Quote:
Originally Posted by Jason
The idea that "any society sufficiently advanced enough to travel through space will also be advanced enough to avoid violence," is a very old one. It pops up in the words of scientists in '50s movies all the time, usually just before they try to make peaceful contact with the advanced aliens and are destroyed by them. See for example The Thing From Another World, in which the scientist Carrington makes almost that exact argument.
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I am aware of real scientists, in the present day who reach a similar conclusion, though not on so questionable and simplistic a basis as merely equating technological accomplishment with benevolence, without careful explanation. Such shallowness can be excused in a motion picture, especially one made in the 1950's, when the cold war made fear of the 'other' an even more serious problem than at present. It would have made sense to them to set up an idealistic 'straw man', then see him destroyed as a consequence of his own naivete'. None of that constitutes a reasonable argument. Ross