this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2024
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chapotraphouse
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I find that when people talk about Aliens they tend to think about them as this monolith. If the purpose of coming here was a humanitarian mission i doubt their military is involved. Something akin to the Red Cross would be organizing it. The Red Cross doesnt have a bunch of military technology. If a bunch of people with swords came at them theyd be in danger. Its not the same as the Marine Corps for example. Who have advanced weapons and body armor on while on missions and air support.
Its very likely they arent even allowed to bring high-tech weapons into this solar system the same way you wouldn't be allowed to bring an AK-47 onto North Sentinel Island.
So assuming that they have the tech they need with them is a bit of a stretch IMO. And who knows how long it would take for them to relay whats going on back to the government, request military support, and get that tech sent out here.
If there really are Aliens here its very likely some Humanitarian Org that is using out of date donated tech thats legally prohibited from having certain things for fear theyd accidentally give it to us. Im sure their military could easily disable every nuke on this planet, but is it so easy for their Red Cross? That im not so sure about.
As for if theyd be used to this sort of thing they may not be. Theres a good chance if this is a species thats more type 2 rather than type 3 and say they've explored a quarter of our galaxy that them being around to witness an intelligent species taking its first steps into space has only happened a couple times at most. Its a very small window of time and most more primitive species in the star systems they control probably arent near that window yet.
That is true, but at the same time, traveling interstellar distances (as far as we know) would take an absolutely massive amount of energy and resources, to the point that it might never be possible for private enterprises and is only ever done on an official scale by their government (or whatever organisation is an equivalent of one).
In turn, we could assume that they have some means of defending themselves from our weapons, just in case, it would be a huge waste of resources to head to a planet to uplift them and then get shot out of the sky and your mission ruined.
And even worse, any warlike species that does this would also probably attempt to reverse engineer their tech and now you've got a warlike, aggressive species with stolen warp drives or whatever, ready to make war on the rest of the galaxy.
Some kind of self-defense would be a relatively minor addition to their mission and would be an important emergency necessity. Even out of date tech from their perspective could be centuries or millennia ahead of ours.
Oh im sure theyd be able to defend themselves just fine. The nukes arent a threat to them in this scenario its that our governments would be saying we will kill all the innocent human civilians if you fuck with us, and the Aliens dont want to see our government genocide us all. So the challenge for them would be how to dismantle the current ruling class without getting a ton of us regular humans killed in the process.
I think CyborgMarx raises a really good point on that front. If they just deposed our rulers themselves it would create a sense of resentment of them, and them doing so would almost certainly collapse society, if there are hypothetical aliens watching earth they might have concluded that interference would cause more harm than good.
I wonder if this is the crux of the potential political debate/crisis among the aliens
I have no doubts the elites of earth would plunge the planet into nuclear Holocaust or at the very least WW3 in the face of any uplifting mission, the aliens may not necessarily be concerned with their own safety but rather the safety of the masses and ecosystems ruled by Earth elites
Without a sizable occupation force instilling some form of rudimentary order post-intervention, many humans would be left at the mercy of rump states and imperial remnants, labeled "alien collaborators" and massacred en masse
This would present a hell of a moral, logistical, and political challenge even for an advanced interstellar state, if they fuck this up Humanity and Earth could end up in an extremely mal-developed state for centuries or more
Excellent points! And this is all assuming some kind of magical Faster Than Light travel and communications. Otherwise the aliens would be left with basically just the stuff they bring with them on a trip that could take centuries or more. So any hasty steps on their part could just end up never getting undone.
Yup. This is exactly why i think theyre actually pretty wise to do nothing for now. Atleast for the time being while earth might suck we are in a sorta stable state. Sure theres some mass killing going on here and there but its nothing compared to what could happen. I mean if the global supply chain collapsed youd have billions starving to death within a few months. I highly doubt the aliens would be prepared to feed an entire planet indefinitely just like that. Its a logistics nightmare.