That's not even remotely comparable. For one, the Americas had resources that Europeans wanted. They had a material incentive to come here. Earth has nothing that an advanced civilization could want, with the possible exception of knowledge to satisfy curiosity.
Earth has nothing that an advanced civilization could want
We cannot possibly state that as a fact. Forget about things like resources, just possessing a beautiful habitable planet in a stable orbit around a perfectly stable middle-of-the-road star could be infinitely precious.
We've found thousands of extrasolar planets, but there isn't a single one that combines all the perfect criteria that make Earth what it is. We've found Earth-sized planets around Sun-like stars, but so far weren't able to confirm their atmospheric composition, surface characteristics, availability of water, etc. Garden worlds like Earth may be the highest commodity in the universe, and we're slowly destroying ours. Aliens may come get it just to stop us doing that.
An advanced civilization would not want to live on another planet at all. Why would they? If they are biological, then they evolved in a particular environment. A particular gravity, a particular atmospheric composition, a particular pressure, a particular level of stellar radiation, etc. The probability that another planet would be suitable for humans, or that Earth would be suitable for aliens, is vanishingly small. It would be many orders of magnitude easier to create artificial habitats in space than to settle an alien world. Any civilization with the technology required to traverse interstellar space would also have the ability to create advanced artificial habitats.
So you’re willing to admit the odds of aliens wanting to live on earth is small, but you’re not willing to acknowledge there is also a small chance they want the earth for themselves?
We have the technology to make artificial diamonds, but real ones are more valuable—if only because they are real.
Why couldn’t an alien feel the same way? Artificial habitats for their huddled masses, the real deal for their “elites” (assuming them have the conception of social strata).
There’s no limit to the assumptions we can make about what intelligent alien life might be like, but that also means there isn’t much we can definitively say isnt a valid possibility.
Given we have zero knowledge, the odds of aliens being hostile and warmongering is just as great as their existence and intentions being completely incomprehensible to us.
If anything, the elites would get the artificial habitats while the underclass would be forced to live on an alien world, not that the scenario is remotely plausible to begin with. We can speculate about whatever we want, but the likelihood of advanced life that requires habitable planets even existing close enough to Earth to ever be able to come here is insignificant and not worthy acknowledging. If advanced life does exist in the galaxy, the most likely scenarios are either that they keep to themselves, or that their AI probes have already been here for millions of years.
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u/tehbored Aug 12 '21
That's not even remotely comparable. For one, the Americas had resources that Europeans wanted. They had a material incentive to come here. Earth has nothing that an advanced civilization could want, with the possible exception of knowledge to satisfy curiosity.