2025-10-07
If you're a general or maybe a politician, established habits of geopolitics and warfare die hard, and any incoming alien group (unless it arrives uninvited in small inflatables from mid-Channel) will likely be taken as a hostile force and met with military action. To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
But maybe this doesn't present the best way to interact with "aliens" that come our way.
For a start, whencever they come from, their technology is likely to be vastly more developed than ours, so they will assuredly have sent their scouts in advance, and will know to bring some primitive inflatables with them on a calm day. If they are friendly.
If not, we will have no answers should they decide to rumble us. Our best course therefore is likely to be to hold the military, offer respectful friendliness, and to try to learn as much as possible from them in as short a time as may be feasible.
Whatever it takes.
In any case, a crash course in interplanetary, maybe intergalactic, etiquette is likely coming our way, and only an inconsequential few of us are likely to be ready for it, however it instantiates. The rest will be faced with the collapse of their current world paradigm.
Clif High introduces us to his understanding of the Adjustment Period. For neither the faint of heart nor the conventional of wisdom as we have known it.
Or of course the whole "aliens are coming" nonsense may be just that - nonsense. It's a tough call!
