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Comment by ssl-3

2 days ago

We'd almost certainly find some way to kill them if we ever ran across any of them.

We're pretty good at accomplishing things like that.

One day, there's some space sharks swimming in a sea of liquid helium and doing deep dives to get to the smaller creatures that devour the seabed of diamonds.

The next day, we're figuring out how to use space shark squeezings in our fusion reactors.

Unless, of course, the space sharks figure out how to kill us first. They will probably try if that's useful to then.

It's the circle of life.

> We'd almost certainly find some way to kill them if we ever ran across any of them

There is a credible argument that what the literature terms genocidal tendencies—where conflict isn’t resolved when it ends, but when the enemy is destroyed—is a precondition for conquering a world. So if we met space sharks, barring enlightenment, they’d probably seek to destroy us, too.