this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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A civilization capable of interstellar imperialism* would be focused on long-term exploitation of less primitive societies, so they would probably manage us better than the current elites do. A more educated, healthy worker is simply more productive than the alternative, especially in the long term.
Boy, somebody hasn't learned about colonisation history!
Targeting primitives is about right, though!
Or they would manage us to their own desires. I wouldn't say imperialism of conquered peoples went well for people on Earth.
Hell, there are several noted cases of deindustrialization, like the British Raj in India, where the imperial power pushed a civilization back into resource extraction. Why would an alien civilization colonize us for anything other than natural resources?
And there are several examples where humans weren't treated well in a resource extraction economy. Sugarcane plantations in the Caribbean were where slaves went to die.
Space is full of mineral resources, going to a random planet with a relatively high gravity well just for some rocks would be counter productive. And an advanced civilization would probably use a lot of automation for resource extraction.
That part is true. But the question is what could the aliens get from us that couldn't be made for cheaper closer to their planet?
Ass
It doesn't have to be mineral wealth. It could be biological in nature, like cash crop farming.
smaller planets tend to lose their water and hydrogen.
Not the cold ones.
Eh, natural resources are far easier to extract from asteroids and moons than to haul out the gravity well of the biggest rocky planet in the area. And they wouldn't have to mess with the nasty apes for any of them.
The only interesting thing on earth is life itself, as well as intelligent life and its culture. Literally everything else can be found everywhere else
Resource extraction includes farming.
Why would they farm on alien soil? That sounds like a terrible idea. Just make space bases dedicated for farming
No, they'd just use earth for scientific reasons, exploring and cataloguing our life. And perhaps maybe for artistic/cultural reasons, enrichment basically
Regardless, there are far more resources much easier to obtain in deep space than we have down here. That doesn't change even if gravity is less of an obstacle to them.
I know aliens haven't found this planet because Musk is still alive, and he's a threat to their goals.
I would find it more likely that they wipe us out to make way for colonizers of their own. They probably have no use for us, save maybe a couple to keep on display in a captive breeding program. They would likely have the technology to perform any work we could, but better and faster.
A civilisation that can travel between stars will probably see us as we see bugs. If we are annoying they destroy us, if we don't bother them, they won't care about us. We think we have some merit and knowledge and that we are special to be interesting to higher species, how often do you wish to uplift, enslave or destroy ants?
Don’t think about how the average person acts towards insects, think about how a farmer does. Plow the field, plant crops, fertilize, spray pesticides.
An alien civilization far in advance of our own which has travelled the stars and colonized millions of planets would just scour all life from the planet (while perhaps sucking up the genetic information into a database) and then reform the biosphere to suit their own needs, siphoning up all the mineral and energy resources they need as well.
Fair point. But that's assuming they are like us. And with how different lifeforms are on Earth we can assume that the alien species are completely different from us both physically and psychologically.
Though the farther we go the more we don't want to kill other biological life that doesn't bother us. Partly because we are kind, more so because we don't need to and other life is fun.
I don’t think it matters much what we want, it’s what we do that counts. What are humans doing? We’re causing a mass-extinction event that puts us in the same camp as Cyanobacteria, the ice ages, the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, etc.
Yeah, but a lot of people don't want to do that and if we ever going to go to the stars we won't have to do it. Those things you mention are caused by the society we have right now that clearly is not capable of long-term investment that is required for interstellar travel. So I think if we ever do interstellar travel we will be more kind to other life by that time.