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From: bnw@crash.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers
Subject: Re: What to do when the aliens arrive.
Message-ID: <3368@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU>
Date: Wed, 21-Aug-85 03:33:39 EDT
Article-I.D.: topaz.3368
Posted: Wed Aug 21 03:33:39 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 24-Aug-85 18:26:50 EDT
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Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
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From: 

JWHITE%MAINE.BITNET@WISCVM.ARPA  (Jim White) writes:
>When the first creature from another planet first sets foot,
>(tenticle, pod, or whatever it may 'set'), on Earth, if it is within
>our power to do so, we should kill it and eat it.
 
     Not a good idea.  If we landed someone on another planet and the local
primitive-compared-to-us natives promptly made a meal of the astronaut, we
would probably respond by conquering the planet, killing a fair number of
natives in the process.  We could be on the receiving end of that.
     I think your fears are unnecessarily bleak.  Although Western society
subjugated natives in four continents, we weren't as far above them as we
would like to pretend.  Any star-voyaging race that finds us will be further
ahead of us than we are ahead of Cro-Magnon man.
     Moreover, I don't believe that it is possible for any society to reach
the level of distant star exploration until it learns to behave itself in 
its own backyard.  Star travelling peoples won't have fought a war in several
generations.  They aren't going to re-learn just for us.
 
     For some good books about the meeting of two radically different
cultures, try H. Beam Piper's "Fuzzy" novels.  They don't fall into any of
the four categories you mentioned ("cuddly" would only fit a very shallow
reading).
                                                         /Bruce N. Wheelock/
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