Do you know that the Sentinel Islanders aren't as crazy as they seem? The vast majority of hunter-gatherer societies are quickly wiped out when agricultural ones show up. This isn't even something that only happened in the distant past. Even today, in Brazil, farmers massacre natives for their land.
Why do we need so much land? Don't we have enough? But our numbers have grown exponentially. And even though we don't need that much land at the moment, there's still some small positive economic value to more land. And so the natives lose.
A similar thing applies to civilizations. The universe only seems big until you factor in exponential growth. Even if humanity could travel a fraction of the speed of light. Give us a few hundred thousand years, and we would settle and overpopulate every planet in this galaxy. And be on our way to the next one.
There are other reasons aliens would want to stop us. If they value human life at all, they might have completely alien moral systems and want to impose them on us. Human society is pretty awful with lots of suffering. No moral aliens would leave us alone to our own devices. But do we really want to get stuck being ruled over by them forever with no autonomy?
If they don't value human life, we are really screwed. In the future we could expand and advance and become a threat to them. It costs them nothing to exterminate us and prevents any future conflicts or costs we might cause them. So why not?
If ETs are able to travel around the Galaxy at faster than light speed that means that they have have the ability to harness absolutely enormous amounts of energy. Probably each Extra Terrestrial ship has multiple Tsar bombs worth of energy at their disposal. Their society must have developed some sort of maturity to make war and violence obsolete, much like World War has become less prevalent with the advent of the atomic age or they would have annihilated themselves early on.
Totally agree on this point. I mean, if we could as humans as a race come together and figure out how to live on this planet together, imagine what we could do.
Also good point to remember is maybe the aliens are nothing like we imagine they are, maybe they are already here and we just as a agreed collective don't yet have the capacity to sense this. There are many stories of people communicating with ETs already, if people did some research and had the capacity to understand more of the spiritual nature of things we would already see this on a global scale I believe.
> Their society must have developed some sort of maturity to make war and violence obsolete
Why "must?" That just sounds like an assumption based on what you want to be true. It is just as likely that a civilization you describe exists but has the exact same type and frequency of internal squabbles that humans do.
With that much power, "internal squabbles" equals mutual annihilation. Just imagine if terrorists could easily make their own thermonuclear weapon etc.
Humans would do all of those things. Maybe aliens would, too, because they respond to the same incentives and threats, but perhaps a prerequisite for cosmic fecundity is a more mature outlook.
I mean, a human could spend their entire life locating and exterminating ant colonies, and ants would fear that about us if they could conceive it, but we generally have better things to do with our time. (Of course if we're in the way...)
Why do we need so much land? Don't we have enough? But our numbers have grown exponentially. And even though we don't need that much land at the moment, there's still some small positive economic value to more land. And so the natives lose.
A similar thing applies to civilizations. The universe only seems big until you factor in exponential growth. Even if humanity could travel a fraction of the speed of light. Give us a few hundred thousand years, and we would settle and overpopulate every planet in this galaxy. And be on our way to the next one.
There are other reasons aliens would want to stop us. If they value human life at all, they might have completely alien moral systems and want to impose them on us. Human society is pretty awful with lots of suffering. No moral aliens would leave us alone to our own devices. But do we really want to get stuck being ruled over by them forever with no autonomy?
If they don't value human life, we are really screwed. In the future we could expand and advance and become a threat to them. It costs them nothing to exterminate us and prevents any future conflicts or costs we might cause them. So why not?