by V R Rutledge

Created on: July 21, 2008

I wanted to provide a counterpoint concerning the probable arrival of an alien race in the future. Aliens, if they exist, will eventually come to earth, if for no other reason than curiosity. I don't want to dispute the assumption that any aliens, if they were very similar to us, would do all, or at least most, of the terrible things that we have done to each other, but I wanted to point out how my vision of aliens in the future would be different.

First, and most importantly, earth is not your run of the mill planet, by all accounts. Our moon has had a tremendous effect on the inhabitants of our planet. It is too large, in the classical sense, to actually be a moon, and that could make our planet unique. Or at least move it into the range of unusual. Some scientists even call it a companion planet, instead of a moon. Two thirds of our planet is covered by water, and that may also be unusual. It may be that life itself is unusual. Whatever the truth of the matter, aliens are probably more likely to be very alien. Maybe they don't have the ability to eat what we call meat. As herbivores, they would have different motivations and would react differently to stimuli. It almost a certainty that they couldn't eat the food on our planet, nor could they drink the water. Things in our water would make it unpalatable, if not downright dangerous for them. If they were evolved from a non-violent species in an ecology where survival did not depend on competition, they might actually want to help us improve our lives and society.
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Concerning the diseases of our planet, and particularly our species, we need to remember that they are things that evolved with us, over thousands, or possibly millions, of years. A disease from another planet might not affect us at all, or if it did, the effect would be radically different than any it might have on a species from its homeworld. On our planet we find that diseases migrate from one species to another, with some small changes. An alien disease would have to adapt to an entirely different DNA structure, and it would probably fail to do so. If the aliens had advanced abilities in working with basic life structures, we might soon find that disease, as we know it, was a thing of the past.

We also need to realize that, with time, humankind has become less terrible. It's been awhile since any conqueror cut off all the right arms of the conquered population, and when was the last time that soldiers were sent into a town or village to

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