—Why would they travel all this way only to leave after a couple days? —Interestingly enough, it is probably what we would do. At least, it is what we would have done half a century ago. It might be an urban legend, but I was told that in the fifties, the US military started thinking about what it would do if we encountered sentient alien life. They came up with a seven-step procedure, starting with remote surveillance. We would then secretly visit the alien world, and if we felt our weaponry and technology to be more advanced than the aliens, we would begin a series of brief landings during
...more
