Waste of space resources

 Morpok thought it was a waste of time, not that his team would listen to him. Come this far across the Universe to unravel its mysteries and understand the inner workings, and then get about to wasting thousands of years in travel, and almost a third of their reserve energy in rerouting and weapons usage. Truth be told, their weapons systems weren't designed for confrontation, they were extremely inefficient, and not particularly accurate or clever. The idea was, if you encounter something that seems dangerous, and that is as unlikely as it would get, you completely annihilate it, turn it into plasma and space dust, and move on. It was a brutish tool, but the designers had made it so that the crew would consider the matter a thousand times before deciding to use it. Besides, nobody seriously thought there was anything else out there besides space dust or interesting patterns arising by chance through combination of novel molecules.

It had been clear from the signals that this was not a natural event, whatever that might mean. Everything is natural, Morpok would mutter under his breath during the meetings every time somebody mentioned detecting signals of unnatural origin. It appeared that another form of intelligence quite far away was leaking a lot of radiation, suggesting they were quickly reaching great technological advances. The rate at which the radiation leak was being reduced suggested that their technological growth was accelerating, and they were probably not less intelligent, if at all, than Morpok's own people.

But they were far away, very far. They'd never be able to reach Morpok's convoy, not in a billion years with their level of advancement. That didn't bother the security crew though, they thought the very existence of such advanced civilization at such proximity was a threat that needed to be dealt with. Which was a transparent code for total annihilation.

Fellows, Morpok began weakly one more time, if we are to ignore the interlopers, who I will remind you once again have no physically possible way to reach to us, or maybe even identify our existence this side of the galaxy, we will be able to lengthen our trip by a significant percentage. It is clear to me that they pose no threat of any kind. Why then, he asked in a resigned tone, are we doing this?