Will we like the aliens?

 

http://turcopolier.typepad.com/the_athenaeum/2015/03/httpwwwnytimescom20150328opinionsundaymessaging-the-starshtmlrefopinion.html

pl

Comments

[Babak Makkinejad]

You cannot be serious; we do not even like one another, let alone aliens.

[LeeG]

I'm envisioning a couple possibilities, multidemsional beings that might look in on us like a kid with a microscope looking at Protozoa or a machine intelligence embedded in a spaceship wandering around seeding habitable planets with prefered life forms, gardening.

[ex-PFC Chuck]

I'm with Babak; if I interpret his comment correctly he's in line with the Fermi Hart hypothesis.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

[Charles I]

I'm reading it now but when was it written?

[turcopolier]

Charles I

25-30 years ago. pl

[kao_hsien_chih]

BM,

I don't know. My experience with people from several cultures is that they like "foreign" peoples more than people who are near them and like them. They keep having to deal with their neighbors and bad feelings can pile up. They have to compete for shared resources and keep getting into disputes over neighborly matters. On the other hand, they have little to quarrel with people from distant places on daily bases. If the aliens, should we ever run into them, are sufficiently different in their needs, wants, and motivations from humans (very likely, if it were EVER to happen), there will be little or nothing to quarrel with them over, unless that is, they want to "reform" humanity to be like them, in which case all bets will be off.

[Charles I]

Very nice effort right of of the gate.

"I did that ten minutes ago sir." Smiling lieutenant indeed.

Getting to know you is one long Life of Benjamin Button - which I have yet to watch - tho I recall commenting from misterheebiejeebie on reading something that imho you Lane were pretty well formed virtually from the get-go.

[different clue]

Will the aliens like us?

" Man! It's whats for dinner."

[steve]

Of course we will. They will want to Serve Mankind.

Steve

[James Morrison]

Quite sure I was married to one at one time.

[Cee]

Read your story. Your account of the shooting of aliens was similar to what was aired in another episode on the History channel yesterday. A Marine engineer named Paul Schneider who claims to have shot some aliens that were in an underground base in Dulce New Mexico was shown in taped interviews bearing scars from his gun battle with them.
The truth is being hidden. The question is why?

[turcopolier]

Cee

If you say so. pl

[turcopolier]

James Morrison

Was she nice? Are you sure it was a she? pl

[turcopolier]

Charles I

I wuz growed like a plant to be like this. pl

[Babak Makkinejad]

People are only kind to you if they perceive you to be not a threat. Thus tourists of all kinds are not unwelcome.

But if you stay there, say as a foreign student, then very many resent you.

[Fred]

Col.,

I wonder if I could sell them Manhattan for some alien beads? Make that "works of art.

"They would be no more incensed by our bad behavior than historians who learned that Babylonians attacked one another with spears."

If only my friends were as nonplussed as that; then I could take this deck of cards with the Confederate battle flag on them (that I just picked up in Dallas) to the next poker game.

[Charles I]

And what a fine hardy specimen you turned out to be. I can see a screenplay Firefly meets Predator meets Tae Guk Ji.

I'm not sure who's left at the end of the sport.

I admire that although this was a scifi war story of maneuver and battle, which you evoke with great skill, you put your social/officer/REMF commentary in there in broader strokes that for me humanize all that order of battle detail. And that's been consistent from the get go, as your other evocative powers developed.

Fewer quotation marks, my cluttery bugaboo, I noticed!

[Vaclav Linek]

Thank you for posting your short story.
I read it the first time you posted it on the Athenaeum.
I liked the furries.

[David]

Seth Shostak's argument does not impress me. He writes: "But I, for one, would hesitate to let a paranoia based on nothing more than conjecture shackle the activities of our children and our children’s children." Well, just because I don't like the possibility that I may get into a road accident does not mean it
is not prudent to take out auto insurance.

While it is true that a planetary radar system is a good idea
to keep track of asteroids that could hit the Earth and cause great damage. It does not follow that just because they may also be picked up at interstellar distances that we should broadcast our presence every which way and make it easier for potentially hostile aliens to know of us.

[LeaNder]

so you mean, I should better not go to Tehran for a year to study Farsi and the culture? I surely do not want to live in a country for a whole year, where everyone will resent me after all?

[BabelFish]

Being a life long Sci-Fi reader, the "first contact" stories are always the most intriguing. I believe it would be chaotic. If their technology was as far beyond ours as science tells us it would have to be to get here, they would simply appear to be magician/deities to the majority of humanity. IMHO, the deep seated "fear of the other" humans seem to harbor would drive the first responses. In any case, it would be a profound shock, something that we don't do very well with as a race.

And a nod to all the Outer Limits references! Well played indeed!

[turcopolier]

Fred

you could get a deck with the First National Flag on the backs, "The Stars and Bars." Nobody will know what that is. pl

[turcopolier]

Charles

Thanks for the good words. IMO you can't write about military affairs without a lot of military detail that shows who these people are and what they are as opposed to the ordinary run of civilians. If you don't include this kind of detail on structure, ethos, equipment, then you just have a lot of frantic people running around aimlessly in the woods. pl

[Babak Makkinejad]

Life is tough.

[Allen Thomson]

To all:

One of my favorite alien contact spoofs:

http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ