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189 acquired in the last few thousand years, which is a brief time on a cosmic time scale. Under such conditions, one might expect some of the alien visitors to be extremely well educated. Their thinking may be very convoluted with regard to us, however. It may be that they have stood back and said that while many of us have the potential for good and are presumably educable, our leaders leave a great deal to be desired. We (the aliens) got here in the 1940s because we detected growing technology. They (humans) had managed to kill forty million of their own in a great war, and destroyed much of their, own planet. The next thing they did, rather than figure out how to live at peace with each other, was to develop competing groups with new weapons of great destructive capabilities and then let "great leaders" kill millions more of their own in their "enlightened self-interest." This (Earth) is a society in serious trouble, as it seems to have developed mostly along the line of devising ever more efficient ways of killing its own. Do we want them to move out into space, or should they be kept on Earth? In view of their own attitude toward life, they surely can't object to our doing a few biological experiments on them. We may have borrowed a few thousand of them, while they allow tens of thousands of children to die every day from preventable disease and starvation. How can they complain about what we do? Some of them insist we are cruel and "inhuman," yet they slaughter millions of animals every year for food and sport. Another possibility is that the aliens are here for economic reasons that are entirely different from wanting valuable bio- logical material. Earth is the densest planet in the solar sys- tem, containing very dense metals such as the little-known osmium and rhenium, along with platinum, uranium, and gold, some of which have very peculiar characteristics. Many of them have high melting points, high strength at high tem- peratures, and are very resistant to corrosion. Perhaps more important, they are quite rare in the universe, as we know from studying the spectra of stars. Earth is therefore likely to have greater deposits of these IMPLICATIONS