Here's a concept that Mike might enjoy:
If aliens could reach us, even just their tech, they'd
have to be well in advance of our technology.
Would they not?
We can't reach them so if they can reach us then
they're more advanced than we are...
But it's not symmetrical.
It's not like you'd take everything we have and
advance it 100 or a thousand years. They'd have
technology that would blow our mind! But they'd
likely be at our level, or perhaps even behind us,
in some areas...
AND THEN there's cultural differences!
Remember, as Doc's research as conclusively
proven, the Reptilians are rather cold, even to
each other, eating their excess males including
their own offspring!
What if they're all carnivores, these aliens? Might
they see eating vegetation as demeaning? A
sign of weakness, immorality, a member of an
inferior caste or species?
Maybe they'd view vegetation eaters as socially
equivalent to cows or sheep... pigs.
The Vegan fluffs would go the other way, insisting
that aliens would have to be so ENLIGHTENED that
they were look down on meat eaters as inferiors...
animals... shameless, gutter crawling snipes.
But, can we fool them?
It's likely that aliens would be as blind to their own
culture, their own artificial constructs of right &
wrong, morality, as we are? Perhaps far more so.
Look. What if the aliens are homogeneous? What
of they don't have different races, ethnicities or
nationalities? What if they killed everyone who is
different many generations ago, so that they are
all once race, one culture... would they know what
to make of us humans? Would they have the
intellectual tools to unravel us?
War and greed has driven human advancement.
If you can't sell it to millions of people, getting
super rich, or it won't help you to kill millions of
people, it never gets funded.
What if aliens had different priorities? What if,
having slaughtered everyone who was "Different"
on their plant eons ago, there was no war. There
were no ethnicities, no competing nationalities...
How might that change R&D priorities, and
technological advancement?
We got nuclear energy when we did because we
got nuclear bombs to help kill each other. The
power plants grew out of the military plans...
Long story short: I imagine that there would be
large cultural differences, between us and Doc's
aliens, and these differences would result in
different priorities, different areas of technological
advancement.
So, where might we be strong, in comparison to
Doc's aliens? how might that be an advantage to
us?
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https://jtem.tumblr.com/tagged/The%20Book%20of%20JTEM/page/5