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How Do You Greet an Extraterrestrial?
The LA Times is running a story about Earth Speaks, a companion project to SETI, which focuses on how we would communicate with intelligent extraterrestrial life, should we happen to discover it. Far more effort has been devoted to searching for signals or a means to communicate than the question of what we might say once contact is established, and the folks at SETI have set up a website to gather opinions on what the best questions and statements are. "So far, the messages break down into a few distinct categories. Some people want to throw a block party to welcome the aliens to the neighborhood. Others, less trusting, would warn the aliens that we've got guns and know how to use them. Another group, possibly influenced by having seen too many movies, would have us hide under the bed until they go away. 'If we discover intelligent life beyond Earth, we should not reply — we should freeze and play dead,' wrote one contributor." What would you say first to an alien?
...do you actually have any green women in bikinis?
> We should definitely show them that we are rational, well behaved lifeforms, with broad interests and predictable interaction
You think we should lie to them, right off the bat?
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
That assumption is that for communication, sharing intelligence is more important than sharing genetics.
Freeze and play dead? Someone really should have thought of that _before_ we started broadcasting radio and TV and a planet-wide basis. Those waves really don't stop when they hit the outer atmosphere you know... By now we should be fairly well-known in our galactic neighbourhood.
As for talking about our guns, whoever shows up here has already demonstrated massively superior technology to ours (we are not showing up on _their_ doorstep are we?) so antagonizing them might not be such a great idea either.
So yeah, by all means let's throw a party and hope it isn't us that ends up on the barbecue...
So we've got guns. I wonder how intimidated a civilization that has the technology to traverse light-years through space would be of our bullets and bombs. If they wished to annihilate us, I wager they'd be able to do it without even giving us a chance to react. If an alien race should contact Earth, I think our best bet would be to at least assume that they have peaceful intentions.
^ What he said ^
Seriously, people. Whoever it was from TFA who suggested "we've got guns and know how to use them" as a response was clueless.
If an extraterrestrial species is remotely close to human beings technologically, then there is no way for them to reach us anymore than we can reach them. Interstellar space is a wonderfully effective buffer. If we're communicating with a neighbouring species via radio, with no chance of visitation, then we needn't worry about hostilities. Try to imagine fighting a war between North America and Australia without ships, missiles or aircraft. And that analogy vastly understates the distances involved.
If they can reach us, and we can't reach them, then threats or hostility is a non-starter. Any spacecraft capable of crossing the gulf between stars is very likely so far ahead of us that we'd be unable to scratch the finish. And any craft able to cross that distance at a significant fraction of the speed of light is, by definition, able to render this entire planet sterile by way of a RKV. Think muskets vs. nukes here.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
Why assume that if they find us, they must have sci-fi movie technology? Isn't it more likely, that they'd find us through their equivalent of a SETI project, or perhaps by saying "Hey, that planet over there looks like it might have some water on it. Maybe there's life there."
In which case, we might find ourselves receiving a weak signal from them many years later, and perhaps an un-manned (un-aliened?) probe many years after that.
No matter who finds who, it's likely that it'll take many years just to let the other know they've been found. Distances measured in light-years suck like that.
A little scientific knowledge doesn't occupy a lot of mass. For all we know, it might need nothing more than a captured human to extrapolate from, and then seed the planet from orbit with germ weapons.
But it might not need to resort to direct weapons. It would, in a knowledge-based economy, be staggeringly wealthy. And humans have demonstrated themselves woefully subject to greed and credulity. It could side with one faction on Earth and have willing allies. Or it could behave as in the film "The Man Who Fell to Earth" where the alien in disguise establishes some basic patents and proceeds to build a massive business empire from there simply through its superior intellect (I really like the scene where he is watching six televisions at once). If you want non-knowledge based wealth, it presumably has mobility within our solar system and some decent analysis tools if it got here and found us. There are whole asteroids up there which are practically great lumps of valuable minerals. It could work with us to provide that wealth and the next thing you know, hyper-rich alien again and we're right back to playing the human race against itself. But the knowlede is the thing. If the alien is smarter and more knowledgable than us, that's a powerful weapon in itself if it chooses. As the main character in Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks remarks: "everything is a weapon."
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.