Re: Crowbars

>> >Or you could just have them land and start shooting, and never open
any
>kind
>> >of communications (ala War of the Worlds).	They are alien after
all, who
>> >knows what they are thinking.  I'm not too partial to that idea
though.
>>
>>That's OK with all the creative minds around here you shouldn't have
to 
>>fall back on that one ;)
>
>
>I read a novel a few years back (don't remember title) in which Earth
was
>pasted by an alien race.  Actually, Earth getting pasted happened in
the
>first chapter (they hit us with a big rock at near lightspeed) - and
the
>story was about the (very few) survivors.  Turned out that the aliens
>didn't bear us any particular malice, they just figured that in the
end,
>any species capable of interstellar expansion would become a threat to
>species survival 'cause any species that fights its' way off planet is
an
>agressive one, so they'd better whack us before we figured out to whack
>them.	We hadn't made it out of our solar system yet, but they had
received
>our tv broadcasts, and saw in our popular "science fiction" that the
galaxy
>was filled with either human-like races we befriended, or
non-human-like
>races we warred with.	And humans were always leaders...  So, kaboom. 
The
>writers were pretty into that sort of hard-core deterministic
philosophy -
>that by definition any species capable of expansion will be a threat. 
And
>any species that *might* become capable of expansion will become a
threat,
>so blast them too.
 
Footfall, by Larry Niven, I think. (I can't be sure, though;
my copy seems to have gone walkabout.)
 
- Sam
________________________________________
Samuel Reynolds
Spinward Stars: http://www.spinwardstars.com/
Reynolds Virtual Workshop: http://www.primenet.com/~reynol
reynol@primenet.com
samuel_reynolds@csgsystems.com