What would you choose?

A Peaceful alien race who wouldnt share technology and looked at us as a lesser childlike race and teased us with promises of technology

or

An aggressive alien race who wanted to strip mine our resources in return for advanced technology.


I ask this question as i myself cannot decide what i would choose.

A peaceful race would be very frustrating, goading us, letting us see what is possible but not letting us use it. Yes it may give us an incentive to better ourselves, but it could do more harm than good

An aggressive race would ruin earth, but would give us the technology to not need the resources.

What would you choose?

I assume we would be the ones doing the mining?

I wonder what kind of labor union they have going?

I don't think any technology could replace the complex ecosystem of earth.
And that would no doubt be ruined by strip mining the whole thing.

Your question assumes we would have any choice in the situation if an advanced, aggressive alien race wanted to strip mine or planet in exchange for tech. Americans can't even get their elected officials to get roads fixed. The U.S. government (and governments of the world) will do as they please.

Interesting question, but relatively easy to answer, in my opinion. Select one, and you doom the earth to slowly fizzle out, impacting all earth species (except for maybe humans, because I guess we would have gotten knowledge about how to survive on a lifeless planet).

However, if you choose the other, earth would go on, life as we know it would go on (except now there would be something we want but are unable to attain). But our quality of life wouldn't go down. Not only that, but perhaps things would improve. Perhaps nations would come together to work towards the elusive knowledge the aliens possess.

Well, if they wanted to trade technology for resources, that would mean their technology would be useless to us without their resources. So we'd have the knowlege, but no way of implementing it. I would go with the condescending aliens.

Originally posted by madjamjar
A Peaceful alien race who wouldnt share technology and looked at us as a lesser childlike race and teased us with promises of technology

We could live with this scenerio.

Originally posted by madjamjar
An aggressive alien race who wanted to strip mine our resources in return for advanced technology.

An aggressive race would ruin earth, but would give us the technology to not need the resources.

But if they had technology that did not use resources, why would they want to mine our resources?

I'll take door #1.

I have confidence enough within our species that we'd be able to catch up technologically with any other, so I'd have to go with number one. I have confidence because the last hundred years has shown me that our technological evolution is exponential (i.e. really freaking fast).