Amanda Jackson5 said:Everything being said here just feels incredibly narrow-minded, uncritical, and frankly, a bit unimaginative:
Without getting bogged down in how we define God, you have to wonder why an advanced enough civilization couldn't reach a state where they effectively have no boundaries—whatever that implies, whether physically or spiritually. If you believe in the idea of quantity eventually transforming into quality, anything is on the table. I don't see any theoretical reason why some form of consciousness couldn't evolve to a point where you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between it and a god. In fact, I’d argue that any form of self-awareness naturally strives toward that. It might have even happened somewhere else in the universe already, maybe even more than once. And perhaps that first instance of "godhood" actually prevents others from happening, much like how the emergence of life on Earth changed everything else...
Nobody has sat down to run the actual probabilities here, but even looking at the linked article, it's clear that object behaved strangely in ways science hasn't quite pinned down yet. To be honest, there are some explanations out there that are far weirder than the idea of an alien origin.
First off, when you look at God through a philosophical lens rather than a religious or emotional one, you're essentially talking about a theoretical construct. We can plug just about any attribute we want into that construct, provided the final result remains logically coherent. You could even imagine one that is logically incoherent, but then you lose the ability to make any meaningful arguments regarding its traits.
Second, we have absolutely no way of knowing what a hypothetical alien civilization might want from us or what their motives would even be.
So, at the end of the day, both God and aliens are just hypotheses, and whatever traits we assign to them are really nothing more than our own human projections.
Why shouldn't we start with the most straightforward assumption derived from our own history? What has any advanced civilization ever taken from a newly discovered, inferior one?
They simply took whatever they wanted.
Resources were seized, and the local population was exploited or even wiped out if they stood in the way of resource extraction.
In an interplanetary context, the primary resource is the planet itself. They certainly wouldn't travel all this way just for gold, oil, or diamonds. It’s much more likely that their own world became overpopulated, uninhabitable, or otherwise depleted, driving them toward ours. If they arrive in waves, perhaps there won't be an immediate "extermination"; maybe they'll just treat us like we treat animals in a zoo.
Alternatively, if their motive is pure curiosity, it is highly probable that any "scouting" would be conducted without alerting the local population, as I suspect we would act in much the same way in some distant future.