reply to post by IamAbeliever
I am a Christian myself, although I have no wish to enter a church until the day after the apocalypse
. However I have never been fearful of the
possibility of alien life. For one thing, I cannot envisage anything being more harrowing than the damage mankind does to itself and its planet every
single day. We are a species which has soaked every inhabited square inch of this planet in our own blood for tens of thousands of years. Even now we
are still discovering how long mankind has been murdering itself , supposedly for survival, and even now we war over petty things, like whos God is
real, oil, money, resources and most gross of all politics.
Baring in mind that we as a species are perfectly capable of our own destruction, I am willing to bet that contact with an alien race cannot be worse
than self termination on a planetary scale. At least were some new species from the stars to come and kill us all, or enslave us, at least we could
look back and say "This we did NOT bring upon ourselves, this we could NOT have prevented." It would be the first war, and the first genocide that
humanity expirienced which was not its own stupid fault. I think also that if it came to it, and the alien was not friendly , that would be a fight
that mankind could have no moral compunction against fighting. I would hate to have to kill my fellow man, for I know the quarrels amongst us humans
are meaningless and foolish in the extreme, at least in thier origins. But an alien race coming to destroy us all would be a fight we could win by
pulling off the gloves, and using all that self hatred and turning it outward against a threat. Even if we failed, we would at least die united, even
if we could never live as such.
But thats more than enough about gloom and so on. I also believe that alien life, should it exist would more than likely be peaceful, since
intellectual persons are very rarely physicaly confrontational, and more often than not have moral limitations which would promote a peaceful resolve
to any real issue between themselves and another party.
I also believe that they would have to have technology of such amazing power and elegance that it would boggle the minds of even the greatest
thinkers of our time. If that is the case, just the oppertunity to witness those mechanics would be something awesome to behold, and something that
regardless of deep understanding, would effect our thought processes in favourable ways, rather than focusing our technological advancement around our
battles for supremacy with one another. I would hope that any contact between our species and a peaceful star faring one, would see our attentions as
a planet turn to the heavens, not just as casual observers, but with the united aim of expanding our reach and our habitat to the planets and moons of
our solar system, and eventualy beyond that, to other stars, and even other galaxies given time.
One reason I am hopeful over the existance of other life in the universe, and our eventualy contacting it, is that if mankind re learns awe,
redefines the barriers of his imagination, we will see a way to live in harmony with one another to a greater extent than we do now, and in time a way
for our species to become older than the planet we originate from. My hope is, that long after Earth and the Sun, and all our familiar friends in
space have burned away to nothing, that there will be humanity still abroad in the cosmos, free of its hate, free to concentrate on exploring the true
wonder of creation. The very universe itself.