Inter-Species Conflict Quotes

About the only things that are unique to Earth are our biota and our culture. If aliens ever come here, they'd most likely be either biologists or music fans. Neither one has much reason to antagonize our armed forces.

Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.

With the exception of certain rodents, no other vertebrate except Homo sapiens habitually destroys members of his own species.

I think [contacting an alien civilization] would be a disaster. The extraterrestrials would probably be far in advance of us. The history of advanced races meeting more primitive people on this planet is not very happy, and they were the same species. I think we should keep our heads low.

In the whole vast dome of living nature there reigns an open violence, a kind of prescriptive fury which arms all the creatures to their common doom: as soon as you leave the inanimate kingdom you find the decree of violent death inscribed on the very frontiers of life.

Evolutionary science kind of bears that out: When species are rivals and competing for space and resources, the superior one wins. Nature has no compunction about that; it just is.

But who does hawk at eagles with a dove?

I recommend you stick to your own species, Shy Babe." p. 155

Wars, invented and organized by the highest available consciousnesses (do the worms go to war? do the fish? do the paramecia?), are the planet's chief source and cause of torment.

In truth, I do not recollect in all the animal kingdom a single species but man which is eternally and systematically engaged in the destruction of its own species.

In every other science fiction series, humans are at the top of the food chain. In the 'Babylon 5' universe, they're in the bottom third.