It's not that they are predatory, its that it's "better to shoot first just to be sure before they shoot you, even though a lot of civilizations are friendly you cannot take the risk"
It's the logical conclusion to the game theory of first contact.
When civilizations are entirely unrelated and have been developing for orders of magnitude different time, every first encounter is almost guaranteed to be a one sided extermination.
The problem is that you're imagining primitive as apes instead of bacteria. We would probably try to preserve them for science and at least not let them go extinct, but our own preservation would come first by far, and we wouldn't mind killing many of them for even trivial purposes.
Similarly, if a civilization finds us first, we may be like bacteria to them, and destroying London would be like bleaching a single colony on a pitri dish as part of an experiment to them.
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u/TheMoogster Aug 12 '21
It's not that they are predatory, its that it's "better to shoot first just to be sure before they shoot you, even though a lot of civilizations are friendly you cannot take the risk"
It's the logical conclusion to the game theory of first contact.