Let's just say for a moment aliens did land on earth...

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Er, "terraforming" Antartica would be easiest to achieve by making the entire planet warmer and much wetter...

Thats kinda my point. There are parts of our own planet that are not even "terraformed" (the Sahara, Antarctica). If we cant terraform those spots on our planet then we cant terraform other planets. So if these alien refugees are advanced enough to terraform a bad piece of earth real estate then they can live on that slice of the planet. And then we can partner up with them to remodel Mars and Venus and Neptune.

Ofcourse in some ways terraforming parts of earth is riskier than doing Mars. Melting all of the ice in Antarctica to turn it into a garden would raise sea levels -and mess up already inhabited parts of earth. You dont have to worry about messing up inhabited parts of Mars because there are no inhabited parts of Mars yet. So you are free to play around with that planet, and expirament, in ways you cant with a piece of earth.

That's probably true right there. Some country would let them in for a technology trade.

I just hope its where I live, I'd want to try a genetics experiment and try to procreate with them.

If we wanted too, we could make Antarctica habitable, it's not beyond our reach. Now, doing it open air without altering the global climate, that's not as easy...

As for Australia, they need a large inland sea. That, we could do. It would involve big explosions to dig the channel, and maybe sacrifice a few towns, but afterwards they'd have a coastal climate iin the outback.

Alaska and Siberia, well I suggest enlarging the Bering Straight, to get more of that warm, warm water up there.

But, my point stands - any alien that is insufficiently advanced to require Earth in order to survive will only have one or two pieces of technology that we don't, though it will be valuable technology - hibernation at least, and a cheap FTL drive at best. If the latter, then we can always give them a neighbouring world and help them terraform it.

Treat them like any other group of immigrants or asylum-seekers. If other immigrants to the US have to deal with annoying customs bureaucrats, then so should they.

Do you care about ants?

That is how aliens would see us as a stupid animal infesting this planet. So, they will kill us off if to take whatever they want. However, this is even unlikely as why would a space faring species care for some stupid rock in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of monkeys on it.

A species that behaves in this way is defective, like a cancer.

Is it possible that an alien species might have actually developed itself morally as well as technologically? Is it possible that an alien species might have ended its wars, ended hunger, and ended prejudice against creatures who look and think differently from themselves?

This is what I would consider to be an advanced race...otherwise, barbarians with large frontal lobes and fancy weapons are merely barbarians.

I would have you know that we also have some very interesting species of fungi, and we have species of choanoflagellates that constitute highly important transmitters of carbon in our food-web. There is a lot of extremely interesting activity going on, and it's not as simple as "pitiful ball of muck floating in space." Our ecology should be at least a topic of intellectual interest for a curious alien species, if nothing else.

And if they do not have such curiosity, then I question whether or not they are authentically a developed race.

It's a space ship with a species on it that left their home planet because of an asteroid or something. Just typical reasons to leave your planet. Now their ship is in trouble and they need a planet that will sustain them or they will simply die with the ship. It is not that far fetched a scenario when you consider what humans need on earth to survive. It would be tougher surviving in space by far than it would on earth and I am sure other species would encounter the same types of problems if all they have is a ship in space to sustain them. Think of all the trouble when you are on board a ship at sea. Ships and boats are renown for experiencing problems and taking a lot of money to keep afloat and going. Well, it would be similar with a ship in space only much more difficult because everything is so far apart and most of what's there is off limits to us.


Don't you wonder if Nasa or European Space have considered such a scenario and have a plan in place on how to respond? I doubt it would be destroy such a species.

Well- you mean one boatload of aliens. Sounds like you mean a few hundred of them. Like the Mayflower with the PIlgrims.

Essentially being shipwrecked here on Gilligan's Island.

And the rest of their species is already wiped out- or atleast facing an unknown fate.

The Mayflower-only had a 100 or so pathetic refugees . They were so harmless that the local Indian tribe allowed them to land and made friends with them. But the Mayflower was just the spearhead of millions more later European intruders who would overwhelm the natives. If this one space ship load is all there is who are left of this species of aliens-then they probably would offer no threat to us. If that were the case then the powers at be on earth might allow them here. But we would probably put them in a small supervised area to live- and to be studied by our scientists as an exotic endangered species-like the Chimps of the Gombe Stream Reserve.

I imagine that the UN, or the European Union, might have some kind of protocal drawn up already- as a response to aliens if aliens were to make contact with us (either by radio, or by landing).Whether or not we would take them to our leader I dont know. But they may well have protocals already ready. But this exact scenario- of a small group of intelligent aliens begging for rescue and asylum from us- I doubt that that the powers at be have thought about that contigency for the reasons I've stated: its a bit of contradiction (the aliens would have to be more powerful than we can imagine to get to here from across interstellar space- but also be so weak that they would beg help from us). Aliens are envisioned as being 1)nonexistant, or 2) Powerful, and unfriendly conquerors of earth, or 3) Powerful and at least momentarily friendly "take me to your leader" types seeking diplomatic relations. Not as being needy castaways begging rescue.

I agree with the earlier comment that if they where technologically capable to transverse the galaxy, pick out our planet among millions of others they would indeed look at us like we loo at ants, but then you would not park your self in an ants nest and expect nothing to happen you will be driven away. This I feel would happen in the given scenario. While there will be people who will accept the situation the fearful majority rule. Also if they did evolved to a level capable of moving between solar systems they must have over come the tendency of internal conflict so in my opinion would not be looking for war or to dominate our world. If they still had these tendencies they would have destroyed them selves long before making of their own planet with technologies they now use to travel. Also our war technology works in a process of releasing energy to achieve an out come, if they where war like species the most obvious out come of energy release is an explosion. Imagine what a warp drive would do if used as a weapon. I think in the given scenario of them needing our planet for survival they would either have to address every organism on the planet to gain permission (although we like to think it we humans are not the dominant form of life on earth) or would have to blend in covertly so as not to be detected by the less acceptant species ie humans. For all we know they are already here we just do not perceive them.

You just assume this is going to be a species that has all the answers, never makes mistakes and is hurling through space carefree with every known solution at their fingertips when they might actually be a group which had to evacuate their world quickly or be annihilated. It was a last ditch effort at surviving and they weren't even sure they would when they initially evacuated. It's just they thought what did they have to lose by trying. I think it's easier to be in that kind of situation than be a species that knows everything and is journeying risk free.

Then why did you suggest that they'd be superior to us? Like I've said, unless FTL (or perhaps, a reactionless drive) is easy, then they're going slow and hibernating. They won't be using a generation ship, otherwise they wouldn't need a habitable planet, having solved the problems required to build space colonies. They won't be going particularly fast, otherwise they'd have the energy budget to live anywhere. Given that they need a habitable world, they'd actually be less advanced than we are...

It's more a matter of bad luck. Their world fails them through no fault of their own. For all we know they could have nurtured their world for thousands of years with great care only to have some unforeseen calamity befall them, like a pole shift or something they were able to anticipate in advance and evacuate a select few of their species and maybe a few thousand frozen zygotes. Just the fact they were able to jump on a space ship and take those crucial first steps into the unknown is more than we have done. I wonder if we were faced with such a calamity on earth, does NASA have a plan to do something similar? Just put some folks on a space ship and go? It wouldn't be any worse than just staying here if everyone were doomed.

Any civilisation that ignores potential threats is not taking care of their planet properly. Humans included, extraterrestrial threat mitigation doesn't get the attention it needs.

If something happened that would destroy Terra - say, a Plutoid on a collision course - then at the moment we're screwed, because we haven't put the resources that we should have into space colonisation. Oh, we'd get a few years warning, which would allow us to save humanity *if people didn't go crazy*. Not all humanity, but enough. Except people would go crazy, and if the proposed solution is for the government to use everyone elses resources to save themselves, I don't blame them.

How many could we save, though, provided we try to save as many as possible? Well, a fleet of 1000 spaceplanes, taking 20 people into space each trip and making 300 trips a year, would allow us to put 6 million people in space every year. That's tiny compared to how many fly on planes each year in the US alone. You might need a year of flights before that to get the Lunar mines up and running and the Martian bases established, but with the situation that dire, I think people would agree with using Orion to lob masses of cargo into orbit. Adding in the time required to develop the systems, we might be able to evacuate 0.2% of Terra's population before The Snowball hits.

If we had to evacuate the Sol, then our only hope at the moment would be Orion, though a solar fryby may be another option soon. We'd need hibernation technology, with rotating crews for the journey. This is the only scenario I can imagine fitting the OP.

In the previous scenario, hibernation technology would be very useful as well, allowing us to spend only a few hundred kg per colonist and take longer, more fuel efficient journeys. Maybe we'd even manage to evacuate an entire percent of the global population, thus explaining why SciFi is dominated by white people - all the poor Africans, Indians and Chinese were left behind to die, along with most of the Europeans and Americans.

Hence, we need a space colonisation program, so we never end up in such a situation.

testing testing

Were going in circles.

Theyre able to get here-so that shows that they are way more advanced than we are. Which means they are better at monitoring coming calamities better than we can.

But yes-its conceivable that folks a 1000 years ahead of us could be blindsided by something they can't prepare for. And conceivably a group might commandeer a space craft as a makeshift life raft. But then how could they survive on a makeshift life raft for 100's of light years? And what are the odds that they would arrive at a planet that happens to be a twin of their own home planet (with the same conditions, length of day,gravitation, etc).

If we just launched ourselves into space the bad news is that it would be hard to find a planet just like earth. The good news is that if we did find such a place that it would most likely NOT be occupied by sentient creatures (our own planet did not have intelligent life with even stone age technology for 99.9 percent of its existence).

Your scenario just requires too many unlikely coincidences.

Humans have had the ability to develop interstellar travel for decades, we just haven't bothered to develop it. You don't need to be "way more advanced" in order to travel to another star, just very patient.