we could build phones with robots but we make chinese workers do it instead
This is not true, phones are already largely assembled using robots, but there is still some things that are hard to do via robots alone which is where the workers come in. If something is easy to do with a robot, it will be done with a robot if not immediately then soon because you don't have to pay a wage to a robot, you buy it once and that's it, so with something as much in demand as phones it will always be cheaper for them in the long run if it is easy enough to do with robots. Unfortunately cellphones internally involve a number of things such as flexible cables the assembly of which is really hard to effectively automate for now. Interstellar travel is ridiculously hard to achieve. If a civilization has done that, they'll have probably solved all of these issues.
You don't have to go far away to find an uninhabited planet with lots of minerals. Almost any planet will do. They don't have to go far and find us. It doesn't sound like it is much easier to haul a bunch of weapons to a very, very distant planet to threaten the billions of people there with destruction when they could literally just dump a few robots on a planet next door, which they are probably doing already if they can travel between stars. It is something that even we can technically do already, it's just not efficient because we haven't figured out space travel yet. But we have a moon next to us, the moon has lots of minerals, and for the rest we can go to some other planet of the solar system, and you can find asteroids or planets with ridiculously higher concentrations of various resources than the earth does.
There isn't a good reason to mess with 7 billion people if you're so technologically advanced that you can do interstellar travel, unless you literally just want to be a dick for the fun of it or whatever.
Dude if they've managed interstellar travel already, I'm pretty damn sure they don't need miners any more.
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This is not true, phones are already largely assembled using robots, but there is still some things that are hard to do via robots alone which is where the workers come in. If something is easy to do with a robot, it will be done with a robot if not immediately then soon because you don't have to pay a wage to a robot, you buy it once and that's it, so with something as much in demand as phones it will always be cheaper for them in the long run if it is easy enough to do with robots. Unfortunately cellphones internally involve a number of things such as flexible cables the assembly of which is really hard to effectively automate for now. Interstellar travel is ridiculously hard to achieve. If a civilization has done that, they'll have probably solved all of these issues.
You don't have to go far away to find an uninhabited planet with lots of minerals. Almost any planet will do. They don't have to go far and find us. It doesn't sound like it is much easier to haul a bunch of weapons to a very, very distant planet to threaten the billions of people there with destruction when they could literally just dump a few robots on a planet next door, which they are probably doing already if they can travel between stars. It is something that even we can technically do already, it's just not efficient because we haven't figured out space travel yet. But we have a moon next to us, the moon has lots of minerals, and for the rest we can go to some other planet of the solar system, and you can find asteroids or planets with ridiculously higher concentrations of various resources than the earth does.
There isn't a good reason to mess with 7 billion people if you're so technologically advanced that you can do interstellar travel, unless you literally just want to be a dick for the fun of it or whatever.