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.

Adrian Johnson
adrian.johnson@sympatico.ca