Re: Alien Life
As someone posted, we don't know anything about intelligent alien life, so we can only speculate. In general, I'd say that despite our fatally selfish and despicable tendencies, it's probably going to be a long long time before we're able to pose any kind of a threat to most aliens that would be in circumstances to visit us, unless they're stranded or something. Imagine you extend the SE4 tech tree to allow research for another thousand turns or so, and 200 billion systems, so expansion and exploration can be constant. Play the game for a thousand turns without meeting any other players. Then you find a player who has just entered the game - a homeworld with no ships or units and essentially zero tech. Do you feel threatened?
As capnq pointed out, the dimension of time and the vast time distance of evolutionary development, combined with the absence of any reason to think we evolved at the same time as another intelligent species, implies that we're unlikely to meet them at anywhere near "the same position on the tech tree". If we do, we'd tend to meet them more like half-way to their homeworld, and not here at home.
Also, it looks like we may be too selfish and short-sighted not to kill ourselves off (directly or through ignorance), so aliens who have not killed themselves off would tend, I would think, to be less selfish and short-sighted.
PvK
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