Gandhi

What does nonviolence mean?

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Jun 15 JDN 2460842

As I write this, the LA protests and the crackdown upon them have continued since Friday and it is now Wednesday. In a radical and authoritarian move by Trump, Marines have been deployed (with shockingly incompetent logistics unbefitting the usually highly-efficient US military); but so far they have done very little. Reuters has been posting live updates on new developments.

The LAPD has deployed a variety of less-lethal weapons to disperse the protests, including rubber bullets, tear gas, and pepper balls; but so far they have not used lethal force. Protesters have been arrested, some for specific crimes—and others simply for violating curfew.

More recently, the protests have spread to other cities, including New York, Atlanta, Austin, Chicago, San Fransisco, and Philadelphia. By the time this post goes live, there will probably be even more cities involved, and there may also be more escalation.

But for now, at least, the protests have been largely nonviolent.

And I thought it would be worthwhile to make it very clear what I mean by that, and why it is important.

I keep seeing a lot of leftist people on social media accepting the narrative that these protests are violent, but actively encouraging that; and some of them have taken to arrogantly accuse anyone who supports nonviolent protests over violent ones of either being naive idiots or acting in bad faith. (The most baffling part of this is that they seem to be saying that Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi were naive idiots or were acting in bad faith? Is that what they meant to say?)

First of all, let me be absolutely clear that nonviolence does not mean comfortable or polite or convenient.

Anyone objecting to blocking traffic, strikes, or civil disobedience because they cause disorder and inconvenience genuinely does not understand the purpose of protest (or is a naive idiot or acting in bad faith). Effective protests are disruptive and controversial. They cause disorder.

Nonviolence does not mean always obeying the law.

Sometimes the law is itself unjust, and must be actively disobeyed. Most of the Holocaust was legal, after all.

Other times, it is necessary to break some laws (such as property laws, curfews, and laws against vandalism) in the service of higher goals.

I wouldn’t say that a law against vandalism is inherently unjust; but I would say that spray-painting walls and vehicles in the service of protecting human rights is absolutely justified, and even sometimes it’s necessary to break some windows or set some fires.

Nonviolence does not mean that nobody tries to call it violence.

Most governments are well aware that most of their citizens are much more willing to support a nonviolent movement than a violent moment—more on this later—and thus will do whatever they can to characterize nonviolent movements as violence. They have two chief strategies for doing so:

  1. Characterize nonviolent but illegal acts, such as vandalism and destruction of property, as violence
  2. Actively try to instigate violence by treating nonviolent protesters as if they were violent, and then characterizing their attempts at self-defense as violence

As a great example of the latter, a man in Phoenix was arrested for assault because he kicked a tear gas canister back at police. But kicking back a canister that was shot at you is the most paradigmatic example of self-defense I could possibly imagine. If the system weren’t so heavily biased in fair of the police, a judge would order his release immediately.

Nonviolence does not mean that no one at the protests gets violent.

Any large group of people will contain outliers. Gather a protest of thousands of people, and surely some fraction of them will be violent radicals, or just psychopaths looking for an excuse to hurt someone. A nonviolent protest is one in which most people are nonviolent, and in which anyone who does get violent is shunned by the organizers of the movement.

Nonviolence doesn’t mean that violence will never be used against you.

On the contrary, the more authoritarian the regime—and thus the more justified your protest—the more likely it is that violent force will be used to suppress your nonviolent protests.

In some places it will be limited to less-lethal means (as it has so far in the current protests); but in others, even in ostensibly-democratic countries, it can result in lethal force being deployed against innocent people (as it did at Kent State in 1970).

When this happens, are you supposed to just stand there and get shot?

Honestly? Yes. I know that requires tremendous courage and self-sacrifice, but yes.

I’m not going to fault anyone for running or hiding or even trying to fight back (I’d be more of the “run” persuasion myself), but the most heroic action you could possibly take in that situation is in fact to stand there and get shot. Becoming a martyr is a terrible sacrifice, and one I’m not sure it’s one I myself could ever make; but it really, really works. (Seriously, whole religions have been based on this!)

And when you get shot, for the love of all that is good in the world, make sure someone gets it on video.

The best thing you can do for your movement is to show the oppressors for what they truly are. If they are willing to shoot unarmed innocent people, and the world finds out about that, the world will turn against them. The more peaceful and nonviolent you can appear at the moment they shoot you, the more compelling that video will be when it is all over the news tomorrow.

A shockingly large number of social movements have pivoted sharply in public opinion after a widely-publicized martyrdom incident. If you show up peacefully to speak your minds and they shoot you, that is nonviolent protest working. That is your protest being effective.

I never said that nonviolent protest was easy or safe.

What is the core of nonviolence?

It’s really very simple. So simple, honestly, that I don’t understand why it’s hard to get across to people:

Nonviolence means you don’t initiate bodily harm against other human beings.

It does not necessarily preclude self-defense, so long as that self-defense is reasonable and proportionate; and it certainly does not in any way preclude breaking laws, damaging property, or disrupting civil order.


Nonviolence means you never throw the first punch.

Nonviolence is not simply a moral position, but a strategic one.

Some of the people you would be harming absolutely deserve it. I don’t believe in ACAB, but I do believe in SCAB, and nearly 30% of police officers are domestic abusers, who absolutely would deserve a good punch to the face. And this is all the more true of ICE officers, who aren’t just regular bastards; they are bastards whose core job is now enforcing the human rights violations of President Donald Trump. Kidnapping people with their unmarked uniforms and unmarked vehicles, ICE is basically the Gestapo.

But it’s still strategically very unwise for us to deploy violence. Why? Two reasons:

  1. Using violence is a sure-fire way to turn most Americans against our cause.
  2. We would probably lose.

Nonviolent protest is nearly twice as effective as violent insurrection. (If you take nothing else from this post, please take that.)

And the reason that nonviolent protest is so effective is that it changes minds.

Violence doesn’t do that; in fact, it tends to make people rally against you. Once you start killing people, even people who were on your side may start to oppose you—let alone anyone who was previously on the fence.

A successful violent revolution results in you having to build a government and enforce your own new laws against a population that largely still disagrees with you—and if you’re a revolution made of ACAB people, that sounds spectacularly difficult!

A successful nonviolent protest movement results in a country that agrees with you—and it’s extremely hard for even a very authoritarian regime to hang onto power when most of the people oppose it.

By contrast, the success rate of violent insurrections is not very high. Why?

Because they have all the guns, you idiot.

States try to maintain a monopoly on violence in their territory. They are usually pretty effective at doing so. Thus attacking a state when you are not a state puts you at a tremendous disadvantage.

Seriously; we are talking about the United States of America right now, the most powerful military hegemon the world has ever seen.

Maybe the people advocating violence don’t really understand this, but the US has not lost a major battle since 1945. Oh, yes, they’ve “lost wars”, but what that really means is that public opinion has swayed too far against the war for them to maintain morale (Vietnam) or their goals for state-building were so over-ambitious that they were basically impossible for anyone to achieve (Iraq and Afghanistan). If you tally up the actual number of soldiers killed, US troops always kill more than they lose, and typically by a very wide margin.


And even with the battles the US lost in WW1 and WW2, they still very much won the actual wars. So genuinely defeating the United States in open military conflict is not something that has happened since… I’m pretty sure the War of 1812.

Basically, advocating for a violent response to Trump is saying that you intend to do something that literally no one in the world—including major world military powers—has been able to accomplish in 200 years. The last time someone got close, the US nuked them.

If the protests in LA were genuinely the insurrectionists that Trump has been trying to characterize them as, those Marines would not only have been deployed, they would have started shooting. And I don’t know if you realize this, but US Marines are really good at shooting. It’s kind of their thing. Instead of skirmishes with rubber bullets and tear gas, we would have an absolute bloodbath. It would probably end up looking like the Tet Offensive, a battle where “unprepared” US forces “lost” because they lost 6,000 soldiers and “only” killed 45,000 in return. (The US military is so hegemonic that a kill ratio of more than 7 to 1 is considered a “loss” in the media and public opinion.)

Granted, winning a civil war is different from winning a conventional war; even if a civil war broke out, it’s unlikely that nukes would be used on American soil, for instance. But you’re still talking about a battle so uphill it’s more like trying to besiege Edinburgh Castle.

Our best hope in such a scenario, in fact, would probably be to get blue-state governments to assert control over US military forces in their own jurisdiction—which means that antagonizing Gavin Newsom, as I’ve been seeing quite a few leftists doing lately, seems like a really bad idea.

I’m not saying that winning a civil war would be completely impossible. Since we might be able to get blue-state governors to take control of forces in their own states and we would probably get support from Canada, France, and the United Kingdom, it wouldn’t be completely hopeless. But it would be extremely costly, millions of people would die, and victory would by no means be assured despite the overwhelming righteousness of our cause.

How about, for now at least, we stick to the methods that historically have proven twice as effective?

Age, ambition, and social comparison

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Jul 2 JDN 2460128

The day I turned 35 years old was one of the worst days of my life, as I wrote about at the time. I think the only times I have felt more depressed than that day were when my father died, when I was hospitalized by an allergic reaction to lamotrigine, and when I was rejected after interviewing for jobs at GiveWell and Wizards of the Coast.

This is notable because… nothing particularly bad happened to me on my 35th birthday. It was basically an ordinary day for me. I felt horrible simply because I was turning 35 and hadn’t accomplished so many of the things I thought I would have by that point in my life. I felt my dreams shattering as the clock ticked away what chance I thought I’d have at achieving my life’s ambitions.

I am slowly coming to realize just how pathological that attitude truly is. It was ingrained in me very deeply from the very youngest age, not least because I was such a gifted child.

While studying quantum physics in college, I was warned that great physicists do all their best work before they are 30 (some even said 25). Einstein himself said as much (so it must be true, right?). It turns out that was simply untrue. It may have been largely true in the 18th and 19th centuries, and seems to have seen some resurgence during the early years of quantum theory, but today the median age at which a Nobel laureate physicist did their prize-winning work is 48. Less than 20% of eminent scientists made their great discoveries before the age of 40.

Alexander Fleming was 47 when he discovered penicillin—just about average for an eminent scientist of today. Darwin was 22 when he set sail on the Beagle, but didn’t publish On the Origin of Species until he was 50. Andre-Marie Ampere started his work in electromagnetism in his forties.

In creative arts, age seems to be no barrier at all. Julia Child published her first cookbook at 50. Stan Lee sold his first successful Marvel comic at 40. Toni Morrison was 39 when she published her first novel, and 62 when she won her Nobel. Peter Mark Roget was 73 when he published his famous thesaurus. Tolkein didn’t publish The Hobbit until he was 45.

Alan Rickman didn’t start drama school until he was 26 and didn’t have a major Hollywood role until he was 42. Samuel L. Jackson is now the third-highest-grossing actor of all time (mostly because of the Avengers movies), but he didn’t have any major movie roles until his forties. Anna Moses didn’t start painting until she was 78.

We think of entrepreneurship as a young man’s game, but Ray Kroc didn’t buy McDonalds until he was 59. Harland Sanders didn’t franchise KFC until he was 62. Eric Yuan wasn’t a vice president until the age of 37 and didn’t become a billionaire until Zoom took off in 2019—he was 49. Sam Walton didn’t found Walmart until he was 44.

Great humanitarian achievements actually seem to be more likely later in life: Gandhi did not see India achieve independence until he was 78. Nelson Mandela was 76 when he became President of South Africa.

It has taken me far too long to realize this, and in fact I don’t think I have yet fully internalized it: Life is not a race. You do not “fall behind” when others achieve things younger than you did. In fact, most child prodigies grow up no more successful as adults than children who were merely gifted or even above-average. (There is another common belief that prodigies grow up miserable and stunted; that, fortunately, isn’t true either.)

Then there is queer time—the fact that, in a hostile heteronormative world, queer people often find ourselves growing up in a very different way than straight people—and crip time—the ways that coping with a disability changes your relationship with time and often forces you to manage your time in ways that others don’t. As someone who came out fairly young and is now married, queer time doesn’t seem to have affected me all that much. But I feel crip time very acutely: I have to very carefully manage when I go to bed and when I wake up, every single day, making sure I get not only enough sleep—much more sleep than most people get or most employers respect—but also that it aligns properly with my circadian rhythm. Failure to do so risks triggering severe, agonizing pain. Factoring that in, I have lost at least a few years of my life to migraines and depression, and will probably lose several more in the future.

But more importantly, we all need to learn to stop measuring ourselves against other people’s timelines. There is no prize in life for being faster. And while there are prizes for particular accomplishments (Oscars, Nobels, and so on), much of what determines whether you win such prizes is entirely beyond your control. Even people who ultimately made eminent contributions to society didn’t know in advance that they were going to, and didn’t behave all that much differently from others who tried but failed.

I do not want to make this sound easy. It is incredibly hard. I believe that I personally am especially terrible at it. Our society seems to be optimized to make us compare ourselves to others in as many ways as possible as often as possible in as biased a manner as possible.

Capitalism has many important upsides, but one of its deepest flaws is that it makes our standard of living directly dependent on what is happening in the rest of a global market we can neither understand nor control. A subsistence farmer is subject to the whims of nature; but in a supermarket, you are subject to the whims of an entire global economy.

And there is reason to think that the harm of social comparison is getting worse rather than better. If some mad villain set out to devise a system that would maximize harmful social comparison and the emotional damage it causes, he would most likely create something resembling social media.

The villain might also tack on some TV news for good measure: Here are some random terrifying events, which we’ll make it sound like could hit you at any moment (even though their actual risk is declining); then our ‘good news’ will be a litany of amazing accomplishments, far beyond anything you could reasonably hope for, which have been achieved by a cherry-picked sample of unimaginably fortunate people you have never met (yet you somehow still form parasocial bonds with because we keep showing them to you). We will make a point not to talk about the actual problems in the world (such as inequality and climate change), certainly not in any way you might be able to constructively learn from; nor will we mention any actual good news which might be relevant to an ordinary person such as yourself (such as economic growth, improved health, or reduced poverty). We will focus entirely on rare, extreme events that by construction aren’t likely to ever happen to you and are not relevant to how you should live your life.

I do not have some simple formula I can give you that will make social comparison disappear. I do not know how to shake the decades of indoctrination into a societal milieu that prizes richer and faster over all other concepts of worth. But perhaps at least recognizing the problem will weaken its power over us.

Alien invasions: Could they happen, and could we survive?

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July 30, JDN 2457600

alien-invasion

It’s not actually the top-grossing film in the US right now (that would be The Secret Life of Pets), but Independence Day: Resurgence made a quite respectable gross of $343 million worldwide, giving it an ROI of 108% over its budget of $165 million. It speaks to something deep in our minds—and since most of the money came from outside the US, apparently not just Americans, though it is a deeply American film—about the fear, but perhaps also the excitement, of a possible alien invasion.

So, how likely are alien invasions anyway?

Well, first of all, how likely are aliens?

One of the great mysteries of astronomy is the Fermi Paradox: Everything we know about astronomy, biology, and probability tells us that there should be, somewhere out in the cosmos, a multitude of extraterrestrial species, and some of them should even be intelligent enough to form civilizations and invent technology. So why haven’t we found any clear evidence of any of them?

Indeed, the Fermi Paradox became even more baffling in just the last two years, as we found literally thousands of new extrasolar planets, many of them quite likely to be habitable. More extrasolar planets have been found since 2014 than in all previous years of human civilization. Perhaps this is less surprising when we remember that no extrasolar planets had ever been confirmed before 1992—but personally I think that just makes it this much more amazing that we are lucky enough to live in such a golden age of astronomy.

The Drake equation was supposed to tell us how probable it is that we should encounter an alien civilization, but the equation isn’t much use to us because so many of its terms are so wildly uncertain. Maybe we can pin down how many planets there are soon, but we still don’t know what proportion of planets can support life, what proportion of those actually have life, or above all what proportion of ecosystems ever manage to evolve a technological civilization or how long such a civilization is likely to last. All possibilities from “they’re everywhere but we just don’t notice or they actively hide from us” to “we are actually the only ones in the last million years” remain on the table.

But let’s suppose that aliens do exist, and indeed have technology sufficient to reach our solar system. Faster-than-light capability would certainly do it, but it isn’t strictly necessary; with long lifespans, cryonic hibernation, or relativistic propulsion aliens could reasonably expect to travel at least between nearby stars within their lifetimes. The Independence Day aliens appear to have FTL travel, but interestingly it makes the most sense if they do not have FTL communication—it took them 20 years to get the distress call because it was sent at lightspeed. (Or perhaps the ansible was damaged in the war, and they fell back to a lightspeed emergency system?) Otherwise I don’t quite get why it would take the Queen 20 years to deploy her personal battlecruiser after the expeditionary force she sent was destroyed—maybe she was just too busy elsewhere to bother with our backwater planet? What did she want from our planet again?

That brings me to my next point: Just what motivation would aliens have for attacking us? We often take it for granted that if aliens exist, and have the capability to attack us, they would do so. But that really doesn’t make much sense. Do they just enjoy bombarding primitive planets? I guess it’s possible they’re all sadistic psychopaths, but it seems like any civilization stable enough to invent interstellar travel has got to have some kind of ethical norms. Maybe they see us as savages or even animals, and are therefore willing to kill us—but that still means they need a reason.

Another idea, taken seriously in V and less so in Cowboys & Aliens, is that there is some sort of resource we have that they want, and they’re willing to kill us to get it. This is probably such a common trope because it has been a common part of human existence; we are very familiar with people killing other people in order to secure natural resources such as gold, spices, or oil. (Indeed, to some extent it continues to this day.)

But this actually doesn’t make a lot of sense on an interstellar scale. Certainly water (V) and gold (Cowboys & Aliens) are not things they would have even the slightest reason to try to claim from an inhabited planet, as comets are a better source of water and asteroids are a better source of gold. Indeed, almost nothing inorganic could really be cost-effective to obtain from an inhabited planet; far easier to just grab it from somewhere that won’t fight back, and may even have richer veins and lower gravity.

It’s possible they would want something organic—lumber or spices, I guess. But I’m not sure why they’d want those things, and it seems kind of baffling that they wouldn’t just trade if they really want them. I’m sure we’d gladly give up a great deal of oregano and white pine in exchange for nanotechnology and FTL. I guess I could see this happening because they assume we’re too stupid to be worth trading with, or they can’t establish reliable means of communication. But one of the reasons why globalization has succeeded where colonialism failed is that trade is a lot more efficient than theft, and I find it unlikely that aliens this advanced would have failed to learn that lesson.

Media that imagines they’d enslave us makes even less sense; slavery is wildly inefficient, and they probably have such ludicrously high productivity that they are already coping with a massive labor glut. (I suppose maybe they send off unemployed youths to go conquer random planets just to give them something to do with their time? Helps with overpopulation too.)

I actually thought Independence Day: Resurgence did a fairlygood job of finding a resource that is scarce enough to be worth fighting over while also not being something we would willingly trade. Spoiler alert, I suppose:

Molten cores. Now, I haven’t the foggiest what one does with molten planet cores that somehow justifies the expenditure of all that energy flying between solar systems and digging halfway through planets with gigantic plasma drills, but hey, maybe they are actually tremendously useful somehow. They certainly do contain huge amounts of energy, provided you can extract it efficiently. Moreover, they are scarce; of planets we know about, most of them do not have molten cores. Earth, Venus, and Mercury do, and we think Mars once did; but none of the gas giants do, and even if they did, it’s quite plausible that the Queen’s planet-cracker drill just can’t drill that far down. Venus sounds like a nightmare to drill, so really the only planet I’d expect them to extract before Earth would be Mercury. And maybe they figured they needed both cores to justify the trip, in which case it would make sense to hit the inhabited planet first so we don’t have time to react and prepare our defenses. (I can’t imagine we’d take giant alien ships showing up and draining Mercury’s core lying down.) I’m imagining the alien economist right now, working out the cost-benefit analysis of dealing with Venus’s superheated atmosphere and sulfuric acid clouds compared to the cost of winning a war against primitive indigenous apes with nuclear missiles: Well, doubling our shield capacity is cheaper than covering the whole ship in sufficient anticorrosive, so I guess we’ll go hit the ape planet. (They established in the first film that their shields can withstand direct hits from nukes—the aliens came prepared.)

So, maybe killing us for our resources isn’t completely out of the question, but it seems unlikely.

Another possibility is religious fanaticism: Every human culture has religion in some form, so why shouldn’t the aliens? And if they do, it’s likely radically different from anything we believe. If they become convinced that our beliefs are not simply a minor nuisance but an active threat to the holy purity of the galaxy, they could come to our system on a mission to convert or destroy at any cost; and since “convert” seems very unlikely, “destroy” would probably become their objective pretty quickly. It wouldn’t have to make sense in terms of a cost-benefit analysis—fanaticism doesn’t have to make sense at all. The good news here is that any culture fanatical enough to randomly attack other planets simply for believing differently from them probably won’t be cohesive enough to reach that level of technology. (Then again, we somehow managed a world with both ISIS and ICBMs.)

Personally I think there is a far more likely scenario for alien invasions, and that is benevolent imperialism.

Why do I specify “benevolent”? Because if they aren’t interested in helping us, there’s really no reason for them to bother with us in the first place. But if their goal is to uplift our civilization, the only way they can do that is by interacting with us.

Now, note that I use the word “benevolent”, not the word “beneficent”. I think they would have to desire to make our lives better—but I’m not so convinced they actually would make our lives better. In our own history, human imperialism was rarely benevolent in the first place, but even where it was, it was even more rarely actually beneficent. Their culture would most likely be radically different from our own, and what they think of as improvements might seem to us strange, pointless, or even actively detrimental. But don’t you see that the QLX coefficient is maximized if you convert all your mountains into selenium extractors? (This is probably more or less how Native Americans felt when Europeans started despoiling their land for things called “coal” and “money”.) They might even try to alter us biologically to be more similar to them: But haven’t you always wanted tentacles? Hands are so inefficient!

Moreover, even if their intentions were good and their methods of achieving them were sound, it’s still quite likely that we would violently resist. I don’t know if humans are a uniquely rebellious species—let’s hope not, lest the aliens be shocked into overreacting when we rebel—but in general humans do not like being ruled over and forced to do things, even when those rulers are benevolent and the things they are forced to do are worth doing.

So, I think the most likely scenario for a war between humans and aliens is that they come in and start trying to radically reorganize our society, and either because their demands actually are unreasonable, or at least because we think they are, we rebel against their control.

Then what? Could we actually survive?

The good news is: Yes, we probably could.

If aliens really did come down trying to extract our molten core or something, the movies are all wrong: We’d have basically no hope. It really makes no sense at all that we could win a full-scale conflict with a technologically superior species if they were willing to exterminate us. Indeed, if what they were after didn’t depend upon preserving local ecology, their most likely mode of attack is to arrive in the system and immediately glass the planet. Nuclear weapons are already available to us for that task; if they’re more advanced they might have antimatter bombs, relativistic kinetic warheads, or even something more powerful still. We might be all dead before we even realized what was happening, or they might destroy 90% of us right away and mop up the survivors later with little difficulty.

If they wanted something that required ecological stability (I shall henceforth dub this the “oregano scenario”), yet weren’t willing to trade for some reason, then they wouldn’t unleash full devastation, and we’d have the life-dinner principle on our side: The hare runs for his life, but the fox only runs for her dinner. So if the aliens are trying to destroy us to get our delicious spices, we have a certain advantage from the fact that we are willing to win at essentially any cost, while at some point that alien economist is going to run the numbers and say, “This isn’t cost-effective. Let’s cut our losses and hit another system instead.”

If they wanted to convert us to their religion, well, we’d better hope enough people convert, because otherwise they’re going to revert to, you guessed it, glass the planet. At least this means they would probably at least try to communicate first, so we’d have some time to prepare; but it’s unlikely that even if their missionaries spent decades trying to convert us we could seriously reduce our disadvantage in military technology during that time. So really, our best bet is to adopt the alien religion. I guess what I’m really trying to say here is “All Hail Xemu.”

But in the most likely scenario that their goal is actually to make our lives better, or at least better as they see it, they will not be willing to utilize their full military capability against us. They might use some lethal force, especially if they haven’t found reliable means of nonlethal force on sufficient scale; but they aren’t going to try to slaughter us outright. Maybe they kill a few dissenters to set an example, or fire into a crowd to disperse a riot. But they are unlikely to level a city, and they certainly wouldn’t glass the entire planet.

Our best bet would probably actually be nonviolent resistance, as this has a much better track record against benevolent imperialism. Gandhi probably couldn’t have won a war against Britain, but he achieved India’s independence because he was smart enough to fight on the front of public opinion. Likewise, even with one tentacle tied behind their backs by their benevolence, the aliens would still probably be able to win any full-scale direct conflict; but if our nonviolent resistance grew strong enough, they might finally take the hint and realize we don’t want their so-called “help”.

So, how about someone makes that movie? Aliens come to our planet, not to kill us, but to change us, make us “better” according to their standards. QLX coefficients are maximized, and an intrepid few even get their tentacles installed. But the Resistance arises, and splits into two factions: One tries to use violence, and is rapidly crushed by overwhelming firepower, while the other uses nonviolent resistance. Ultimately the Resistance grows strong enough to overthrow the alien provisional government, and they decide to cut their losses and leave our planet. Then, decades later, we go back to normal, and wonder if we made the right decision, or if maybe QLX coefficients really were the most important thing after all.

[The image is released under a CC0 copyleft from Pixabay.]