[DistractionRect]

Resources. Perhaps their star will soon (on a cosmic timescale) consume their planet and they're looking for another solar system to inhabit. Labor for their Dyson sphere. Who knows. But, if something goes out of their way to make contact, odds are it won't be a friendly hello.

[yreg]

There's an abundance of resources in the countless uninhabited systems.

[dotancohen]

Mineral resources, possibly. But how about labor resources? Or food?

[yreg]

I’m convinced that interstellar travel is incredibly difficult or even totally impractical.

If you are a civ who is able to do it, surely you can grow whatever food you need at home and have advanced AI/robotics that can provide labour.

That being said, Harry Turtledove wrote a great story about interstellar travel being easy and humanity somehow missing that branch of the tech tree.

Road Not Taken: https://www.eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf

[dotancohen]

  > If you are a civ who is able to do it, surely you can grow whatever food you need at home and have advanced AI/robotics that can provide labour.

That's about as reasonable an argument as "if you drive a Tesla, surely you can afford to donate to my cause". Maybe they are way over-invested in their FTL technology and really have no choice but to look for external labour. Maybe they painted themselves into a corner with the FTL tech that can get them here, but they need our labour to enable their drives to restart for the trip back. Or maybe whatever reasoning they have is so _alien_ to us that we simply can not comprehend it.

[Intralexical]

Ah yes. The interstellar aliens want human slaves and cattle to compensate for their failure to invent bucket excavators and hydroponics.

[dotancohen]

Yes, it is possible that whatever FTL tech they are using will work with a living creature but not with some machine. Maybe they just encode human DNA to clone for slaves because their culture does not allow them to use their own DNA for slaves, and DNA is easy to send over their FTL tech.

When discussing aliens you have to consider that their reasoning, their culture, their motivations, their technology, their customs, their values are all _alien_ to us. You have to be open minded, for every excuse we can come up with for "why not" there are infinite explanations for "why so".

[Intralexical]

The thing is that culture, motivations, and technology are all shaped by constraints imposed by the laws of physics, which (by definition) can generally be presumed to be universal. Having plausible explanations for "why so" doesn't change the fact that doing so would likely be so inefficient that it would place their entire culture at a significant disadvantage.

Yet on a cultural level, I think the "food/slaves" narratives of alien invasion are actually failing to be open-minded enough. Mechanical labor and physical nutrition are the kinds of things that our newly industrialized post-colonial societies worry about. It's not actually a particularly "alien" idea. Thinking a much more technologically advanced society would come to Earth for the same reasons comes across to me as projecting our own anxieties and sins.

[ceejayoz]

I mean, maybe?

People still eat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ortolan_bunting despite the illegality, low nutritional value, and the ready availability of other options.