[simonh]

Too many speculative versions of really weird aliens throw out constraints that are likely to be universal in an attempt to emphasise strangeness. Things like basic constraints such as the conservation of energy and matter, evolutionary pressure, information theory, game theory.

Take Klaatu in The Day the Earth Stood Still, who apparently has no understanding whatsoever of the reasons why humans do the things they do. What sort of superintelligence doesn't even get the simplest principles of competitive behaviour and dysfunctions that can arise from competition for resources? But no, we are incomprehensible to him and it all has to be explained by the humans, even though his own civilization went through _exactly_ the same problems.

It's fine for fiction, but taking that way of thinking and applying it to speculations in the real world as though it's valid science is an error.

[throwaway2245]

It seems completely reasonable to me that space-faring creatures who have reached Earth would likely have been living in a post-scarcity environment for long enough that competitive dysfunction would be (literally) alien.