As a fan of science-fiction, I’ve often paused to wonder just why an alien race might, in real life, be interested in Earth and/or humans. The plots in SF books, movies, and games are, for the most part, simply laughable — they want humans as food or because we’re a good place to lay their larvae? Right — if they evolved on a different planet, the chances that humans would taste good or be nourishing for their children are somewhere between slim and nil.
Because they want some resource (other than us) that Earth has to offer? There are billions of other solar systems out there that have pretty much the same resources, but don’t have the potential complication of being occupied, and many of them are almost certainly in the aliens’ own stellar back yards, so why would they pop all the way over here to get whatever it is? That would be like driving several states away to buy milk, when your corner store has the same stuff even cheaper.
Given that any race that might be inclined to make contact with us (peaceful or otherwise) would have to be more technologically advanced than us, there are really only two scenarios that make even a modicum of sense. The first is that they long ago solved all of their physical needs and are bored and curious. The second is that they’re so paranoid that they feel the need to subjugate (or, more likely, wipe out) every other race that ever might pose a threat to them.
The second would definitely be bad news for us, but it’s also the least likely. Scouring an ever-expanding universe, looking for potential enemies, is a mind-numbingly boring task; devoting the resources to mounting an expedition to wipe them out is highly unlikely. Even getting to us would be impossibly expensive by our standards.
The first is marginally more likely, but still pretty far-fetched. It assumes that the other race has nothing more interesting to do, and that they have essentially unlimited time and resources. We may eventually get to that stage, and we might go looking for other occupants of the universe then, but thinking that others are subject to the same boredom and curiosity that we are is fairly humanocentric.
Anyway, the story that triggered this rant is here.
On the note of “we need people to lay our larvae”, I always thought the “we need babies for batteries” part of “The Matrix” nearly ruined the movie for me.
BTW, I wonder if there’s intelligent life out there, and they figure we’re not intelligent life ourselves. 😉
Of course, I liked the Twilight Zone episode where the title of a book the aliens carried around was “To Serve Man” and it turned out to be a cookbook. 🙂 I always had a sick sense of humor though.
Yes, I imagine that there are much easier ways to get electrical power than by hooking up human batteries. If it worked the way The Matrix said, I’m sure the power companies would have started “hiring” people already. 😉
But while I found that pretty difficult to swallow as well, the third Matrix movie made it clear that pretty much everything the humans of the time believed was a lie from the machines. There’s not enough information to know why the machines of that fictional universe really wanted to keep humans around, but it’s a good bet that turning them into batteries wasn’t the main reason. I could make good cases for a couple of possible reasons.
I never caught that Twilight Zone episode. I found TZ to be a little too strange, and the episodes that I did see seemed to concentrate on the horror genre, which I don’t much care for. But it does sound humorous, in a macabre way.
Well, I haven’t seen the third one yet, only the first. You saw TZ (the original black and white one) and didn’t like it? I sort of liked it, but the last time I saw it I was a teenager, so my tastes were a bit less sophisticated. “To Serve Man” though was undoubtedly a classic. B-)
Yes, I saw a few episodes of the original black-and-white TZ (I didn’t know there was another one), and that’s the one I didn’t much care for. But I saw them in my pre-teen years, and was probably too young to appreciate its finer points.
Well, most of them had the theme of people being trapped in some weird universe or the like, but that one was funny in a sort of bizarre way. 🙂