They have spent enormous resources to get here and I for one would not think it was just for a how ya doing meet and greet. What are they going to do? Say hi and the go back home? That thought is more Start Trek as far as I'm concerned.
It isn't like the Apollo mission had the aim to perform conquest on the lunar surface...
They've been abducted. How is that not against their will? Rape is an act of violence not of sex. So getting a broomstick up your backside while being held down by other inmates or a probe of some kind while being held down by aliens is still rape. There are numerous accounts of woman being impregnated or men having sperm removed.
I never said it was not against their will, but that it was not intended as a sexual attack or power play. Rape is intentionally sexual, this is not (depends on the abduction account though).
This is against their will and could be considered sexual by many people.
Indeed it could, and I agree the issue is definitely not clear-cut. But; would you consider for example artificial fertilisation occuring between two gametes in a laboratory, to be sexual?
It is in that same area of biology, yet few people would consider it sex-related.
It just so happens that humans make everything involving the genitals, or any erogenous zone or even the entire body into something sexual. Maybe it's a cultural thing, or maybe that's just the way we work... but an alien species need not have any such attitude, at least regarding a totally dissimilar alien organism.
One person's torture is not another person's. With all the examinations over the years I would have suspected that they would understand the screams as pain or at least fright. To intentionally continue to conduct such examinations without regard to the subject is in my opinion a form of intentional torture. Like you say we tranquillize the lion but they make no such allowance for us.
Just because the lion is tranquillised does not mean the event is not traumatic for it. Animals are often evidently stressed in research situations and people don't prevent the fact, though they may try to lessen stress as much as is possible or practical.
Also: painful procedures are regularly done on humans by other humans, yet in many cases little or nothing is done about pain. What about male circumcision? It is ubiquitous in many developed nations yet is still seen as acceptable despite the pain it might cause the subject.
That said, there is really overwhelming evidence that the abduction phenomenon is psychological, rather than physical... its often disturbing or terrifying nature may too be an indicator of this.
Volcanic vents and metals found naturally. They may also create chemical heat or have biotechnology.
Volcanic vents and chemical heat sources can't really replace fire, naturally elemental metals can't do everything, and biotechnology has a huge number of limitations. It does become a real science fiction cliche though.
I was only giving some examples of way aliens may not leave their own wold even though technologically advanced.
Fair point. I suppose you could currently include humans in that classification as well.
Actually, if there's an interstellar civilization that we don't see any traces of and is about to come into contact with us, the most probable outcome for us I can think of is death by indifference - the same thing each one of us inflicts on thousands of microorganisms every second. Computationally optimizing the matter of our solar system while taking care to preserve our sentience on whatever substrate they're using is a distant second, since it assumes us being recognised as sentient, and being worth the matter-energy expense to preserve by whatever utility function the ET is using.
Great, we've come full circle from Star Trek. :facepalm:
