I can see if they start firing away, using whatever primitive technology we have... but in the case where they clearly have far surpassed us, managing to travel from light years away using obviously superior technology... why do we always start shooting? It must be like ants baring their pincers at us... I don't get it at all.
shareI think the most basic thing that it comes down to is fear and transplanting human behaviors on the aliens that they might express.
Aliens coming to Earth poses a thread. Because if they're like humans, they might try to do to us what we've been doing to ourselves since always. War, conquest, slavery, all that good stuff. And if they're not like humans, we don't know what the hell they might do, because we're the only advanced form of live that we've even observed. So it's a precautionary measure I think. And it makes us feel safe, even if that's irrational.
It's beside the point that if aliens have traveled to another planet they have vastly superior technology to our own.
You need to inject some action and conflict into the story as well. Plus, all of these stories are really about humanity and how we reach to certain events, and we're pretty fond of solving our problems with guns and bombs and things like that.
That's my 2 cents anyway.
I enjoyed the film... but that just didn't make sense. Even if somehow they had lost... they could've just come back a hundred years earlier and wiped us out before we had nukes. I hope if we are confronted with this situation in real life that we don't try preemptive attacks.
shareI found this movie very boring and pretentious crap.
shareIt's been a while since I saw the film, but from what I remember it was just some countries that wanted to attack the aliens, and at that time they didn't know how the aliens perceived time. And wasn't there something in the way the Chinese translated the language that made them think the aliens might attack?
I don't know what else they could've put instead of the attack to make the situation more urgent.
But I hope too, that if that happened in real life, we would go for the preemptive attacks. The UN is probably already working on a protocol for First Contact. Though noone really listens to them...
The Chinese linguists were attempting to use chess as a way to communicate with the aliens so the paradigm immediately became infused with warlike connotations. I never watched Star Trek much but I believe the Klingons language was heavily skewed towards war. On the other hand Louise was trying to find basic elements of common ground. Linguistics and semantics can become extremely important in situations like this... that's why she told them to ask the Berkeley professor about the sanskrit word. During WWII I believe a translator interpreted the Japanese word mokusatsu as "ignore" when others would translate it as "consider". The second atomic bomb was dropped because of that difference in meaning.
sharePeople are xenophobic and stupid. Didn't find the reaction unrealistic at all.
shareFor dramatic purposes. That's the only reason.
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