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this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2024
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chapotraphouse
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The problem with this is that we have anti-nuclear defenses, so why wouldn't the aliens? If they like to go around uplifting species then they've probably dealt with dozens of "Americas" on other planets, I doubt they would feel a need to be so patient, especially when being patient could result in the death of the species they are trying to uplift.
I find that when people talk about Aliens they tend to think about them as this monolith. If the purpose of coming here was a humanitarian mission i doubt their military is involved. Something akin to the Red Cross would be organizing it. The Red Cross doesnt have a bunch of military technology. If a bunch of people with swords came at them theyd be in danger. Its not the same as the Marine Corps for example. Who have advanced weapons and body armor on while on missions and air support.
Its very likely they arent even allowed to bring high-tech weapons into this solar system the same way you wouldn't be allowed to bring an AK-47 onto North Sentinel Island.
So assuming that they have the tech they need with them is a bit of a stretch IMO. And who knows how long it would take for them to relay whats going on back to the government, request military support, and get that tech sent out here.
If there really are Aliens here its very likely some Humanitarian Org that is using out of date donated tech thats legally prohibited from having certain things for fear theyd accidentally give it to us. Im sure their military could easily disable every nuke on this planet, but is it so easy for their Red Cross? That im not so sure about.
As for if theyd be used to this sort of thing they may not be. Theres a good chance if this is a species thats more type 2 rather than type 3 and say they've explored a quarter of our galaxy that them being around to witness an intelligent species taking its first steps into space has only happened a couple times at most. Its a very small window of time and most more primitive species in the star systems they control probably arent near that window yet.
That is true, but at the same time, traveling interstellar distances (as far as we know) would take an absolutely massive amount of energy and resources, to the point that it might never be possible for private enterprises and is only ever done on an official scale by their government (or whatever organisation is an equivalent of one).
In turn, we could assume that they have some means of defending themselves from our weapons, just in case, it would be a huge waste of resources to head to a planet to uplift them and then get shot out of the sky and your mission ruined.
And even worse, any warlike species that does this would also probably attempt to reverse engineer their tech and now you've got a warlike, aggressive species with stolen warp drives or whatever, ready to make war on the rest of the galaxy.
Some kind of self-defense would be a relatively minor addition to their mission and would be an important emergency necessity. Even out of date tech from their perspective could be centuries or millennia ahead of ours.
Oh im sure theyd be able to defend themselves just fine. The nukes arent a threat to them in this scenario its that our governments would be saying we will kill all the innocent human civilians if you fuck with us, and the Aliens dont want to see our government genocide us all. So the challenge for them would be how to dismantle the current ruling class without getting a ton of us regular humans killed in the process.
I think CyborgMarx raises a really good point on that front. If they just deposed our rulers themselves it would create a sense of resentment of them, and them doing so would almost certainly collapse society, if there are hypothetical aliens watching earth they might have concluded that interference would cause more harm than good.