My favorite by far in that series was the second, written and directed by the great James Cameron.
The one I'm talking about, Aliens, starred Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley, a genuine, balls of steel female, who saves a child from the acid-blooded mother alien. Ripley had one of the greatest lines ever in a movie, when she tells the ugly,formidable alien mommy to 'Get away from her you bitch!'
Back to my point, given the vast distances between potentially habitable places in our own galaxy, it doesn't appear that aliens are a viable threat to life on earth. Some very smart scientists have been seeking the slightest hint of alien life for several decades. They're using some very sophisticated equipment to identify incoming radio signals. Thusfar, despite their best efforts, they've found nothing.
Just for the sake of argument, let's say there was an alien civilization that had technology that made interstellar travel possible. Would they be like E.T., or more like Darth Vadar?
It seems unlikely aliens would travel light years to come here unless we had something they wanted, like a new place to plant their seed. Jeeze, it's not as if that hasn't happened on Earth before. The best, most close-to-home example is what Europeans did to the indigenous people of North, Central, and South America, starting in the 17th century. Indians on this side of the Atlantic were enslaved, pushed aside, or very often, exterminated, because the European newcomers awarded themselves the right to take what they wanted. The concept was and is called 'manifest destiny'. It's an incendiary mix of religious animus, greed, and brazen ambition. White Europeans considered the Indians of the Americas to be vermin with no rights. That's just one cold-blooded and very real example of an alien encounter gone very wrong. Moreover, it's still happening on a grand scale. Right now, in 2012, the Republican legislators and the governor of the state of Michigan have given themselves the right to victimize and asset strip a number of struggling city and county governments in their state. What they are doing in Michigan is another damnable example of manifest destiny.
The great cosmologist Stephen Hawking thinks we are foolish to assume alien visitors would behave any way other that rapaciously if they took the trouble to travel light years to get here. And, given the huge advantage they would have in technology, taking what we have would be as easy as engineering a virus that would eliminate humanity in short order, leaving them free to settle in and exploit earth's resources as we have for many millennium.
Bottom line; where aliens are concerned, if they are out there, probably the best thing would be for them to stay in their own neighborhoods, galactic or otherwise.
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