A few weeks ago I wrote an article suggesting that it could be that we are too violent. But really, we are good people (for humans). Most of us do not want to hurt anyone. Even if attacked, a lot of people would sooner crouch in the fetal position than hit another person. So is it really that we are too violent? Or could it be more that we have the potential for violence - we have the potential and the means to carry it out.
Violence Credit Score
Pondering this, I am reminded of the Personal Financial Management class I am currently teaching. In the class, we spent a lot of time on how and why you can qualify for credit. It is obvious that you can be denied credit because of things you did like skipping a payment, maxing out your cards, or carrying a balance. Any of these attributes will lower your credit score and make future creditors think twice about giving you additional credit. If they do agree to extend you credit, they may put you into a pool of people with the same bad habits. They will then charge you all a higher interest rate under the assumption that statistically a certain percentage of you will default and stop paying your debt. The higher interest rate will make up for the folks who stop making payments. See, you learned something today on that UFO guy's blog.
There are other reasons you can be denied credit which have nothing to do with what you have done in the past but more about what you could do in the future. One is, to have too much available credit. That is, you could be making your payments on time, only using a small fraction of your available credit, and paying your full balance every month. But if you have, let us say, ten credit cards, each with a credit limit of $25,000 and you only make $50,000 a year (ignore how that is even possible, for this extreme example) you then have the potential of running up a quarter million dollars in debt, over night, and not having the means to pay for it.
This scares future creditors. They think that if they give you the credit you seek that you may have difficulty paying them back because of your total debt potential. So they will either deny you credit or they will put you in a pool of people with similar debt potential and charge you all a higher interest rate.
Bringing this line of thinking back to alien contact, perhaps instead of a credit score, aliens have given Earth a Violence Credit Score. Stay with me. We lose points for having wars with each other. We lose more points for violent crime. We lose a few points for petty crime, but nothing significant. We lose points for literally using the Nuclear Option and nuking each other. We lose points for breaking peace treaties. Just with these reasons alone, our violence "credit score" on Earth is pretty bad.
Human Potential for Violence
The bigger reason for being denied alien contact, though, may just be in the human potential for violence. The largest military powers could annihilate every person on the planet and still have weapons and ammunition left over. What if we turned these weapons on our interstellar visitors? Certainly, if they could get from there to here, they would have superior weapons capabilities. But that would not stop us from taking out as many of them as we could, in the process.
Just because aliens have superior weapons does not mean they would use them. A lot of Second Amendment proponents say they would never want to use a fire arm against someone - they just carry one, "just in case." Aliens may not even want to carry their weapons through space with them. Or maybe there is an interstellar law that they cannot. We cannot carry guns or even knives on airplanes. Perhaps aliens are not allowed to carry their photon ray blasters on board their space ships. It is possible.
Either way, if aliens wanted to pick a fight with humans, they would end up taking some casualties. If we decided to use our violence potential against our alien visitors it would be a blood bath. In the end they would wipe us off the face of the planet but we would take a lot of them with us. That is what we do, right? We do not go down without a fight. Hoo-wah!
Why would any alien race want to risk their lives, making friends with people who act like that? I would not. If my new neighbor said, "You can come on over for a barbecue but if you say anything I don't like I'm gonna shoot you," I would politely decline his invitation. It may not be our militaries that scare off the aliens. It might just be you and me.
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| Welcome, aliens! |
We have a lot of guns. Here in America there are 120 guns per 100 civilians. There are nearly 400 million people here. That is a lot of guns! We are not alone, though. The total number of civilian guns in the world is approaching one billion. Humans have the potential to barricade themselves in their homes and take out billions of alien visitors (not that that many would ever actually come here at once). That alone is enough to wreck our violence score and cause aliens to deny us contact.
Again, let us bring it home - my new neighbor asks me over for a barbecue but tells me, "We don't want to hurt you, but the whole family is gonna be packing heat,with the safeties off. Even little Ruby Sue has one that matches her romper." Thanks for the invite but I have other plans.
- Plan #1: Stay away from people with the potential to kill me.
- Plan #2: Stand in the window, behind the curtains with binoculars and keep an eye on those yokels.
Note, this is not a Second Amendment rant. I will leave that debate to others who have stronger views, for and against, than I do. I do not have a dog in this fight. Really, I do not care so do not try to argue with me on it. My point is just to show that humans have great potential to inflict harm on alien visitors. That is undeniable. We may not want to hurt anyone but just like when you have the potential to run up too much debt by having too much available credit, the people of Earth have the potential to run up too many casualties against aliens by having too much available fire power.
If I were them I would keep my distance too. I would stand in my spaceship behind a curtain of clouds, with binoculars and keep an eye on these people.
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Thank you for reading and keep an eye on the sky.
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