Could we actually fight a war against an alien race?

[sapphi_snake]

DarthVolod said:

This is one of the problems I have with most alien invasion scenarios. Would an alien species that is so violent that it would commit genocide against another intelligent species despite the fact that they would have much more to gain from collaborating with said species even be able to develop advanced starships capable of traveling to other solar systems? If they were truly that barbaric then I would imagine that they would have destroyed themselves long before they could build starships.

If an alien species ever vists earth it will be to open an alien Walmart or trading post ... something like that. I'll admit that the invasion plot is far easier to pitch to a major studio when disucssing a sci-fi movie though. 

As I said in previous posts, what makes you think that a superior alien species would even view humans as 'persons'? And if they're so advanced, what could they possibly gain from a colaboration with humans? They'd already have 'advanced starships capable of traveling to other solar systems' (duh, that's how they got here in the first place), and we humans could really add nothing to help them. And calling them 'barbaric' because they'd do that is quite ridiculous. They'd act not different than the way humans act towards 'inferior animals' or even to eachother during colonialism.

Plus, communication between our species would most likely be quite difficult. It depends on how they communicate with eachother, what kind of language they use, what concepts exist in their culture etc. Just learning to communicate (if even possible) would take a long time.

If aliens ever came to earth, they'd probably take some humans for autopsies to see how they 'work', hunt some for sport, create 'human reservations' to keep some in their 'natural habitat', put some in zoos and circuses, keep some as pets (hey, our intelligence could be an advantage in this case, we could learn all kinds of tricks and amuse them) etc. There's simply no reason why aliens that are so advanced would view humans as 'persons'.