Yet it should be noted that they are giving the human race lots of chances. They could have just attacked immediately with no warning.
Just to be clear, are you
presenting us with a scenario, curious as to how we will react?
Or are you attempting to
argue in favor of a conclusion, which you have predetermined to be the 'only right course,' because you are interested in creating a narrative where humanity willingly abandons the Earth and in 'forcing' others to accept that this would be the correct course of action?
...
Because the people you're responding to have made a valid point: there is no way to guarantee that an offer of the kind you describe is sincere. It would be very simple and relatively convenient for the arthropod species to simply allow us to climb aboard their fleet of ships, then dump us on an uninhabitable planet or otherwise dispose of us. Doing so would ensure that we do not somehow leave a mess on 'their' homeworld, either by sabotaging it with weapons of mass destruction, or just by having our stinky corpses cluttering up their field of view.
Given the impossibility of establishing the aliens' good faith in making this 'offer,' and the fact that they
clearly have no respect for our lives or right to the planet in the first place or they wouldn't be making it... Responding by threatening to hold the Earth's biosphere hostage by willfully releasing huge amounts of nuclear fallout may not be
optimal depending on whether or not the aliens are telling the truth, but then again it might be optimal.
Certainly, the Native Americans would be a lot better off today if they could have told the early Americans of 1800 or so "we have a button we can push that will ruin this whole continent and make it an uninhabitable mess; respect our land rights or we push the button."
The capacity of the human nuclear arsenal is grossly exaggerated. We do not actually have the power to ""burn the entire atmosphere to radioactive ash."" Not even close. At best we can give the biosphere a temporary cough and a fever for a few decades.
Also, the technology for [awesome medical stuff]
Sounds like a pretty damn sweet deal. A lot of people will disbelieve it at first, but once it turns out that yes, you can get to live forever, there will be a stampede for the stuff.
The thing is, we won't know the medical tech works until AFTER we've already been forcibly dispossessed of the planet. And, if it turns out "
it's a cookbook," it's too late to do
anything about it, even retaliate by mildly inconveniencing them.
See, the thing I'm wondering is,
what's the hurry? This civilization has been living happily off of the Earth for two hundred million years. If they were really dealing with us in good faith, they could say something like:
"OK look, we know you're sentimental about the planet; you feel the same way we do, only you were
born there whereas none of us even knew where it was until a little while ago. We really want this planet, but we understand that it's special to you. We'll give you, oh... one hundred years to learn the benefits of our technology in the off-world colonies we'll establish for you on other, similar planets. We'll be requiring that you gradually move part of your population off-world in return for what we give you, but we'll let you identify and preserve sacred sites and locations of special historical significance, as long as we get, oh... half the land area, apportioned by negotiation between us."
Something like that would still be kind of asinine and blatantly imperialistic, but it would at least sound like they were TRYING to be fair, instead of trying to brutally shovel us off the planet as fast as possible so they could delete us from the universe and never think about us again.
It would take them a few years, but yes.
So what? Since "mildly inconvenience them" is literally the only bargaining chip we have, we might as well use it or threaten to use it anyway. They're blatantly not acting in good faith, and you're blatantly stacking the deck of this scenario in favor of your desired conclusion while keeping up the pretense that you're trying to ask
us what
we think we should do.
Well it's interesting that you would choose certain death over a potentially quite comfortable lifestyle.
What you are ignoring when you describe it this way is that other people who are alert to the possibility of deception and treachery don't see the choice this way. They see it as "better to die on your feet than to die on your knees" or "better to die mildly inconveniencing the person who killed you than to die in the manner of their choosing."
The best analogy I can come up with is the crime of kidnapping. A kidnapper often points a lethal weapon at their victim and says "come with me or I will kill you." You, using the logic you apply to this scenario, would probably cooperate. However,
in practice, this is not a good or safe response. The kidnapper usually kidnaps people for very nefarious purposes, and kidnapping is a very serious crime. Letting the victim live usually makes it much harder for the kidnapper to get away with their crime, so they have a strong incentive to kill the victim. And to do so
after torturing the victim, raping the victim, obtaining a ransom from the victim's family, or otherwise inflicting appalling crimes upon the victim and their loved ones.
It is arguably better to resist a would-be kidnapper and
die fighting than to cooperate with them, though that is a decision I suppose each individual person would have to make for themselves.
...
Here, the arthropods are basically walking up to someone whose power is like a child compared to theirs, and saying "I'll give you space candy if you get in my space van, and if you don't get in my space van, I'll kill you."
This story does not end well for the weaker party.
There might be another faction that want diplomatic ties to any intelligent life on Earth if that's the case, though they might be a minority.
That would also explain why they're in such a hurry. They want to do this before anyone else finds out...
