Rahvin writes:
1) They're not likely to be able to get here easily. So far as we know, you can;t go faster than light, meaning even relatively "close" civilizations will take thousands of years or more to travel interstellar distances.
I actually had a long conversation with Rrhain about this. Again, let me remind you people that the native americans couldn't by any stretch of imagination understand how other civilizations could exist on the other side of the vast ocean and those civilizations actually got the means to get to the americas.
What you just pointed out is pretty much the same narrow-mindedness that brought the native americans to their doom.
To be fair, I don't think it was the native american's narrow-mindedness that brought them to their doom, I think it was the superior technology in terms of guns and armor, and the superior (at least in terms of taking advantage of the natural world) methods of the immigrants.
I think, even if the native americans had known, they could not have done much but delayed the inevitable given that the ethics and morals of the immigrants were such that might meant right, in the face of their disadvantages.
However, I also think Hawkings in this respect is talking bullshit. Why would you want to live at the bottom of a gravity well as deep as the Earths? Why would you want to saddle yourself with something less than 1% of the resources of the solar system? especially when it's full of pesky natives that have nuclear bombs and who can seriously give you a bad hair day when you try to subjugate them?
They wouldn't. If they can travel between the stars, they'll find more water, more air, more metals and more raw materials just floating billions of miles out in space in the oort cloud than they could ever hope to dig up on Earth.
Not for nothing do I say that the first person or company to exploit space harvesting will be the ruling force for the solar system for the forseeable future, and that's discounting the ability to throw rocks.
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