originally posted by: CrapAsUsual
a reply to: nOraKat they will choose our cities and will land in the meddle of a crowd and the governments will be powerless to
control an event like this.
What we perceive as 'aliens' could be a lot of things: subterraneans, robots, probes, psychological phenomenon, cloaked entities, fantasy, ghosts -
whatever. But let's ASSUME they are indeed 'folks from some other planet'. Well, I don't really know how such entities "think", if they think at all
in the human sense of the word. Nor do I know if they 'breathe' (they may be similar to our plants for all I know) nor do they need to be bipeds etc.
etc. So, first of all, we're ASSUMING a LOT here.
With that caveat in mind, even if we ASSUME they are more or less similar to us, so they "think" and their senses roughly match ours (they feel, see,
hear, smell, have emotions etc. - again a LOT of ASSUMPTIONS), well, so even if we ASSUME they are more or less like humans, we still don't have any
reason to believe they would land in the middle of a city / crowd etc.
Au contraire. Suppose we, humans, would be in their position - we sure enough would not land! Far too dangerous. The crowd might kill us, we
might be infested with diseases and the atmosphere is probably not suitable to support us. Also, our species knows the effects it has on a
civilisation if they are brought in contact with a (seen as) more advanced culture: the advanced culture will in effect eradicate the less advanced
one. Aliens would probably know this too, and if they are here to study us - another assumption - they probably act under some "prime directive" not
to interfere with any other civilisation. You don't poke your finger into the petri dish.
Now, perhaps - and again, ASSUMING a lot here - they are here, monitoring us. And say we somehow found out about them, say because one of their probes
was found, or perhaps because some scout ship of theirs was joyridden into a crash by their equivalent of some drunken teenagers. Say that scout ship
crashed. We found it. We (the government / military) would probably try to cover it up, simply to buy time to analyse the situation. Also, to prevent
the population from being harmed as such a ship could be riddled with very dangerous bacteria, virusses etc - remember what our diseases did to the
native Americans!
Now, say that we found one of their "drunken teenagers" alive. Say that we then tried to convey this to them (say, by creating a giant crop circle
with a picture of the ship or the "alien"). Say that "they" are social beings like us and would like to try to save one of theirs. Say that we were
able to "tell" them where to land to pick up their friend. Well, yes, assuming this, assuming that.. but in that case it may be entirely possible that
a second ship would land in a remote area.
But landing smack right in the middle of a crowd? Nah, can't imagine they would.
But again, what do I know, perhaps it is simply not true that higher intelligence (required to build space ships that could come here) implies better
social skills