I think you guys have fallen off in the weeds somewhere.<p>The point wasn't that somehow Europeans were "right" in the way they treated the natives, any more than the natives were "right". My thesis is, given any two sufficiently distant cultures, <i>any</i> interaction between them, no matter how principled, will be traumatic to the lesser culture.<p>That doesn't mean I approve of the side-effects of interaction, or that I'm a believer in social darwinism, or that we should kill a million people in order to make drugs to extend the lives of the billions of other humans. These are all extreme positions that I do NOT take. I'm simply pointing out the patterns from the past, which I fully expect to continue in the future. My personal opinions have no bearing on this anymore than whether or not I like the beach has anything to do with the migratory patterns of sea turtles. It's an observation, not a value judgement.<p>Even when I say I would send my kids to the schools and such, what I'm saying is that <i>we must do what we have to in order to survive as a species</i>. Not that I approve or somehow would be complicit in it. I'm saying that the personal attitude of survival and not moaning over things lost is what makes us able to move forward no matter what position we are in.<p>The more interesting question would be if the aliens arrived with all sorts of goodies, much like the Europeans did. What if we could eliminate death? Eliminate suffering? Live more fuller lives? But what if the interaction was bound to kill 90% of the population no matter how well it was handled?<p>I'm not in charge of making decisions like that and I quite plainly refuse to do so, even in a rhetorical sense. I'm much happier describing my personal reaction to such an event than trying to figure out what's best for an entire species over the long run. That's way above my pay grade.<p>But it's not a matter of me good, them bad. It's more like "some cultures are better than others, and when two cultures get significantly far apart mixing them becomes extremely traumatic to the lesser one"<p>You want an answer to the Fermi Paradox? I think it's right here.