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188 words, our planet may be an area in dispute among several different groups of aliens. There is also the possibility that this was a prison colony, sort of a quarantine location, where they could dump undesirables and give them a chance at making it or failing. Ta ene nee Ine Le the thw nnn foe It may also be that the reason for aliens coming here is purely economic. What do we have that might interest aliens? One thing might be biological material. It could be the DNA that belongs to people and of which we have many variations on the human theme—incredible variations of defects, strengths, weaknesses. And there is also plant and animal DNA, genetic structural material. We have an undifferentiated biological population with, for example, ten thousand varieties of sorghum. Whatever characteristics you want, there are prob- ably a few seeds with those characteristics. The same holds for fish and mammals, many species and varieties of which have been around for a very long time. If, in the alien society, they have learned to control reproduction under laboratory condi- tions for people, animals, and plants, it may be that a new disease has arisen. It may be that they need certain charac- teristics because they want to explore places where their own biological make-up is inappropriate. One can imagine innu- merable combinations of their genes and ours that might fit their specialized needs. We don't know. It seems likely that any really advanced technological civili- zation will have studied biology as well as technology and may have learned the "secrets" of aging. That may have led them to a path around the aging problem. In other words, if there are certain biological clocks that need to be reset, if there are certain stimuli that are negative, these may have been placed under control so that an advanced civilization able to move between stars lives longer than we do. Now, suppose aliens are the equivalent of three hundred human years old, have been taught using ultra-advanced com- puters, and have access to information developed by many different civilizations over a long period of time. This is very different from our situation—where all our knowledge was CRASH AT CORONA