Bay 12 Games Forum

It does raise the important point.  Any civilization with the ability to produce energy and material tools on the scale need to launch invasions of solar systems from other solar systems, almost certainly has the capability to produce energy and material in such abundance that it would never need to conquer anything.  Even if you did need a planet's worth of iron or something, there's plenty of perfectly serviceable dead-rock worlds, without the muss and fuss of turning a planet like Earth into an ingot.

Quote from: Eagleon on May 06, 2010, 11:43:57 pm

and no angry/noisy apes

How many times do I have to say that we're not a problem, but an asset? We're advanced enough to mine and refine metal, and then deliver it to our orbit, but we're not advanced enough to be much of a threat. And if there's one thing humans know how to do, it's kneeling before those stronger than us (our entire history proves this quite well). There wouldn't be much of a conquest, they'd just need to make examples of a couple of cities.

And free labour is cheaper than doing something yourself, however you look at it.

They wouldn't have to come here to kill us at all. That would be silly. They'd just have to send something that could. Nukes are primitive though, and would ruin a perfectly good planet. I'd expect Von-Neumann machines programmed to destroy sources of electromagnetic radiation. That would bring us to our knees pretty quickly (can you say Dark Ages?), and keep us there unless we were very, very organized and reacted quickly to preserve the technology to -maybe- rebuild and fight back with our own machines. Which humans tend not to do in the face of crisis.