[b_tterc_p]

I mean, if living before meeting aliens is worthwhile, then living with discovered and destroyed aliens should be fine, no?

Your point doesn’t really hold up if the effort to destroy a civ is basically zero, while the cost to defend is approximately unachievable.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Do you really even want to live in a universe like that? And if not, why contribute to creating it? Ultimately no one survives. There's no winning, you don't get a trophy for watching the last proton decay, so it is silly to survive for surviving's sake.

[dr_dshiv]

Plus, wouldn't it also attract the attention of the nice guy alien civs? They've been keeping their head down, just developing tech for more thousands of millenia - they probably care about civilizational diversity. The destruction oriented would surely be on the nice guy hit list for destroying all these nice diverse civilizations. So then it's just a question of whether a nice guy attitude would enable better wartech than a destruction oriented attitude.

[b_tterc_p]

I like being alive. I don’t generally extend my personal scale of experience beyond my neighborhood let alone intergalactic diplomatic relations. If we destroyed an alien civ, life would be as it were before meeting them, which was fine. Why do aliens need to factor into your world view?