There's a bit of space between friendly and hostile

Best of the Web quotes Stephen Spielberg on the subject of extraterrestial visitors:

“I have to certainly believe what my heart tells me. That the first time there is a meeting of the minds between extraterrestrials and human beings, it’s going to be friendly,” Spielberg told The Associated Press. . . .

“I can’t believe anybody would travel such vast distances bent on destruction. I believe anybody who would travel such vast distances are curious explorers, not conquerors,” Spielberg said. “Carrying weapons a hundred-thousand light-years is quite a schlepp.

I don’t think Spielberg is completely wrong here, although I suspect that what he does get right he gets right for the wrong reasons.

I would agree that any species that makes it across interstellar space to this solar system is very unlikely to be hostile or a conqueror. However, Spielberg shows a remarkable lack of imagination for someone in his line of work.

Conquest isn’t going to be profitable for the same reason we don’t have slavery and the USA is uninterested in conquering other nations. Once a society reaches a sufficient level of technology, brute force and large scale coercion becomes a liablity, not an asset. This is of course the same effect that doomed the USSR and other Communist nations.

What is far more likely than hostility is complete indifference. It’s far from obvious that that would be preferable. For instance, a automaton swarm that dissassembled the planets to build large scale space structures would be indifferent to humans but hardly beneficial. Stephen Baxter’s “Xeelee saga”;http://www.answers.com/topic/stephen-baxter has a similar basis. The Xeelee are a very old, extremely powerful race. They basically ignore humans, which is so upsetting that humans go to war against the Xeelee, who basically swat them as we would an insect. Despite the war the Xeelee are never hostile, simply indifferent, because it’s not a real war from the Xeelee point of view. The Xeelee operate a level beyond human comprehension. Because of this, they have no direct effect on human civilization because there’s no trade, no real interaction. I suspect this is the most likely scenario, which can make for a good novel but leaves a bit to be desired in the drama department for a movie.

P.S. Not carry weapons across 100,000 light years? First, that’s the width of the entire galaxy and therefore can’t be the actual distance traveled to get here (since we’re about 30KLY from the outer edge of the galaxy). Second, just what kind of devices could these aliens carry that couldn’t be used as weapons? As Niven pointed out, a high power reaction drive works wonderfully as a weapon (something like an Orion drive would be even more easily used as a weapon). Interstellar lasers would do fine as a death beam. Nanotech medicine would be far more deadly than any of our biowar efforts.

All I can say is, if Spielberg needs ideas for a science fiction movie in the future, he’d better outsource it.