Ideas that really suck

I’m reading Eye, a collection of SF short stories by Frank Herbert, which came out in the year before he died. There’s one in which beings from some galactic civilization land on Earth and deliver an ‘or else’. Which left me thinking: like some galactic civilization would be aware of what’s happening on a planet of an insignificant star in one of the spiral arms. And like that civilization would regard humanity as any sort of threat or worthy of membership.