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Comment by Hexstream | Hacker News Reader

I think it's ridiculous to think the aliens might be hostile to us...

Imagine a civilization 1000 times more advanced than us. Why would they want to kill the equivalent of cavemen?! And there are so many planets out there, I don't see why they'd want to enslave/destroy ours specifically.

It's not like they could possibly feel threatened by us. It reminds me of some people who wanted to prepare for some kind of war against the aliens. In the very unlikely one is declared, we obviously don't have a fighting chance of any kind. It's civilization-who-can-barely-go-into-space VS civilization-with-faster-than-lightspeed-ships.

But as I said, if they're smart enough to travel the stars then they're certainly responsible enough not to destroy a comparatively irrelevant civilization.

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That's a pretty human-centric view of the universe. The thing about aliens is, they're alien. Maybe they regulate self replication, therefore the humans need to be licensed. Maybe they can't handle the concept of not being alone, like Kricket. No way to know up front.

I'd like to say we have things, therefore humans are slightly more likely to build stuff than destroy stuff. I'd hope civilization works that way everywhere, but there is no proof of that. Really, there isn't all that much evidence.

We'd share physics and math, and that's about it.

However, this particular article is nonsense.

>Why would they want to kill the equivalent of cavemen?!

Comparatively irrelevant FOR NOW. But that's discounting the exponential progress of energy consumption. They aren't afraid of our nuclear weapons, but why let us live to develop gamma ray bursts? If they study our psychology at all, they would learn that our leaders wouldn't hesitate to gamma ray burst any potential threats.

We're all going to die!!!!!!!!!!!

No, we're all going to die!11!1!!1111111111111

If I remember correctly from "Collapse" by Jared Diamond, a lot of human societies have been conquered and destroyed in human history. Kind of the same thing, technologically advanced people discover backwards people and finish them off.

Assuming it is feasible to accelerate a ship to relativistic speeds, they could well decide to exterminate us in self-defense. A relativistic bomb delivers enormous destructive power, and by definition, it is never where you see it when you see it, and is probably unstoppable.

http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3aa.html#killingstar has a very good writeup on the subject.

Maybe we're so far away the only value of our planet and species is for alien anthropology majors writing theses. They'd look at how miserable life is for sentient beings to live in a time when object-oriented programming is in vogue.

If they are that much more advanced than us, would they even regard us as intelligent? Would we be roaches to them?

Eh, I generally agree with you. Just playing the devil's advocate.

the nuclear bomb was not used by those who built it

Workers in a machine-gun factory do not usually use machine guns.

I think any civilization that is a tiny bit more advanced than us (and trust me it really isn't that hard) would wipe us out of the universe, and i personaly would not blame them. you have to sit back and think who would want to share the universe with creatures who hate, envy, kill their own, lies, cheats, destroys their once perfect habitat, pollutes, steals....

anyways my message to you the aliens is "back the fk off before you contract Humanitis. your most advanced doctors would NEVER be able to cure it"

is it not hard to be a more advanced civilization than us?

There has been millions of species of creatures on Earth over the time it has been around. We are the most advanced, and frankly the other species aren't really close.

Perhaps we are pretty special.

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