Some Observations...(all are welcomed)

[Wade]

----- A compelling hypothetical; not to judge but to offer thought expansion:

I'm an omnivore.
My intellect lets me know many benefits to eating meat. Taste pleasue, high brain energy, better adaptation in case of an extreme environmental condition...

My intellect also allows me to use emotion to empathize with my prey(even if the meat is from a store or restaurant). Sapience and consciousness are just words created that stress our extreme intelligence level above the other life forms that we share this planet with...

Assume a scenario where an alien race of an extreme intelligence level above ours that we share this universe with comes to our humble planet. They too are omnivores and have found us to be a tasty food item. They process us in a very quick and painless way. Indeed, we may not even know the scope of this process or even that it happens; even at the point of death. I doubt many of our food life forms(animals) know what will happen to them as they go about their business in the fields and buildings and water.

This is the nature of things. Even life forms of equal or nearly equal levels of intelligence routinely eat each other. Many have evolved it to a necessity.

If we became aware that these aliens were eating us our number one desire would be that they stop eating us. We also might want them to go away and stop the food processes and infrusructure that they built up around us. We would not care so much how quick and painless the death process was when compared to the process as a whole. Most of the aliens might not even care if they could even be aware of our complaints.
Our food life forms complain in their various ways moments before their death. Cows, pigs, and chickens struggling and screaming in a processing building; fish and other life forms struggling and communicating in various ways in nets and boats.
The aliens would use their own extreme intellect above ours to measure their benefits and emotion. The majority of them would probably continue to consume us as a tasty food item.

Hopefully any aliens that we meet will have advanced enough evolutionary or technologically to direct energy consumption; or simply not find us to be a tasty food item. Hopefully we will have advanced to a level of intelligence, technology, and evolution higher than our competitors when we meet(possibly to direct energy consumption).

When we leave this solar system to colonize others we will find new life forms of lesser intelligence. We will probably find many of them to be tasty food items that we process in a quick and painless way.

These are some things I some times consider that make me think about being a vegitarian. In the end though I am an omnivore.

-Wade

[capnq]

Wade said:A compelling hypothetical;

Compelling is in the eye of the beholder.

Assume a scenario where an alien race of an extreme intelligence level above ours that we share this universe with comes to our humble planet. They too are omnivores and have found us to be a tasty food item.

This is where I start to have suspension of disbelief problems with the scenario. Even if some quality of the universe causes all life forms to use chemically similar forms of DNA, ISTM that the odds are that separate paths of molecular evolution would leave each race full of biochemicals that the other(s) find unpalatable if not toxic. At best, I'd expect us to make potentially useful sources of exotic organic chemicals.

One of my favorite bits of the background color in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is the incompatible biochemistry between Terran animals and Planet's lifeforms.

If we became aware that these aliens were eating us our number one desire would be that they stop eating us. We also might want them to go away and stop the food processes and infrusructure that they built up around us. We would not care so much how quick and painless the death process was when compared to the process as a whole. Most of the aliens might not even care if they could even be aware of our complaints.

Our number one desire would be to convince others that it's really happening.

[Glyn]

Oh the humanity of it all!

Billions of individual living entities are raised in crowed conditions feed special chemicals to maximize there growth then they are slaughter so that their gestating young can be ripped from the parents carcass just to be used to feed the masses of humans and other animals!!! Many of these living entities are actually eaten while still alive!


SAVE THE PLANTS!
They have a right to live without the cruel treatment of modern farming!






Thought on Aliens eating humans.
1) The chances are that our biology is a compatible food source for an ext-terrestrial is probably very low.
2) We generally do not farm predator animals for food. Not because they don’t taste good, but because it’s dangerous! It’s dangerous enough just raising non-carnivore.
3) The environmental toxins are usually much more concentrated in predator animals.

[Renegade 13]

I sure wouldn't believe anything a site called "www.thevegetariansite.com" has to say... After all, I'm sure they're totally unbiased. [sarcasm]

[Captain Kwok]

I work in the food development industry and can say with some confidence that the conditions are typically in-between the extremes that have been presented here. There's some good processors that make an effort to keep conditions in their farms reasonable. But with any large-scale operation where costs are a major factor (ie for fast food etc), then the practices become more questionable. Small-scale producers can't compete on cost, so they generally raise for speciality markets (ie organic, high quality stores/restaurants) and treat their animals well.

However, that is really limited to the more tightly regulated markets. You would be shocked at some of the things that go on in the less developed regions of the world. What might make things worse is that many large-scale operations (read: fast food suppliers) are moving to these regions for the cost benefits - which means the animals and laborers will take the brunt.

[Wade]

--I said *assume* a scenario...as in hypothetical.

--I said *an* alien race...as in one possibility using a hypothetical assumption.

--If an alien race is advanced enough then they can make use of chemically different forms of DNA as food.

--I said *we* as meaning the entire human race. Thus if *we* became aware that these aliens were eating us our number one desire would be that they stop eating us. Others would not nead convincing because *we* all would already know.

--I vaguely remember a documentary about evidence that the US government was using laser scalpals, black helicopters at night, and such to harvest cattle organs and genitilia. This was to do research on the possible effects of radiation in regards to cancer and reproduction in humans. In the mid century there was wide scale atom bomb and radiation tests across wide expansess of several US mid-western states.

-Wade

[capnq]

Wade said:
--I said *we* as meaning the entire human race. Thus if *we* became aware that these aliens were eating us our number one desire would be that they stop eating us. Others would not nead convincing because *we* all would already know.

I cannot imagine that "we" would have such a unanimous opinion on *anything*. There are numerous examples of things that "we" know have happened or are happening, which "they" claim never happened or aren't happening, and vice versa. At least one example has already been brought up in this thread. Some people cannot be convinced by even "irrefutable" proof.

I can imagine the existence of people who not only would not oppose this, but would actually support it.