The Romans were arguably a flash of insight away from the hot air balloon, they had good uses for it and all the prerequisite techs. Analogously, we might be one really good flash of insight away from technology we'll just actually get a thousand years from now. So the aliens could be otherwise on our tech level, but they just figured out warp drive.
I'm not saying I think these things, I'm just trying to point out that your conclusion is not a given.
It certainly means that they have those capabilities as pertains to travel, but it is not a given that they would have those capabilities in a military sense. Of course the argument can be made that you can convert that kind of power into a weapon, but I'd hazard to say that a haphazard conversion does not in fact impart upon you a godlike ability to ignore everything we could possibly do.
I'm definitely not arguing that this means we should increase military spending. I think that is fundamentally not a great idea for us in the first place. Instead, I am arguing that while the things you are talking about are widely used as sci-fi tropes and held as beliefs by a lot of people, I do not think they stand on their own merits.
A well equipped squad of marines would still eventually succumb to a gird of barbarians unless they could resupply.
It's more like neolithic man meets nuclear submarine... but worse. We have 0 tools at our disposal to fight anything that's farther away than the edge of the atmosphere. "They" can take a few decades to accelerate a really massive "civilization ending" object and slam it into us. It's not like we can go anywhere to avoid it.
Even if an alien civilization finds our planet, I don't see why that would imply we are inside their logistic operational range.
Assuming they are real, the aliens do not act in a way consistent with a goal-directed intelligence, which means they are not the product of evolution, which means they are something so strange that the idea of befriending or defeating them makes no sense. They're something more like this story: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-th...
Or maybe they are scouts that were sent all over the cosmos for the purpose of exploration and they will report back their findings to their home eventually.
There are plenty of rational explanations for their behavior, especially if we are extremely far behind them in our technological development.
They only have a tiny poorly manned outpost?
Are you sure you know what their goals would be?
>> Assuming they are real, the aliens do not act in a way consistent with a goal-directed intelligence, which means they are not the product of evolution, which means they are something so strange that the idea of befriending or defeating them makes no sense.
This. If - and that's a big if - we assume previous bizarre aerial activities observed by humans were in fact of ET origin, then it's only natural to think of those ETs more like AI (robots) that don't necessarily share our goal-oriented intelligence, but rather possess higher levels of intelligence and their own agenda. As a result, you're right; we wouldn't even begin to understand their purpose cause theirs just has no counterpart in humans.
Given the distances and ages required for interstellar travel, these things are more likely unmanned probes than busses filled with tourists.
> It has been theorized that a self-replicating starship utilizing relatively conventional theoretical methods of interstellar travel (i.e., no exotic faster-than-light propulsion, and speeds limited to an "average cruising speed" of 0.1c.) could spread throughout a galaxy the size of the Milky Way in as little as half a million years.
Fictional times indeed. Just don't think too hard about the money.
If it turns out that aliens are on the planet and have advanced technology that could ruin us all, maybe the Pentagon and the Kremlin would find a reason to stop starving their own people for the sake of assumed dominance over the planet, and instead unite to either befriend, or defeat, the common alien friend/foe.
One can imagine the reason all of these events are couched in such secrecy might be, indeed, militaristic hubris. Or, in other words, FOMO at a grand scale ..