Colonization 2 – What would really happen?

Space: The Final Frontier, and that means a whole area of the universe we haven’t explored. Some of us dream of the day we conquer Mars, but I’m thinking of a more interesting future; one where there’s intelligent life we can share information with. However, movies portray these life forms inaccurately, as monsters who invade Earth and wage a war with the human race, and we always seem to be on the losing end due to their superior advancements. So I thought I’d flip the equation: what would really happen if we found a planet that had intelligent life, but they were LESS intelligent than us?

Well the sad fact is that we’d probably pull a Columbus v2. Knowing human history, having these aliens be less advanced than us means we can totally exploit – I mean, bring culture and technology to – their daily lives. That begins with a simple genocide to claim the land and settle. Easy right? We’ve done it before why not do it again? Then we could probably enslave them to do our bidding; perhaps we could also make some sort of tombs to hold our dead bodies after settling there, much like the pyramids. But I’m in the mood for cones, not pyramids. We could even bring them back to Earth to do our labour here. I doubt they would have a similar currency (if any) to ours so we could pay them nothing to work with our heavy machinery. On the plus side, this can bring down child labour rates for humans, which means less human rights violations! So it’s not all bad, is it? We could also generate more profit for the employers due to the lower salary cost, which is great for small business owners. We’ll give the aliens a place to live and everything, kind of like a reserve, except it’ll cater less to what they need because we took all their living necessities from their home planet. Once a couple of thousand years pass and the aliens learn our language, maybe they’ll want fairer treatment and actual wages, and that means the first case of inter-species discrimination. No worries though; since we’ll still be more advanced we can just wage an easy-to-win war against them and keep them in their place. We’ll set laws so they can’t climb their way past the glass ceiling. They’ll forever be ours. It’s easy.

So uh, yeah let’s just hope that there’s no intelligent life out there; not for our sake, but for theirs.