This man should not be placed in charge of earths defence

[Shadowcatbot]

That story is beautiful. I can imagine the humans taking the aliens out to a massive shipyard with a number of new human warships under construction to send a message of "Observe puny mortals, your pathetic galactic empire will fall under our superiorness!".

[Archduke Daynel, PhD]

Well, let's look on the bright side; unless the aliens fire first, we'd take over their planets peacefully and treat them as equals.

[Shadowcatbot]

Hahahahahaha. Just like we treated Native Indians, Blacks and Incas when the British and Spanish showed up? I doubt the French are going to be in space conquering planets anytime soon and even then they were way too slow in surendering building colonies.

[Archduke Daynel, PhD]

We're better now, if you ask anyone you know that we all agree we treated the people of the new world quite bad. Why did we treat them bad in the first way? Because we were undereducated and believed them to be inferior life forms.

[Error]

But see, humans learn from our mistakes.

Besides, if they don't surrender from fear/awe, obviously our ships need more guns. So we either a) gain a vassal or b) learn something. Win-win!

[Tau]

Did some research, turns out The Road Not Taken was actually a prequel to another of his stories, Herbig-Haro.

[Shadowcatbot]

* Human Confederacy. Most advanced tech in the galaxy and you manage to fall for the simplist mistake in the book. Making your empire too big to handle.