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I always wonder about motivation, though. I guess an alien civilization could destroy us by accident, or by not caring about us. But I still can't figure out wh

I always wonder about motivation, though. I guess an alien civilization could destroy us by accident, or by not caring about us. But I still can't figure out why they'd do it on purpose. What's the point? Get our resources? If you can travel across interstellar space, you have more than enough empty rocks to mine and stars to get energy from...

rsaarelm 15y ago
Any civilization building simple space technology the aliens encounter might keep being harmless to them, or given some thousands of years to develop in peace it might both develop robust interstellar flight and go all genocidal on everything in the stellar neighborhood. If you destroy the weak alien technological civilizations you encounter right when you encounter them, you make sure that they won't be coming after you in the very long future you expect your civilization to keep sticking around. And assuming you are already thinking like this, you might also be more likely to think clever aliens will also think like this and be even more disposed to not let them stick around to develop to a level where they can actually pose a threat to you. It also helps that if you still live on planets, anyone in space can lob really big rocks at the planet with little danger of retaliation to produce handy extinction events, so the game theory is more first strike wins than mutually assured destruction.
arctangent 15y ago
In addition to the (IMHO most likely) reason provided by rsaarelm, there is also the small matter of religion. We've seen on Earth what minor differences in religion can entail and there's no reason that such differences wouldn't cause war between galactic civilisations.
vidarh 15y ago
Xenophobia. Hit us first before we get powerful enough to hit them. And it doesn't need to be the default - just a few bad eggs, and everyone else would need to be careful.

rsaarelm 15y ago

Any civilization building simple space technology the aliens encounter might keep being harmless to them, or given some thousands of years to develop in peace it might both develop robust interstellar flight and go all genocidal on everything in the stellar neighborhood. If you destroy the weak alien technological civilizations you encounter right when you encounter them, you make sure that they won't be coming after you in the very long future you expect your civilization to keep sticking around. And assuming you are already thinking like this, you might also be more likely to think clever aliens will also think like this and be even more disposed to not let them stick around to develop to a level where they can actually pose a threat to you. It also helps that if you still live on planets, anyone in space can lob really big rocks at the planet with little danger of retaliation to produce handy extinction events, so the game theory is more first strike wins than mutually assured destruction.

arctangent 15y ago

In addition to the (IMHO most likely) reason provided by rsaarelm, there is also the small matter of religion. We've seen on Earth what minor differences in religion can entail and there's no reason that such differences wouldn't cause war between galactic civilisations.

vidarh 15y ago

Xenophobia. Hit us first before we get powerful enough to hit them. And it doesn't need to be the default - just a few bad eggs, and everyone else would need to be careful.