1000 years is the blink of an eye compared to the lifetime of our galaxy or the amount of time it took life to evolve intelligence on Earth. There's no good reason to expect that humanity's age will be within 1000 years of an alien race's. Consider how little chance an army behind 1000 years technologically would stand against a modern army.
Computer strategy games (I'm specifically thinking of Master of Orion and Galactic Civilizations) often make the assumption that all the races that are going to come into contact with each other have the same technological starting point. This is for the good and simple reason of game balance: Nobody would want to play the game if one race started with a game-winningly huge technological advantage due to random luck.
Many other games and science fiction settings make a similar assumption: That alien and Terran technology are on roughly equal footing, because a situation where everyone has a fighting chance simply makes a better narrative.
It's absurd anyway. Advanced tech will(and already has, to an extent) put extremely destructive power in the hands of normal people. If we haven't learned to get along by then, we will certainly kill ourselves off.
> [With] Advanced tech...we will certainly kill ourselves off.
If the normal developmental pattern of technologically advanced races is T ~ a few thousands of years of continuous population increases due to technology [1], followed by a technology-caused extinction, it would neatly explain why we haven't met any aliens: Since T is a drop in a bucket compared to the time required for evolving intelligence, with high probability all the aliens close enough to us to send signals or spaceships gained intelligence more than T years ago, and have already killed themselves.
[1] The exact timing of the beginning of our technological development depends much on how you define "technological development." But it's fairly safe to say that T < 1 million years.
It takes two to tango, so to speak. No matter how peaceable we are as a race, if the other guy has bigger weapons and is itching to use them, it might not make any difference.
Theoretically, it isn't possible to stop an advanced alien race that has mastered ftl travel from being able to destroy earth. There is this concept called relativistic bombardment - your "artillary" is set to travel so fast, that the light that comes off it only arrives moments before the actual shell, and thus, there is little to no warning. The only way to stop this sort of attack is a shield that is impenatrable. However, such a thing cannot exist, since the attacker has all the time they need to devise a shell that can penetrate the specific shield you intend to use.
Hence, the only safety you can guarentee is if you know your enemy don't know where you are, and thus can't aim the weapon. Otherwise, its impossible to stop an attack.
Now, conversely, humans knows this too, so it makes rational sense to attack first. Its MAD on a galactic scale!
If my (admittedly rough) understanding of relativity is correct, there's a problem with this weapon: From the recipient's perspective, the shell would never arrive.
Basically, as the shell accelerates to C relative to the target, time in the target's reference frame expands relative to time in the shell's reference frame. A shell traveling at C would instantaneously travel from origin to destination (from the shell's perspective) but would take infinite time (from the target's perspective).
Of course, an impact at 1% C would still make one hell of a bang.
> would take infinite time (from the target's perspective).
this doesn't sound right - the shell does arrive, and arrives exactly X light years after being launched, as measured by the alien. Its just that from the perspective of the people in the shell, heaps of time has passed on the outside.
But my knowledge of relativity is cursory at best, so im not sure if i m right.
Computer strategy games (I'm specifically thinking of Master of Orion and Galactic Civilizations) often make the assumption that all the races that are going to come into contact with each other have the same technological starting point. This is for the good and simple reason of game balance: Nobody would want to play the game if one race started with a game-winningly huge technological advantage due to random luck.
Many other games and science fiction settings make a similar assumption: That alien and Terran technology are on roughly equal footing, because a situation where everyone has a fighting chance simply makes a better narrative.