You know how aliens are always depicted in fiction as being superior to humans in every way, right? Harry Turtledove wrote a terrific short story that challenged that assumption. The aliens that try to invade Earth are great at high-speed interstellar travel and are motivated by conquest but fight on the ground with Napoleonic-era technology, which is more than sufficient for most places that they conquer. The National Guard shows up with M-16s and a few Bradleys and eats them for lunch.
If ET came here, the ONLY assumption that we could safely make is that they're good at fast space travel. Is caution warranted? Absolutely yes. It is already out of our hands no matter what SETI does? Probably.
You know, I enjoy Turtledove’s books. But when all of civilization and human life is at stake in dealing with an alien race, I’m not really prepared to wager everything on what one (rather talented) sci-fi writer has proposed in one of his books - that they’ll be coming at us with muskets.
No, I say that we just STFU. The best possible strategy would be to switch everything to communications that DON’T get beamed into space...and, just before shutting off the last radio and TV signals, have a false scenario of a devastating nuclear war sent out...that the planet is completely irradiated, poisoned, etc., so that anyone wanting to come here will decide that it isn’t worth it.
Either that, or half-animal unintelligent underground mutants. And when they are depicted as 'vastly superior' the male alien messengers almost always appear to be gay or even transgender.
In case anyone was wondering, this is from the episode "Arena", where he takes on 'Gorn'...
And, for the record, he and 'Gorn', all these years later, are apparently still going at it.
