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given our track record with planetary stewardship
Track record won't even enter into it, they will just say "we were here first and this planet is sacred to our people".
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Maybe those aliens will order their citizens to strip their land of it's natural resources to trade for our advanced technologies, then use them to wage wars on each other for dominance. Then when the rulers of the winning aliens run their royal coffers empty they'll steal the land from their own people to sell to us humans. Eventually they'll have mismanaged their planet's affairs so poorly humans will just move in and take over!
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Regardless of how loathsome a sentient species may be, it is a cosmic right of every sentient species to avoid extinction if it has the intellectual and physical resources to do so.
There is no moral issue.
But if humanity blows its only chance at non-extinction, I will not lose any sleep over it.
Everything we need to pull this off is firmly within our grasp. If we do not colonize the stars, our species does not deserve to endure.
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(10-10-2022, 09:53 PM)randomq Wrote: Maybe those aliens will order their citizens to strip their land of it's natural resources to trade for our advanced technologies, then use them to wage wars on each other for dominance. Then when the rulers of the winning aliens run their royal coffers empty they'll steal the land from their own people to sell to us humans. Eventually they'll have mismanaged their planet's affairs so poorly humans will just move in and take over!
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Classic! We travel across the galaxy in search of a new land, and when we find it we consider the inhabitants to be aliens.
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(10-10-2022, 10:52 PM)iquetzal Wrote: But if humanity blows its only chance at non-extinction, I will not lose any sleep over it.
This made me chuckle.
(10-11-2022, 02:52 AM)My 2 cents Wrote: Classic! We travel across the galaxy in search of a new land, and when we find it we consider the inhabitants to be aliens.
Ok, you got me there. But what would the right term be? Extraterrestrial is so Terra-centric. Lifeforms? Presumes they are biological. Inhabitants? What if they are a nomadic species? OMG I assumed they are one species, but maybe they are a much more enlightened cooperative of species?
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How about indigenous inhabitants? We seem to keep forgetting that term. So trying to steer this back toward its original subject, given the discussion so far, letting our indigenous people decide how to manage this land doesn't seem like such a bad idea.
Certainty will be the death of us.
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letting our indigenous people decide how to manage this land
So we rewind the clock, start in Africa, figure out who arrived in which uninhabited lands first, and they get dibs on running their HOA?
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I don't think "my ancestors lived here first" should be a qualification for anything in a modern democracy where everyone is equal. We should go by who owns the land, who is most competent to manage it, who was democratically elected to manage it, etc. If any of those is in doubt let it be resolved in court.
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(10-10-2022, 04:34 PM)MyManao Wrote: OMG, Tom, the TMT is not some frickin' savior of us all, and anything, everything it can do others will do regardless if it's built of not.
That's not what I posted and is a straw man.
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I don't think "my ancestors lived here first" should be a qualification for anything in a modern democracy where everyone is equal.
This belief makes living in Hawaii a poor choice, then.