Only scavenger drones?
28 Sep 2017Valorin
They are here. Reports of encounters are all over the board. But all bets are not off yet. The invasion many people feared, the ruthless attack by a Thargoid war fleet did not come. Despite the exciting and frightening fact that those aliens reached human space I am not yet inclined to believe that they are hostile. Is it alarming? Yes! But is it a threat? I am not sure yet. There have been reports of ships attacked and destroyed by Thargoids, so yes, they are dangerous. There are also lots of rumors going around if you listen to people hanging out at spaceport bars. Rumors about people being taken and mashed into nutrient paste and things like that, which are assumptions and wild stories born of fear and our human desire for escalation and excitement.
If I look at it in a more sober light, I find, that so far the Thargoids didn't outright attack. They scavenge, they scan, they collect, they remove obstacles in their way. Most reports I heard state that the Thargoids often ignore human ships as long as they don't get too close or interfere with their business. They emit noise, change colour and deploy a cloud of small vessels swarming around their ships as a warning. Any human pilot with any sense of self preservation wakes at this point, but some didn't and have been attacked. Yes, there have also been reports of pilots who state to have been attacked unprovoked, but perhaps they just didn't notice. Thargoids are aliens. Who can say what provokes them or interferes with their mission? So far they are less hostile than the average pirate.
I'm not saying they are harmless. They are not. From all I saw and read I am under the impression that the Thargoids we met so far are nothing but worker drones, like the small ones we saw at the structures. The question is: what is it they want? Maybe this is just how they expand and we should indeed chase them off our territory. These drones collecting from new systems as their civilization advances. Perhaps they are recovering from a crisis, or are at war with each other (we know there are two races) and are now gathering stuff for rebuilding. We don't know yet.
We know Thargoids are insectoids, and looking at the structures we can assume that they live in hives. I think the ships we encounter now are indeed just workers, ignoring whatever does not interfere with their purpose. They are scavenging, scanning for resources. Looking at ants I know they not only have worker drones, but also warriors, which are bigger and stronger and as soon as a hive identifies a threat, they swarm and destroy it. This is, what I actually fear the most. If these ships are workers, what are their warriors like? And shouldn't we, under all circumstances, avoid being identified as a threat until we are able to fight back? I also believe peace is still possible, if it weren't for triggerhappy fingers.