this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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We may not want them to contact us. There is the hypothesis that if a civilization learns about another one on another planet, they might eliminate them before they become competition. It would easy to do too. Just hurl some asteroids or comets at the Earth at relativistic speed and we'd be toast.
I remember that was an episode of Babylon 5 - if you answered the test correctly, the probe would blow you up. I suppose it's also a test of wisdom, not just intelligence:-).
But I also remember a short story in a book about humanity having uploaded itself into our sun, and thereby spread out into the stars, using those as supercomputer mainframes. i.e. what will come from us may look very unlike us now - similar to how a seed looks nothing like the plant that it becomes, or a child acts very differently than the adult that it grows up into.
Then again, if aliens now were to encounter the likes of Musk and Bezos as their points of first contact... I shudder to think what they would want to do to us:-( - after all, what would we do to us, if the roles were reversed? The very measure that we ourselves use is precisely the very thing that we fail at, i.e. we don't look at them and call them "good", do we? No, we are rather ashamed, but then again neither do we stop purchasing goods from Amazon or using Twitter/X (I mean... I do, but most of us do not).