Why do we assume UFO/Aliens are always hostile?

[Baron von Blitztank]

Because anything different is scary, immoral, disgusting and makes the baby Jesus cry...

But mostly because Cthulhu and the Great Old Ones have already laid claim to this planet and will brainwash us all to remove any possible competition.

 

[Strazdas]

1. Aliens are a good target as they are foreign and there is no morality attached to killing them

2. Because we assume aliens act like we do.

So you think if humans ever could develop the technology to travel space and find other race, you assume the first thing in our mind is to destroy what we find?

Yes. Look what happened when we discovered Americas.

Lets ask the question this way: IF you walked up to an ant hill, and it started shooting miniature missiles at you, would you try to be friendly?

 

[Composer]

My favorite representation of aliens coming to Earth was the Twilight Zone episode "To Serve Man"
Something about it was just so fitting. If they managed to reach our planet with their advanced technology, what else would the have to gain but personal pleasure? perhaps a nice snack of roasted human or two.

 

[KapnKerfuffle]

Because it makes for a more interesting book/movie/games etc. But any beings that can figure out the energy problems of getting from point A to B in a universe this vast probably doesn't need too much from us.

 

[MeChaNiZ3D]

Not everyone assumes that. Movies do because that's the easier way to make a movie with aliens in it. Often aliens are just used as a stand-in for any human enemy, except that people don't necessarily care as much when they die. I don't know what aliens will even look like if we find them, or what form they'll be in. But I think if we find humanoids or other sentient communicative aliens, we'll probably be able to establish a working relationship and pool knowledge. Because scientists would be the ones at the forefront. If they find us, that's where the "humans are generally dickheads" comes into play. And god help them if they land in the US, some people over there are already waiting for them by virtue of being delusional. But we shouldn't assume they're automatically going to want to kill us any more than we should assume diplomacy is their first priority. Maybe they're already had a bad encounter with another species and don't want to take any chances. Maybe we spend a few years communicating through deep space without knowing the specifics. Maybe they're bacteria. Who knows.

 

[RedDeadFred]

There are many references of aliens being friendly. I know that, I have kept up with pop-culture thank ou.
!BUT! Why isn't it the default assumption? Why is it the rare exceptions compared to the negative portrayal.

Again, YOU are making the assumption on what the "default" is. Stop that.

It IS the default assumption though. If you were to walk up to a random person on the street and ask them how they would feel if we made contact with intelligent ET's their first response would probably be fear. The amount of alien invasion movies has kind of ingrained this thought into pop culture. Also, one of many people's most basic fears is the fear of the unknown. Aliens are very much a huge unknown.

I don't personally think that aliens are going to be hostile. If they are, then it will probably be because they are afraid of us or they are some super powerful being who view us as no more than ants. I refuse to believe though that every other life form in the universe is just as violent as us.

 

[MagunBFP]

Personnally I'm inclined to believe that if the aliens who found us weren't hostile to begin with Humanity's paranoia would start pissing them off really fast. Just think about it... a space ship appears out of nowhere in orbit of the planet... Someone in power is going to see it as a threat that needs to be destroyed to "protect the human race" as this is clearly a threat and can't be trusted. Then there's the fact that when the alien wishes to be "taken to our leader" There's going to be a shitfight over who our leader is. The US is going to insist on it being them, because while they don't actually represent a majority of the world they have a rediculously massive military... and hollywood, China will want to be the leader because they actually are the majority of the world. So there will be fighting and argueing over that. Then there's the indignities that we would subject the aliens to "all in the name of security" not to mention that there will be groups saying that "aliens are abominations" or "they're unholy" or "not people so we can do what we want with no moral qualms" We are a fearful and overly proud species, if we do piss off alien visitors I only hope they just say screw it and find someone else and not enslave us with their advanced tech.

 

[SinisterGehe]

Just out of curiosity. Why do people think that our planet has the unique resources that aliens would want. There are planetary objects made of prime elements, pure gas, even some that are pure metal. And most planetary objects contain all elements in plenty, and most of them have more mass than we do. So why spend resources on wiping out entire civilization when you can just go and pick the fruits around them. Just look at the other planetary objects near us. Hell... Moon is assumed to have inner core of pure heavy metals (majority of the mass). So what resource would earth have that aliens would't found along the way here? Water? Even it exists in massive volumes outside of earth.

 

[Bertylicious]

Iain Banks wrote about "Outside Context Problems" such as the Spanish Conquistadors going to South America. I guess the fear is of a similar OCP affecting us. The ludicrous thing is that the humans always triumph over their aggressors, typically in some fashion involving open warfare rather than some manner of asymetrical attrition method.

Exploitation of resources still ends of with lots of killing and death. Just look at what the British empire did. Obviously, we won't kill all of them. Exterminating an entire group of people take great amounts of resources.

Not really. Just a few blankets impregnated with small pox.

 

[Frotality]

i would like to reiterate the stance that we assume aliens will act as we do. we are, of course, our only example of intelligent life to form an opinion based off of. we assume aliens are hostile because humans are programmed to assume unknown things are hostile, its a basic survival tactic, and it goes both ways. if aliens come to earth with ANY kind of goal that doesnt involve us, we are just an unknown variable that just serves to complicate that goal, just like all the pesky natives our empires had to deal with.

and conversely, there are many examples of friendly aliens throughout our media because of those times where the goals of two different cultures coincide and mutual cooperation is possible. its just a matter of circumstance whether at first contact, the instinct to work together overpowers the instinct to guard ourselves from the unknown.

 

[Scow2]

For a far more circumspect and far less misanthropic viewpoint... the answer comes down to competition and ignorance. We are not them, they are not us. They will not be "Funny-looking people" - the difference between them and us is vaster than the difference between us and ants or dolphins. The big issue is they will have no way to communicate with us.We will not understand them, they will not understand us. They will also have no way of understanding how intercommunicative we are.

They will not understand why the people in China will care if they 'clear out' a section of our world to set up their own base. They will also put their own needs over ours - they might try to trade with us for what they need, but more than likely, we'd be far less adept at giving it to them in the quantities they want. They wouldn't understand what parts of our land we'd value or why.

Even if they came in peace and attempted to mind their own business, sooner or later our species' mutual interests will collide, and if we have no way of diplomatically handling them (Which we won't, because we can't communicate with them), any incursion between the two (Such as aliens abducting a farmer's cattle, or nosy humans trying to investigate the aliens) will likely cause retaliation and escalation of conflict.

They might also find us morally despicable despite our virtues (Especially if they DO learn our language and hear how much we badmouth ourselves), and hypocritically decide that the world's better off without us.

We're likely to be outmatched by any interstellar travellers, because what they show us would be just a fraction of their might. And if they didn't initially outmatch us, we'd raise the bar for what level they need to be when they come back. At best, we'd be like tigers or elephants to them - worth protecting and saving until we become a nuisance. At worst, termites. Or, we might be like Zombies to them (Think more or I Am Legend more than Dawn of the Dead).


Of course, it's not all bleak. Just as our own culture has kept an open enough mind to accept the possibility of intelligent, non-hostile life, it's possible theirs does to. If we survive the intial conflict long enough to communicate with them, it's possible to get them to acknowledge and respect our culture. It'll take a while for them to recognize us as social equals, and by the time it does, though, our culture would be radically different from where it was before The War of the Worlds. In order to avoid ending up in a mess like modern Native Americans or Africans, though, we'd need to build up sufficient strength to stand on our own against them, without reversing the trend and making them the oppressed.

It's also unlikely they'd want to completely exterminate us - in all likelyhood, they'd have an interest in Earth because it has life, and they want to study extraterrestrial life without disrupting it any more than they have to.

 

[pilouuuu]

Nobody wants to watch movies about aliens coming to earth and shaking our hands. It's BORING.

E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind and The Day Earth Stood Still (the old one, not the crappy one) say hi!

Captcha: good grief

 

[RufusMcLaser]

It seems OP's opening assumption that media tends to depict aliens as hostile is .
By way of a little experiment, I looked at this [http://uk.imdb.com/search/title?genres=sci_fi&sort=boxoffice_gross_us,desc] list of top-US-grossing sci-fi films. I paged through the first 100 and listed all of which had aliens and weren't outright kid features. I counted franchises as a single entry on the list, so Star Wars and Star Trek appear once each since each film within the franchise talks about the same fictional universe.
I came up with 16 films depicting aliens in contact with humans. (Avatar, Star Wars, Transformers, Avengers, Independence Day, Star Trek, Men In Black, War of the Worlds (2005), Signs, Super 8, Prometheus, Green Lantern, District 9, Contact, Cowboys & Aliens, X-Files (1998))
Of those, six (Independence Day, War of the Worlds, Signs, Prometheus [debatable], Signs, Cowboys & Aliens, and X-Files [also debatable]) depict aliens which are universally hostile. The other ten either feature friendly/indifferent aliens, or a mix of friendly and unfriendly aliens. Six of sixteen isn't a majority, just a large minority- so by the yardstick of high-grossing US sci-fi movies, the "problem" isn't that severe.
I acknowledge up front that this is a complex matter, and so vulgar a measure as "it made lots of money in the US" is pretty chauvinistic. The approach has problems but I think it's good for a ballpark figure of what's in the Western consciousness.

If we widen the focus to include popular video games, things are probably going to change drastically. I can't think of many popular titles that depicted peaceful aliens- can you? (Master of Orion wasn't in the same league as Resistance: Fall of Man or teh Haloz.)

 

[hooblabla6262]

We don't always assume they are hostile.

Some movies/other media take that stance cause it makes for an interesting story.

I always assumed the first contact would play out just like the movie Mac and Me.

 

[Scow2]

1. Aliens are a good target as they are foreign and there is no morality attached to killing them

2. Because we assume aliens act like we do.

So you think if humans ever could develop the technology to travel space and find other race, you assume the first thing in our mind is to destroy what we find?

Yes. Look what happened when we discovered Americas.

Lets ask the question this way: IF you walked up to an ant hill, and it started shooting miniature missiles at you, would you try to be friendly?

We coexisted peacefully with the native Americans for years (Even though many encountered at Jamestown were hostile), until the native Central Americans offended our morals or obstructed our goals, or the North American Colonists decided to overreact to the frequent assaults from the natives due to mutually-incompatible cultures.

i would like to reiterate the stance that we assume aliens will act as we do. we are, of course, our only example of intelligent life to form an opinion based off of. we assume aliens are hostile because humans are programmed to assume unknown things are hostile, its a basic survival tactic, and it goes both ways. if aliens come to earth with ANY kind of goal that doesnt involve us, we are just an unknown variable that just serves to complicate that goal, just like all the pesky natives our empires had to deal with.

I'd strongly disagree with this. For the most part, upon finding a new entity the human response is usually "Approach with caution." Are we more inclined to interpret a given action as hostile? Yes. But history is full of more cases of hostilities being delayed than assault-on-first-contact.

 

[Tuesday Night Fever]

snip

"If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans," he said. "We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet." -Stephen Hawking

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Space/stephen-hawking-alien-contact-risky/story?id=10478157#.ULPxyOT7Kyg

Personally, I don't assume that extraterrestrials are going to be hostile. But at the same time, I don't make the mistake of assuming that they're going to be friendly either. I think the only intelligent way to view them would be with caution.

Just because you think they'd have no real incentive to invade Earth doesn't mean that they wouldn't have it. It's just another assumption about them, same as the assumption that they're guaranteed to be hostile. Frankly, (assuming extraterrestrials exist at all), we know absolutely nothing about them. We don't know their beliefs, we don't know their culture, we don't know their desires, we don't know their motivations, we don't know what their civilization wants or needs, we know nothing.

For all we know, maybe they traveled through the vastness of space looking for a new pal to hang out with or a new target to test fire their sweet, sweet doomsday weapons on. Hell, maybe they're just looking to build an interstellar highway and Earth just happens to be in the way.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

1. Aliens are a good target as they are foreign and there is no morality attached to killing them

2. Because we assume aliens act like we do.

I think this is an adequate explanation. Human history has demonstrated that any time you introduce two groups, hostilities tend to result. Doubly true in situations where there is an obvious technological difference or vastly different military power available.

Plus, the fact that they aren't human means you don't need to attach any particular reason for them doing terrible things. They can simply be the bad guys without needing to explain why they're the bad guys. It is a rare human group that manages to be labeled thus.

 

[Strazdas]

1. Aliens are a good target as they are foreign and there is no morality attached to killing them

2. Because we assume aliens act like we do.

So you think if humans ever could develop the technology to travel space and find other race, you assume the first thing in our mind is to destroy what we find?

Yes. Look what happened when we discovered Americas.

Lets ask the question this way: IF you walked up to an ant hill, and it started shooting miniature missiles at you, would you try to be friendly?

We coexisted peacefully with the native Americans for years (Even though many encountered at Jamestown were hostile), until the native Central Americans offended our morals or obstructed our goals, or the North American Colonists decided to overreact to the frequent assaults from the natives due to mutually-incompatible cultures.

Because being greeted like gods that came across the ocean and first thing in our mind being to organize a cue and slaughter the capital is peaceful coexistence to you. And then you even have to ask the question....

 

[Scow2]

1. Aliens are a good target as they are foreign and there is no morality attached to killing them

2. Because we assume aliens act like we do.

So you think if humans ever could develop the technology to travel space and find other race, you assume the first thing in our mind is to destroy what we find?

Yes. Look what happened when we discovered Americas.

Lets ask the question this way: IF you walked up to an ant hill, and it started shooting miniature missiles at you, would you try to be friendly?

We coexisted peacefully with the native Americans for years (Even though many encountered at Jamestown were hostile), until the native Central Americans offended our morals or obstructed our goals, or the North American Colonists decided to overreact to the frequent assaults from the natives due to mutually-incompatible cultures.

Because being greeted like gods that came across the ocean and first thing in our mind being to organize a cue and slaughter the capital is peaceful coexistence to you. And then you even have to ask the question....

I already (indirectly) accounted for the Aztecs. Up north, we coexisted peacefully. In central America, we tolerated the Aztecs for a few hours before saying, "Wait, these guys have a LOT of the gold we want, are savagely primitive, AND are human-sacrificing heathens! These fiends must die! AND GIVE US ALL THEIR GOLD!"

Also, the Aztecs totally knew the Feathered Serpent was coming back, and what he was going to do to them for their atrocities.