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Rain comments on The Aliens have Landed! - Less Wrong
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Doubtful. It's likely that losing 90% of earth's population would result in collapse of the world's cultural and economic institutions, including nation states, resulting in a very different test. Maybe if they had clone-farms and produced physical humans to torture offworld?
Which brings to mind we should expend effort on "rescue" attempts, such as hacking the little spheres or stopping the aliens through other means.
It's also likely that an advanced alien species with an interest in getting rid of humans would do it by creating some nasty nanotech or redirecting a few asteroids, rather than going through this elaborate and unreliable blackmail scenario. It's not a dilemma if you parse out all the practical considerations, so don't.
Suspension of disbelief is important for what-if scenarios. I find little black spheres to be weirdly possible given a particular world-state ("crazy aliens"); thinking of 90% of humans being kidnapped evokes a very different possibility-view of the result. I can't stop thinking about post-apocalypse movies in the latter case.