Still need some bucking up after Sunday’s ObamaCare disaster? Well, here’s one small reminder that even we ignored and “powerless” individuals can — and will prevail.
Okay. Maybe not exactly in our most idealized way …
Still need some bucking up after Sunday’s ObamaCare disaster? Well, here’s one small reminder that even we ignored and “powerless” individuals can — and will prevail.
Okay. Maybe not exactly in our most idealized way …
Heh. Reminds me of what SF author Wil McCarthy said about his first novel AGGRESSOR SIX:
So if we ever did encounter hostile aliens, the odds are they’d either be throwing rocks at us, or assailing us with powers almost beyond our comprehension.
This is not to say, of course, that such a conflict would be entirely hopeless, any more than mankind’s “war” against household vermin is hopeless for the rats and mice and insects of the world. It’s all in how you fight.
That horrified some friends of mine when I called it beautiful, true and hope-giving. 😉
George, in a strange & bleak way, I grok.
I’ve always wondered why so many people believe that any aliens who came here to earth would be friendly, or even consider us to be anything other than vermin. Thus I loved the scene in Independence Day where the airhead who wants to meet the “space brothers” gets zapped. And I get a kick out of the president in Mars Attacks who just has no clue about how malevolent these invaders really are.
I expect any beings with the technology and sophistication to reach us here would consider us, at best, expendable. After all, if our own “leaders” consider us as nothing but herd animals to be tagged and milked, what could we expect from creatures with no predisposition to “love” us?
But yeah … in the end, the rats, mice, and cockroaches will probably prevail … and to whatever extent we are like them, so will we …
Well, IMO, any aliens that could get here wouldn’t even notice us. There is absolutely nothing about Earth or the Solar system that can’t be found more easily floating around everywhere else. The gas giants would be more useful.
People always want to make the Euro/Amerindian comparison. On a forum, I replied thus (and was promptly ignored in favor of the argument, of course):
The same statement, btw, could have been said about any human venture to another continent where less advanced peoples lived. Sure, Europeans, who were far superior in technology, science and know how than AmerInds could have chosen instead to occupy uninhabited parts of the North American continent, but nevertheless did push quickly into AmerInd territories and conquer the native tribes. It just happens. What shoulda/woulda/coulda rarely comes into play until after the fact.
(Me)You’re thinking on the wrong scale, brah. Compared to a civilization that can shove starship-sizes masses ‘cross interstellar distances (and survive the trip), Europeans and Amerinds differ only in their quaint clothing fetishes and the color of the mud they rub into their belly-buttons.
Example: A ship that can survive continual micromatter collision at high relatavistic speeds is going to be fairly impentrable to anything our civilization can throw at it, including nukes. Note that this posits only a species that can build a device to shove such a mass almost as fast as light. If you want to get into a tech level that can warp/fold/fiddle-with spacetime so as to circumvent relativity, all freakin’ bets are off.
Leslie Fish put that poem to music. It’s one of my favorite songs to crank up and sing along with. (Well… it was when I had a stereo in my car…)
George,
You wrote, “IMO, any aliens that could get here wouldn’t even notice us.” You make a good point. I hope we never have to find out.
OTOH, they might notice us in the same sense that we notice rats, mice, cockroaches, and for that matter viruses and bacteria.
(Whatever happens, if it happens, I don’t believe that an alien encounter is likely to be good for us Terrans.)