So when the tentacled aliens arrive in their high-tech spacetime warping vehicles, it will mean very bad things for us, even if we do have the advantage of opposable thumbs. There’s only one thing that can save us, even if they arrive with the best of intentions: the first one that gets off its spaceship, before it can gabble out “znɚʂx pɷʆwrnaʡɮ snȜʑʥϢxx” (“We come in peace! Behold, we bring you gifts of beads, trinkets, and digital watches!”), we kill it and eat it and hang a few tentacles by our front door in plain view of whatever else is in that high-tech spacetime warping vehicle.
When word gets back to the home planet, they’ll decide our crap-covered hornet’s nest of a planet is too disgusting to mess with, when Argelius II is right next door to us (next door for a galaxy-hopping civilization, anyway) and has a “Gun-Free Zone” sign prominently posted in the front yard to boot.
As precedent, I refer you to the Jivaro Indians of Ecuador and Peru. The Spanish conquistadors utterly destroyed the great civilizations of the Aztecs and the Incas, but the Jivaro are still there today. Why? Because they never tried to make nice with the high-tech civilization; they simply regarded shrunken Spanish heads as delightfully chic accessories for their mud huts. It wasn’t long before everyone needed a couple of shrunken Spanish heads hanging on the front door
