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Return of the 'Original' Terrans

Hotdog Vendor said:
So we have a choice between getting wiped out by a superior force, mildly inconveniencing that superior force before getting wiped out, or abandoning this planet and its problems to live somewhere else for extended lifespans in post scarcity, but with that vastly superior force saying we can't have our own spaceships or a 'second ammendment'.
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I mean, there's a fourth possibility.

Namely, the spaceships they have us board are programmed to fly a few light-years and then the robot crews just stop and dump all humans aboard into the vacuum of interstellar space. Or drop us off on an uninhabitable planet without adequate protective gear. Or flood themselves with a deadly neurotoxin. Or they drop us off on a habitable planet and then just blast the shit out of it to kill us all.

Because the kind of people who place so little value on human life that they'll threaten to murder us all to get us to leave the planet fast because they want unimpaired use of it this much even though supposedly no living member of their species has set foot on it and for about two hundred million years they haven't even known where it was until just now...

Well, that's also the kind of people who'd kill us all just to be rid of us, and who would see no point in expending resources to keep us alive or to give us benefits like free medical care.
 
Horologer said:
The problem is that you're basically conflating knowledge we have right now and the knowledge we would have in this scenario. Looking in on this scenario from the outside, you could argue that the logical choice is to up sticks and move to this Not!Earth that the Original Terrans ask us to, because we know they intend to keep their word. It would still be terrible, but there's an argument for it.

But from the inside of the scenario, we don't know whether these Original Terrans are lying or not. The fact that they immediately crashed the party with superweapons and told us to leave wouldn't exactly engender trust. A demonstration of their firepower doesn't imply that they're honest, it just proves that they can kill us. The logical choice is to hold the planet hostage, because the one thing we are certain of is that they want the planet. It's basically the only thing we have to bargain with, so we can't afford to simply hand it over. The alternative is to throw ourselves into the arms of an aggressive and hostile invader.
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What about the fact that they are willing to accommodate groups of humans seeking refuge even if the majority of humankind resists? That doesn't really make sense if they intended to just kill everyone anyway from the start.
 
Mak Taru said:
What about the fact that they are willing to accommodate groups of humans seeking refuge even if the majority of humankind resists? That doesn't really make sense if they intended to just kill everyone anyway from the start.
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That doesn't prove anything, though? Once those humans disappear into the space van, there isn't really any guarantee they're still safe once out of sight.
Even if they were and the aliens provide live feed of them being safe and happy with a cure to old age and perfect health, it can be seen just as a way to bait the rest into jumping into the shady space van after the first batch suffered nothing.
Because no smart alien would kill the first batch, the others wouldn't want to jump in after. Only once you can get them all, then you can get rid of them.

The thing is. No matter what they do, these aliens already fucked up big time. They need to fire whoever is in charge of foreign relations. First impressions are the major factor in any sort of relationship between individuals or large group of people. Blowing up a moon and basically saying 'leave Earth or else' doesn't engender trust. So no matter what kind of seemingly kind and good-willed action they do after, it's already moot after blowing things up and issuing a threat.

At this point, we're kind of repeating ourselves, several made the point before I even noticed the thread, I posted too to clarify and then Simon_Jester showed up and explained it better than anyone here but it doesn't seem to stick either way.
 
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Yeah.

One of the core rules of negotiation is "never issue a threat you're going to regret carrying out." Don't threaten to do something you're not comfortable with actually doing, in case they call your bluff.

But if the aliens are comfortable with doing as they have threatened to do, then they place effectively zero value on human lives, welfare, or autonomy. And then it's psychologically implausible that they'd even care about our lives enough to be willing to do the work it would take to fulfill their own promises.

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Sorry, @Mak Taru , but you've created a scenario where no one who isn't super trusting is actually willing to believe your hypothetical aliens will do as they claim. And that means they're probably lying, which in turn means the "better to die on your feet than to die on your knees" question comes into play.

Even if you cannot possibly defeat the guards, there is no advantage in meekly letting the guards herd you into a gas chamber in the hopes that it's actually a shower like they say it is.
 
Well they may be lying. They may have an unknown reason to complete this resettlement within a certain time limit, as has been proposed earlier. Or they may believe that a display of force is the best way to ensure cooperation, based on their experience with the psychology of their own species.
 
Reminds me of o e of my RPGs. In that one super advanced aliens find Earth, set down. Peace talks, so freakken our by our ability to wage war on each other. From there they are banned from space flight unless super fused ( in some of situations pressed to be muscle.)

Here?

If they are Terran or not, it shows they do not care about us at all and only situation we win is spiting them by radiating the beautiful Earth to a atomic fire ball. Screw your space grasshopper/lobster thing.
 
OverlordVan said:
Reminds me of o e of my RPGs. In that one super advanced aliens find Earth, set down. Peace talks, so freakken our by our ability to wage war on each other. From there they are banned from space flight unless super fused ( in some of situations pressed to be muscle.)

Here?
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Yeah, I mean that scenario at least works because the reason people are declaring a quarantine around us is "Space Jesus you guys are fucking lunatics." I may not like that, but I can respect it, and I can trust someone for whom that is the stated motivation.

[Though I have no idea what 'super fused' means :p ]

Whereas here, the Arthropods are just imperialistic dickbags who are offended that the planet didn't... I dunno, go into temporal stasis the moment they left? It bothers them that life went on without them, and they want to purge the planet of the offending life so it can be theirs. And they want those filthy xenos (us) off their planet, even though we are at least as much natural and rightful inhabitants of the planet as they are.

I can't trust someone when that's their stated motivation.

Mak Taru said:
Well they may be lying. They may have an unknown reason to complete this resettlement within a certain time limit, as has been proposed earlier. Or they may believe that a display of force is the best way to ensure cooperation, based on their experience with the psychology of their own species.
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I mean, yes. They could totally be a species of sociopathic conscienceless brutes who use overwhelming violent threat displays to enforce compliance on the weak.

The catch is that if that is the psychology of their species, it is highly unlikely that they have any qualms about lying to us or exterminating us by treachery. Their species history is probably littered with cases, in other words, of guards herding people into gas chambers at gunpoint while telling them that said gas chambers were in fact showers. It's just accepted that this kind of cold-blooded lying and treachery by the powerful is normal. Most people in their society who are weak just expect it.

Somewhat paradoxically, they simultaneously consider it a sort of pathetic naivete to actually BELIEVE the promises of a person who is coercing you if you don't have some kind of leverage... and feel that "rationally" they have no choice but to comply with the powerful person coercing them, because nothing in their species psychological makeup makes them capable of collective resistance against an oppressor.

This represents a very bad game-theoretic equilibrium, but certainly one that can exist.

So yeah, that's my take on the Arthropods.

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In which case I don't want to be in their power and would probably prefer species-wide death to the consequences of being in their power. For the same reason that it is a VERY BAD IDEA for a little girl to get into the nice stranger's space van no matter how much space candy they promise her.
 
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I mean, couldn't they just buy up the land over time? They're obviously going to have more resources than us, and humans actually like going out beyond civilization to find new places to live. All they'd need to do is force a free migration treaty with the human nation states, and then slowly wait as the individual lobsters decide to move there leverage their wealth into political positions and thus turn those human nation states into multi-racial nations states whilst all the minorities begin their interstellar exodus on their own accord.
 
So they might be lying to us and planning on killing us regardless, in which case we should definitely force them to kill us?
This is why we can't have nice things.

If they're trying to pull one over us then surely the folks who decided to stay in Antarctica can spite-nuke the planet when we don't send back word that all is well, if that's what they want to do. But until they actually prove their treachery, why make a move that forces humanity to lose?

Besides, if aliens really do try dumping most of humanity into the vacuum of space, that's clearly a sci-fi plot and we'll find some way to get out of it. Though on that note, the lobsters are clearly concerned about leaving competition with space ships and weapons to develop unwatched and uncontrolled, which of course means that by trying to prevent that by keeping us under a heavy thumb, we'll eventually become the thing they fear and rebel anyway because that's how these things go.
 
GabeC1997 said:
I mean, couldn't they just buy up the land over time? They're obviously going to have more resources than us, and humans actually like going out beyond civilization to find new places to live. All they'd need to do is force a free migration treaty with the human nation states, and then slowly wait as the individual lobsters decide to move there leverage their wealth into political positions and thus turn those human nation states into multi-racial nations states whilst all the minorities begin their interstellar exodus on their own accord.
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Sounds kind of complicated to the simpler and cheaper alternative, which is just coercion or genocide.

No large scale organization or polity can be that virtuous or generous. If humans could communicate with ants, and those same ants made a nest in your garden. Do you think you'll bother making treaties with them to gradually move them out? You'll just exterminate/chase them out and destroy the nest to restore the appearance you want for your garden.

It's the same thing here. The athropods' actions aren't exactly wrong from a practical sense if a bit exaggerated (blowing up a moon to make a point seriously? Unless they're just that incredibly cheap and these guys just don't care). I'm just kind of surprised they even bothered to communicate with us, really...

If the situation is reversed, we're unlikely to care about primitive species still stuck on their planet. It may sound weird and cruel but that's only because you can relate to being a modern sapient species still stuck on their planet for the time being since you are part of one. If you're born in a different era, it's different. Can you say, you'll feel remorse or you can relate to the ants you'll commit genocide on in your garden? Not really, or at least most people wouldn't.

To the ants, it is the end of the world and you are its harbinger. To you, it's just another Tuesday dealing with an infestation, and it doesn't really mean you're a bad person or cruel. It's just the natural life order is so large, on a completely different scale, we don't really acknowledge it. It's best not to, or you'll fall into deep moral debates with yourself and lots of philosophy.
Hotdog Vendor said:
So they might be lying to us and planning on killing us regardless, in which case we should definitely force them to kill us?
This is why we can't have nice things.

If they're trying to pull one over us then surely the folks who decided to stay in Antarctica can spite-nuke the planet when we don't send back word that all is well, if that's what they want to do. But until they actually prove their treachery, why make a move that forces humanity to lose?

Besides, if aliens really do try dumping most of humanity into the vacuum of space, that's clearly a sci-fi plot and we'll find some way to get out of it. Though on that note, the lobsters are clearly concerned about leaving competition with space ships and weapons to develop unwatched and uncontrolled, which of course means that by trying to prevent that by keeping us under a heavy thumb, we'll eventually become the thing they fear and rebel anyway because that's how these things go.
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In a real-life scenario where this does actually happen. Humanity can't actually rely on TVTropes and hopes reality comply...
 
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Hotdog Vendor said:
Please forgive me for not taking this thread entirely seriously.
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Looking back at the opening post... I suppose that's fair. I guess this discussion really threw me off rails.

In fact, just realized your post isn't actually a serious one. It was kind of obvious (who would use tropes as a serious argument here?) but I still didn't get it. I'm used to sarcasm and irony usually but somehow this one completely went over my head. :V
 
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Terran Imperium said:
No large scale organization or polity can be that virtuous or generous. If humans could communicate with ants, and those same ants made a nest in your garden. Do you think you'll bother making treaties with them to gradually move them out? You'll just exterminate/chase them out and destroy the nest to restore the appearance you want for your garden.
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Hilarious that you bring that up, because I'm the kind of person that moves them out of my sink as they walk onto my fingers and give them my leftover crumbs before washing the dishes. Just because my brain is probably larger than their equivalent of civilization doesn't mean I get to be a dick about it and treat them as if their lives don't matter. Not that comparing Humans to Ants is correct in this scenario since both Man and Lobster can actually communicate with one another whilst being understood.
 
Terran Imperium said:
No large scale organization or polity can be that virtuous or generous. If humans could communicate with ants, and those same ants made a nest in your garden. Do you think you'll bother making treaties with them to gradually move them out? You'll just exterminate/chase them out and destroy the nest to restore the appearance you want for your garden.

It's the same thing here. The athropods' actions aren't exactly wrong from a practical sense if a bit exaggerated (blowing up a moon to make a point seriously? Unless they're just that incredibly cheap and these guys just don't care). I'm just kind of surprised they even bothered to communicate with us, really...
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Except that's not so. If humans actually thought like that, it would be a regular thing for nuclear powers to just nuke most of the population of non-nuclear powers without even bothering to make any demands then walk in to take the local oil wells or whatever for themselves.

A culture that looks at outsiders "like ants" and ruthlessly destroys anyone who can't fight back is a culture that is the enemy of everything else. And essentially declares war on the rest of the universe by existing. And can only really maintain that behavior when up against people who can't fight back, which demonstrates how opportunistic and dysfunctional it is.

Nazi Germany and WWII Japan thought like that, and look at how well it turned out for them.
 
Hotdog Vendor said:
So they might be lying to us and planning on killing us regardless, in which case we should definitely force them to kill us?
This is why we can't have nice things.
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The underlying argument is that the likelihood that they're going to kill us later on, given their initial behavior, seems very very very high. Their opening move is:

"We are super-racist against you. Your lives and history and culture are of no meaning to us. Your world is rightfully ours. We have absolutely no problem killing you if you do not obey us. Leave."

The more unimpeded control and access to the Earth that they are given, the harder it will be to even mildly inconvenience them via spite-nuking or other means.

Terran Imperium said:
Sounds kind of complicated to the simpler and cheaper alternative, which is just coercion or genocide.

No large scale organization or polity can be that virtuous or generous. If humans could communicate with ants, and those same ants made a nest in your garden. Do you think you'll bother making treaties with them to gradually move them out? You'll just exterminate/chase them out and destroy the nest to restore the appearance you want for your garden.

It's the same thing here.
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No, no it is not the same.

Because the relationship between humans and nonsapient ants is not the same as the relationship between technologically advanced sapients and technologically primitive sapients.

Having better tools doesn't make you a more objectively valuable category of thing, entitled to murder people with inferior tools at will. There is no compelling reason to believe that people with good tools "must" be willing to murder people with inferior tools in order to survive or to thrive, either. That is a choice, a choice that can be made or not made.

If the situation is reversed, we're unlikely to care about primitive species still stuck on their planet. It may sound weird and cruel but that's only because you can relate to being a modern sapient species still stuck on their planet for the time being since you are part of one.
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I can relate to being intelligent life with thoughts and hopes and dreams and the capacity to communicate and modify my behavior based on communication.

Ants do not possess any of those things, which is WHY we routinely destroy them- because it's impossible to negotiate with them, for the same reason it's impossible to negotiate with a ticking alarm clock. The alarm clock simply doesn't have any parts capable of recognizing that you are talking to it, comprehending any arguments or appeals you make. There's no one there to negotiate with in the first place.

There is no reason to simply assume that all technologically advanced groups will be as casually destructive to technologically primitive sapients as humans are to ants. Humans behave as we do towards ants because no other relationship is possible between thinking life and nonthinking life that cannot be persuaded not to encroach upon the thinking life. Where persuasion is possible, where discussion is possible, where a shared recognition of common moral value is possible, things do not have to be that same exact way.

If you're born in a different era, it's different. Can you say, you'll feel remorse or you can relate to the ants you'll commit genocide on in your garden? Not really, or at least most people wouldn't.
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This stretches the definition of 'genocide' and for that matter 'people' so broadly that it becomes downright disingenuous.

COULD there exist alien species who will casually exterminate sapients living in a place that they want, just as humans would exterminate a wasps' nest near their garden? It could happen.

MUST any such alien species that could plausibly arise operate that way? It is not required.
 
So if they can terraform and colonize other worlds, right, what happens when Crab People from some third planet show up and claim the Earth? Crab Peoples do a shooting war over our heads or what? Big ol' war between Crab People Nations from different spiral arms fighting over the homeworld?




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Frick I knew this kinda reminded me of something: Outer Limits (1995 reboot) episode The Promised Land. Takes me back, I remember watching that on TV when I was a boy.
 
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Simon_Jester said:
The underlying argument is that the likelihood that they're going to kill us later on, given their initial behavior, seems very very very high. Their opening move is:

"We are super-racist against you. Your lives and history and culture are of no meaning to us. Your world is rightfully ours. We have absolutely no problem killing you if you do not obey us. Leave."

The more unimpeded control and access to the Earth that they are given, the harder it will be to even mildly inconvenience them via spite-nuking or other means.
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And how is our ability the mildly inconvenience them worth consideration in this decision? Wiping ourselves out doesn't win us anything. Taking a chance on the relocation offer at least gives humanity a possibility.

I'm a bit tempted to start getting technical on what the definition of 'racist' is but I don't think it would actually help anyone or the discussion.
 
They do have some regard for human civilization, which is why they decided to attempt negotiations in the first place. They'll also allow humans who accept their terms to leave even if the vast majority of humans decides to fight. And they will accept a surrender even after that point. The above can be considered 'Word of God' true information on the scenario.

Beyond that, you don't know how they might treat you, beyond what they say.
 
Hotdog Vendor said:
And how is our ability the mildly inconvenience them worth consideration in this decision?
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We have no other bargaining chips and they have given us every reason possible to believe that they are lying. It's not that the ability to inconvenience them is worth much, it's that this is a scenario of absolute despair.

Assuming that someone who hates you and wants to take away everything you have and regards you as vermin with no rights because you had the temerity to evolve naturally on the same planet their ancestors evolved on 250 million years ago is telling the truth when they offer you anything? Yeah, that's a farce.

There is no realistic chance of human survival in this scenario.

The kind of sapients vicious and cruel enough to make the ultimatum described in the OP? Yeah, they're not going to also kind and benevolent enough to resettle at their own expense billions of low-tech sapients. Throwing in the medical tech offer just makes it even more blatantly too good to be true: "Get into the space van, we have candy!" Once you're in the space van, not only can they do as they please, they can do as they please without fear of collateral damage to the apparently valuable planet you're standing on.

Mak Taru said:
They do have some regard for human civilization, which is why they decided to attempt negotiations in the first place.
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I don't believe you. They're willing to kill any number of humans for the simple 'crime' of refusing to vacate the planet on which humans evolved. Even though it costs the Arthropods nothing they already had to simply let said human beings stay on that planet. The Arthropods lose nothing. They did not have the Earth. They did not know where the Earth was. For hundreds of millions of years, they got along just fine without the Earth.

But now that they know about the Earth, they covet it, and are willing to kill arbitrarily large numbers of humans if the humans don't agree to be moved off-planet to a place that the Arthropods assure us exists and is habitable and is totally not a trap or an extermination camp.

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I don't care if you call it "word of God" or not. Your goal here is clear; it is to 'force' others to 'logically' agree that the correct solution is to get in the space van and accept the promise of candy.

No.

I reject your claim that the forced conclusion you blatantly wish others to accept is a valid conclusion. You have portrayed an alien race whose stated intentions are incompatible with their behavior. I can only conclude that you are portraying a race of alien liars.

Their offers are not credible. Their "acceptance of surrender" or willingness to take people off planet who do what they say is meaningless, and almost certainly a trap designed to minimize the amount of dead bodies, pollution, and radioactive debris they have to clean off their so-precious alleged homeworld.

(Seriously, how do we actually know they're the original species? They could be clones made in a lab on some other entirely different planet 200,000,000 years later for all we know. They have a biochemical basis comparable to Earth life, but for all we know this is a panspermia setting in which that sort of thing is common. We're not being allowed time or tools to access the larger galaxy and find out what is going on. This stinks of a set-up.)
 
Simon, why are you engaging with this seriously? It's not a serious question, there's no point in giving a serious answer.

Just declare that the Lobsters say "oh crud if you called dibs there's nothing we can do"

Then we, I dunno, join hand and lobster-claw in friendship and then do a Star Trek Future.
 
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I'm not saying that accepting the offer is the 'correct' choice. And I didn't discount the possibility that they could be lying. All I said is that they have some regard for our civilization... that could mean as little as desiring to learn about our history and philosophy before killing us all.

I'm deliberately keeping their true intentions ambiguous.
 
daniel_gudman said:
Simon, why are you engaging with this seriously? It's not a serious question, there's no point in giving a serious answer.

Just declare that the Lobsters say "oh crud if you called dibs there's nothing we can do"

Then we, I dunno, join hand and lobster-claw in friendship and then do a Star Trek Future.
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Eh. yeah. @Mak Taru isn't really engaging with this in a serious manner.

Because he made it very clear on Page 1 that he was trying to railroad us into agreeing that the 'logical' solution was to trust them and get in their space van, while basically trying to find a way to present them as not... y'know... morally bad for wanting to forcibly dispossess another species at gunpoint so that they could then colonize a homeworld that barely resembles the one their forgotten ancestors left over two hundred million years ago.

There's sort of this vibe of "oh shit, I have to salvage this situation and somehow make my desired conclusion seem plausible and palatable!" I'm reminded of the railroading sort of DM in a role-playing game.
 
I mean "humans should obey the Overlords" is... weirdly naive? It's a goon's idea of how a child should behave.

Mak Taru said:
I'm deliberately keeping their true intentions ambiguous.
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No your not though.

This is Space Internment Camp where the "twist" is that it's knocking off Childhood's End (part 1), but with a heavier hand. Maybe cause lobsters have claws instead of hands. I mean since you've ruled out "To Serve Man" being a cookbook.

Like this is a bad faith argument. Maybe more from a lack of imagination than anything else.

They've been gone for over a hundred million years, and they're gonna say "you got two years to leave"? Why not 10,000 years? If they got biological mortality why are they in any sort of rush at all? Why isn't their only short-term ultimatum "don't ruin the biosphere, or else" and then the carrot is cleaner tech to go with that stick?

If they're such collectivists why are they going straight to dominance tactics? Instead of just being patient and repeating themselves for 100 years? Like just to see if that works for them before even starting to consider a move to Plan B.


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Now that I think about it, it occurs to me they'd probably suffocate in the current atmosphere anyway (not enough oxygen), so it's not like they'd be able to move in anyway, not without a couple millennia of tinkering with the oceans and stuff.
 
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