WTF are you waiting for! Shit or get off the pot you intergalactic squatters! This ain't the Truman Show, give us communism or fuuuuuck off back to Vegas Prime
WTF are you waiting for! Shit or get off the pot you intergalactic squatters! This ain't the Truman Show, give us communism or fuuuuuck off back to Vegas Prime
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 Even out of date tech from their perspective could be centuries or millennia ahead of ours.
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
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.
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.
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.