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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6115902" data-attributes="member: 2067">See, I'm not quite on board with this.Trading is the logical recourse, and arguably the one that nets the most benefit for the most people over time. Why trade instead of conquering? Because lots of happy people will give you more money over the long haul than a few terrified ones. The most sensible power is a subtle one, one that people exert on themselves without even noticing it (Max Weber, your Protestant Ethic keeps explaining so much), one that keeps people working together to do awesome things that nobody could do by themselves.Trade is the BEST option!But the people who wield power in our world are not necessarily the most logical. Indeed, wanting to wield power is itself a little illogical, so it sort of selects for those with an inflated sense of self-importance and a propensity for charismatic personality traits (in both the charm sense and in the cult/sociopath sense). So I don't think it's a matter of humanity being good or bad as a whole per se. I think it's a matter of biology, sociology, design, and instinct. Someone somewhere with some power would do something stupid sooner or later. The real tell would be how we (and the aliens) react to that stupidity. Given that the aliens have technology (and thus presumably have a roughly comparable society to humans), they're not likely to react any smarter than we would, and they're not likely to avoid being stupid, either. I imagine we'd have a big philosophically awesome organization that is all about peace harmony cooperation love and free trade between the planets, and we'd have them able to do exactly jack nothing about all the goofuses on the ground who see the fear in peoples' eyes and use it to earn their trust, empower themselves, and do something dumb once they're in control of a few nuclear warheads. Governments don't act any more rationally than the people who make them up, really. They're mostly just an amplifier, for the best and the worst of us.</blockquote>

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