Choices

Before I get into the meat and potatoes of this entry I'd like to apologize for not updating more frequently. I began working back in September and my free time was cut down as well as my schedule was changed. I'll try to keep up now but no guarantees.

Now I was planning on making this post a while ago because it was one of the first impressions I had while playing Starcraft 2. One of the missions, named "Safe Haven", has the player making a choice between either siding with the Terrans (the humans) to save their colony from the Protoss (an advanced alien race). The reason that the Protoss are attacking is that the colony has become infested by the Zerg (swarm-like alien race). There is no cure for the infestation as far as either the Terrans or the Protoss know. So the choice is to save the colony or help the Protoss make sure that the infestation is controlled.

Now here's the part where I might be strange. When I came to the choice I realized that there wasn't a choice at all: I had to pick helping the Terrans. I even feel that we, as humans, are obliged to choose to help the Terrans. The reason why I think this is that if we are confronted by an alien species which we cannot reason with (the Protoss would try to wipe out the colony no matter what) we are obliged to do everything in our power to resist and defeat them. By all means we should attempt to reason with them first but, if that fails, then we must make sure that the threat they represent is neutralized. This is because the threat they represent is not just to a specific group of humans. They are a threat to all humans because their inability to reason out another solution means that they are fundamentally incapable of communicating with us. If they cannot communicate with us then they will always be a very real threat. A threat that is capable of wiping us out.

In this sense, if we are ever faced with a choice like this from an alien or foreign species, I believe we are obliged to help the humans to survive. They are not only representative of our species but the interaction is representative our ability to communicate with that alien species. If we cannot communicate with them and compromise then we cannot co-exist. We must end the threat that they represent and oppose them.