An emotion is anger, whereas aggression is a phenomenon, and one that occurs naturally as a response to a threat or as a drive toward expansion, a basic tool of survival. Research on chimpanzees in Tanzania’s national park, conducted since 1974, has documented a correlation between increasing intelligence (hierarchy within the group, group cohesion, and coordination of the actions of individual animals) and aggressiveness (a drive toward expansion, an increased propensity for violence, and more frequent instances of unjustified cruelty). But we aren’t animals, and this framework doesn’t apply to us, right? In fact, that is an outdated humanist myth easily shattered by the facts. Humans regard expansion or cruelty toward RATIONAL beings as aggression, and we can attach the label of rationality to hypothetical aliens or Homo sapiens, but not to animals we keep in enclosures for food. And who can guarantee that rational aliens (rational in their own eyes) would not regard us as the same sort of underdeveloped animals, useful only for a tuft of wool? Rationality does not imply mercy toward life forms that lag behind in development at all. Quite the contrary, it can give rise to a drive toward expansion and absorption, in one form or another. And the claim that aggression is limited (to only one option, seriously?) does not withstand scrutiny either. Exploitation, destruction, transformation into some other life form, consumption for sustenance: there are plenty of possibilities, which humans, incidentally, have devised and actively employ toward other living beings that we do not consider rational. So it would be more accurate to rephrase the question in the top comment as: “Do the advanced civilizations of the galaxy intend to interfere with the natural course of development of our particular planet?” Of course, taking all of this together, one could then fall into some form of nihilism and say that humans are not rational (as a civilization and/or as a species), and that the only rational form of life would be one that completely renounces violence (because violence is irrational!). But that would already be a substitution of concepts. Aggression is an evolutionary key, not a sign of irrationality.
