V - not for Vendetta

Watched this new show called V, well not new because it's a remake of an older show with the same name. It's really cool. Anyway, i'm not going to focus too much one what's happening on the show, what happened, who died, who're the actors/actresses, the plot-twists. What got me thinking though is the basic idea of the show, that is an alien life form suddenly appeared in a planet and they would like to be friends and setup 'diplomatic relations' with the home planet.

Let's twist this around a little bit and imagine, imagine yourself the leader of Earth's own spaceship that now has the capability of travelling across the vast galaxy, your mission is to lead your crew and find another planet that has a lifeform on it and 'get friendly' with them as soon as possible. How would you go about in achieving this? Considering that you and your ship suddenly appeared out of the blue, how would you think the aliens (well we are the aliens on that planet, so let's refer to them from now on as Citizens) feel, won't they feel somewhere along the line WTF? Don't you think the Citizens would be scared, curious, untrusting, cautious among other things all at the same time.

Let's not go overboard and imagine all the different scenarios that could happen, especially the evil twisted ones that always happen in a show/movie. Think with the assumption that we don't have any ulterior motives whether it's because Earth is so overcrowded that we're seeking a new habitable planet to live in that's similar to Earth or our resources are depleted or inter-galaxy conquest, none of that! We're just making friends.

This has all happened before on Earth, an example would be the United States' gunboat diplomacy on Japan during 1850s when they're demanding Japan to open up their country to western trade and diplomatic relations (at that time Japan's policy of isolationism has been going on for 200 years). But since we're trying to setup a peaceful diplomatic relations with the Citizens as quickly as possible, such threatening gestures and tactics would bring about the wrong idea. So again how would you gain the trust of the citizens that we're all merely trying to be friends and nothing more?

That's all for now. Goodbye~~

For more info on V: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_(2009_TV_series)
and on Japan's isolationism's end: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakumatsu