, it makes no sense to me. They always go for the hot, rocky planets deep in gravity wells. Why do they do it?!"
Barti: "I guess there's no accounting for taste."
Slarti: "Maybe they want to avoid competition... no one is going to come there looking for resources."
Barti: "But they had to drain an Oorth cloud for fusion power to get there! You are right, it makes no sense!"