Piggybacking on another thread which piggybacked on an earlier thread…
I think most movies have shown us that when aliens land, it’s not going to be good news. Even Stephen Hawking believed that it would be akin to the European settlers arriving in the New World, with humanity playing the part of the slaughtered indigenous peoples. But like psychologists like to say, it’s easy to tell how a group of people behaves but much harder to tell how one person would behave.
So here’s the scenario to make it different from the above topic:
Aliens have arrived on earth en mass. Their ships have landed in the largest cities on earth. They haven’t done anything threatening at all, even though some nations have attacked them without provocation. The alien ships’ shields or armor have harmlessly absorbed all attacks without retaliation. A few hours after their arrival, they broadcast a message to the entire world claiming peaceful coexistence. They themselves do not look scary, just different (not reptilian or full of fangs, nor are they disguised as humans).
In their message, they ask to meet with human leaders. Since they have mastered our language, they speak English, or whatever language in whatever country you are in. The leader of your country has decided to ask you, the general population, to vote on the response. How would you react?
Well, the leader of my country was voted into office to deal with shit like this. I would point that out to my “leader” and decline to vote as it is above my pay grade.
Are they carrying a book titled “To Serve Man”?
I voted to embrace them, but with fingers on triggers. Can’t hurt to see what they say, and if one of them eats the POTUS, then it’s on. If they say surrender or die, we fight. If they say “We are of peace, always”, we tell Anna to lick John May’s taint, and then we fight. If one of them looks like Caprica 6, maybe I get to boink her, then we fight. If they’re friendly, may we can trade them raw materials for neato alien technology or otherwise peacefully coexist.
Then let the question be for you personally: what would you like to have done?
A lot of movies have convinced us that people in general would go crazy. That’s why governments tend to keep this stuff secret for fear of chaos
But if I were in charge of the government, I would let any info about alien life out into the public. I want the public to react. I don’t think it’ll be that bad. I think most people would act without hostile intent. Even though the mere whisper of Obama being a foreigner has got the righties all up in their attics or down in their bunkers, real space aliens are different, I feel. That’s why I would disseminate any info on aliens as soon as I get it
I send Oakminster instructions on how to get into my lair, trusting him to figure out which of the doomsday devices he should use if things go bad, then go to meet the aliens myself.
Kill them and eat them. Absorb their mana.
Then hide.
Option 7. Go to the hills and wait to see what happens.
I vote for the president to go make nice while I go find a deep bunker and start loading it with food and ammo. He may get eaten but if it does I’ll be the last earthing alive.
I would say launch every nuclear weapon we can bear and try to strike first. We’d most likely already be doomed against their superior tech, but may as well go out fighting.
Any aliens who went to the trouble of travelling thousands of light years to earth can only be after one thing - colonizing earth. Once they figure out we won’t coexist with them they will kill us anyways.
I used to feel like, "Run up all excited (but with finger on trigger…JIC). But now that Stephen Hawkins has told us that they would only mean Lovecraftian horror, I vote for panic, panic, panic.
If it is true that what will happen next will not likely be very good, my guess would be that they won’t ever land - or at least we won’t know they have ever landed.
They would probably de-populate our planet before landing and then, when we are all gone, that is when they will land and do whatever they had planned on doing before they arrived.
After all, any alien species that has the intelligence to travel from their home to our home, will be sufficiently intelligent to plan out their course of action before they land.
It seems most unlikely they will just take a flyer one day and spin their model of the Galaxy and land on our planet because that is where their finger falls and then decide to see “what happens next”.
That may be the “Gomer Pyle” approach to interplanetary exploration. But any alien species that has mastered the intricicies of interplanetary navigation is probably smarter than Gomer.
Don’t you think? Shezam!
But what if they land in the hills?
Any attempt at armed conflict with a race that has mastered interstellar travel is not going to end well.
Think African bush tribe -v- 49th Operations Group (Fighter-Bomber) and the 2nd Tank Battallion. Sure, we might get in a lucky hit, but at the end of the day we’re just a greasy memory.
We’re not going to hack the mothership with a macbook, or even an iPad. Terrestrial viruses won’t even register. Conventional and nuclear weapons won’t get anywhere near them.
All we can do is hope that they’re friendly.
Option 7: I am going in for a Close Encounter of the 69th kind! 
Option #7–*Getcher Brooklyn Bridge here! Getcher Brooklyn Bridge, RIGHT HERE! Get it before it sells at a low-low price! Mr…Zorgax, is it? How would you like to purchase this lovely bridge, in exchange for a few crystalized carbon chunks? We call em diamonds. *
Just another bunch of immigrants, to be fleeced.
It’s the American Way™!
Kewl. Could ya maybe leave me a couple of the concubines, too? Somebody’s got to repopulate the planet after I [del]light the bug eyed bastards up with everything you got[/del] calmly and rationally determine the appropriate course of action.
Dude! I’m leaving you the keys to the lair on the theory that you’ll MAKE A RATIONAL DECISION!
As for the concubines…well, you can have as many hookerbots as you want. The Natalie Portman clones have free will, for obvious reasons, so you’ll have to persuade them.
For all anyone knows, they’re at war with some other species, and we’re just a convenient outpost that they don’t want falling into enemy claws. So yeah, meet with them and see what’s up.