Pfffft.  What's next?  Next thing you know they'll be saying there's water on Mars.

With the exception of a nuclear event, I doubt if we'll have a single bit of control over whatever eventually destroys us, whether it be a great flood, a meteor, aliens, mother nature, a virus, etc.  All of those things are plausible, IMO.

Hell, it could end up being an alien virus that rides a meteor to earth during a severe storm and spreads through contaminated flood water.

A couple of wives and three kids shows that he beats the average arfcom basement dweller on lifetime tail count.

Once we finish playing Cowboys and Islamist, we can play Cowboys and Crab-Claws.

Once again, there are no resources on this planet that are particularly uncommon.

Any race with the technology for interstellar travel (assuming such a thing is even possible in a practical sense) could find an abundance of anything we have easily without coming here.

Junior Mints.  That has to be it.  Sorry bastards are coming for our Junior Mints.  

Or we might destroy the aliens.

Harry Turtledove wrote a short story in which humans missed discovery of the "gravity drive"  during the age of sail, when most species find it.  Unfortunately this discovery causes the alien races to only create technology that assists them in interstellar travel.  They are otherwise in the days of Christopher Columbus (medicine, food, military tech, etc.).  One of these races (with their awesome blackpowder weaponry) encounters mid 21st century Earth.  

http://www.eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken_(short_story)

There are many, many places where I could hunt deer. But I like going to my buddy's farm a thousand miles away in Missouri.

It's ironic because ar15.com has a safari subforum.



Back to the groceries...

We are the all singing all dancing crap of the universe

Yep, it wouldn't be about resources, but just because we are here.  

Lets say we are to the aliens what wasps are to us.  Do you wait for the wasps nest to get really fucking big before you stamp it out?

http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html

I think it's silly to relate what we currently know about civilization, mathematics, engineering and physics to a civilization that could have millions of years ahead of us.Arguing that aliens don't exist because we have not found Dyson Spheres is a logical fallacy because it assumes they would have energy needs similar to our own or have not developed alternative means of energy production that are more practical than encapsulating an entire star. For example my 55"  television today consumes less than half of the energy a 32" television of 15 years ago did. I'd imagine in another 100,000 years or so it's going to get a lot more efficient.

The second problem is the assumption that they would be driven to colonize everything. It's the same issue with scientists who assume life can only exist on a planet with Earth like conditions. We can't look beyond our own limited understanding of the universe around us because we only apply what we already know and understand to what we observe. Look at the birth rates in the developed world compared to the undeveloped world here on Earth. The more advanced we become the less we reproduce. I know I'm applying human attributes in these examples but that underlines what I said earlier in that we can only think in our own terms.

I've entertained the notion that Hawking is actually a potato these days and his antics are really the result of a group of MIT students controlling him remotely.

Oh geez, no one has ever thought of that before.

"Rods from God"

As far as assumptions go, we really have no idea how easy or difficult it would be for life to form out there. Sure, we can estimate the number of stars, planets, planets in the habitable zone. But what are the odds of life developing? 1 in 10, or 1 in 10 trillion?

Who knows?

I will be waiting for my probing. No wait, I will wait to probe her.

Eh, what the hell. As long as there is contact lets get it on.

Except that it's a single wasp nest in an area the size of Alaska and it's only existed for a millisecond (actually many orders of magnitude worse).  How do you find out it's even there?

People really fail to grasp how big things are out there...

She's the reason we have Obama.