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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?
If we are actually noticed, the problem with the "freeze and play dead" suggestion is that it if it works, we risk convincing them that we are mostly harmless, unintelligent creatures. Earth then begins to look like a habitable, unoccupied planet ripe for colonizing.
While a display of martial might would serve to make the earth look less available, it also risks making us appear savage and again, unintelligent. It might make them feel justified in subjugating us and colonizing earth.
Safest is probably a policy of partial isolation. We should greet others firmly, while revealing little of our own cultures and history. Be respectful, and allow visitors to see a strictly controlled show. Given time, this can be relaxed. If they do seem interested in colonization, prepare for war. Demand commitments to peace and respect for our territory that, if broken deliberately, will give us moral high-ground in counterattacking. But if this should occur, act quickly to establish laws of war--display an aura of civility and discipline. Conversely, if they are interested in an exchange of knowledge, be open and willing--say nothing of atrocities and wars, and let the borders be opened slowly. Control their perception of us, so that we may appear to be a mixture of cultures that they could ally themselves with, rather than merely subjugate.
What if they were to arrive in our solar system and not care about us? I mean, what if they didn't care about lifeforms? It's a huge assumption that they are looking for others like them. That's a drive that seems to be uniquely human. As far as I know, no animal on earth goes around comparing surrounding species to themselves. I use the earth animal example because we have no other species to compare in the vicinity of our solar system. But back to the point, What if they arrive and simply ignore us?
Restore the madness of youth's lechery
Rather than spoil the ending of the classic sci-fi short story Omnilingual by H. Beam Piper, I'll just post a link - it's a short read, like the label says. (A team of explorers on Mars find a dead civilization, complete with an utterly untranslatable library of books....)
Why assume that if they find us, they must have sci-fi movie technology?
Because statistically speaking, it's incredibly unlikely that an alien race would have developed technology at anything close to the same time that we did. So either they will be so far behind that they won't even have radio, or many thousands (if not millions) of years more advanced than us (technology-wise).
This is why the "warn them that we have guns and know how to use them" and "hide under the bed" options are ridiculous. Any alien race we are able to communicate with will almost certainly have the technology to easily wipe us out if they want to, as well as being able to detect the radio waves we've been throwing out into space since the early 20th century.
Imagine the humans of 1900 trying to pose a credible threat to or hide from the humans of 2009. Now imagine the same thing, but it's the Romans or Chinese or a few thousand years ago versus the humans of 2009. Then realize that even a few thousand years is nothing on cosmological scales, so even that vast gap of technology is an eyeblink compared to the differences in technology we would be likely to encounter with an alien race.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Of course, all this assumes that aliens would want to be hostile to us for some reason anyway. If a civilization is advanced enough to travel here, they're probably advanced enough to not have any good reason to be hostile. The only reason for hostility would be that they want something we have, and that could really only be the planet. But while this planet is basically a paradise to us (compared to the other planets out there that we can see), that's because we evolved on it, and are suited for living on it: it has temperatures/climates we like, it has food growing/living on it that we like, etc. As aliens would have evolved on another planet, this planet and the life on it probably wouldn't be something they value that much; it could even be poisonous to them. The only other reason they'd want this planet is for the mineral resources, but if they can travel to other star systems, it seems like it would be pretty trivial for them to get mineral resources from all kinds of other lifeless asteroids and planets instead of having to fight for this one.
Honestly, I can't imagine a decent reason why any alien visitors would be hostile to us. Some of their ways might seem hostile to some, but that would only be from insufficient communication I believe (like if they treated us as lab specimens to be experimented on for the purpose of science without attempting to communicate). I think the chances of aliens coming here to wipe us all out, like in Independence Day, are pretty much nil. If any aliens go to the effort of traveling here, they probably would be interested in either simply learning about us (without sending us all into panic), or communicating.