What do you mean “WE” discovered cheap easy cold fusion? Are you working to discover this process? Probably not. Its a “Big business corporation” like General Electric who is trying to discover it. And after spending years and years and millions and millions of dollars, you expect them to power your home for free.
Do you expect to be paid for your labor where you work or do you show up at your job for free?
Communism didn’t work because is it a badly flawed system, not because we couldn’t get it “to work”.
Setting aside your insulting and ridiculous implication that people of faith are dangerous and primitive, how would you react if you discovered from them that the comparison was favorable?
After ten years of waiting, we’ve finally recieved a followup transmission. It says, “539/Glognok/Frxxaz”
That reminds me of a followup to my question about death, which may be hard to ask as a direct question: How much do the aliens value life? Would they consider all life sacred and find it abhorrent to take the life of a single being, do they make compromises like human beings for killing “lesser species” for food (or perhaps there are no “lesser species” and everything is the same), or would they go around willy nilly killing and eating each other on a whim? Since nothing else is known about alien life forms, you could have an alien race with a life span of 1,000 years, or perhaps a super-fast alien race with a lifespan of a few hours for each one. I think that’s a question I’d like to ask, if I could figure out how to phrase it.
I dunno. Which of Earth’s religions is their God favorable to?
In any case, I’m probably screwed.
If I were the representative of this possibly more technologically advanced civilization and your first question of me is “what’s your God” and my civilization had endured thousands of years of religious wars and finally rejected it then I’m thinking,
“How many planets and/or moons do your people inhabit (Including permanent artificial space habitats, if applicable)?”
“Are there any technological ‘holy grails’ that you’ve been trying to achieve, but have yet to be able to make work? If so, perhaps we could be able to help you out—or trade for?”
“Could you provide a history of your species, in as much detail as practical, since the beginning of your recorded history?”
“Do you have ‘art’? If so, what kinds? Could you show us some notable examples? We would be more than willing to show some of ours.”
“What is the level of your psychological and neurological science?”
“What form of government(s) do you have?”
“Do you have the technology to reanimate the dead, or gain immortality? How about suspended animation?”
Seriously though, I think most people assume in theses scenarios that the other party is far more advanced than we are. That, to me, shows how low our self esteem is as a species. There’s no doubt that we’re lost but I’d guess that they’d be searching because they are too.
That’s why I’d ask: For how long have they been recording their own history (if that’s even possible to convey in a meaningful way) and if there’s been any other contact. And what are THEY looking for as far as reasons go.
I didn’t get that impression. Most questions here are useful for finding out whether they are more advanced than we are.
But it’s a good bet that they are more advanced. We humans have had radio telescopes for only 70 years or so. Assuming our civilization continues for at least 70 more years (a fair assumption, I think), it’s better than 50/50 chance that any civilization capable of interstellar communication is more advanced than we are.
Okay. Maybe you and I can find common ground. What would you think of this set of questions?
What is the nature of reality?
What is the source of knowledge?
What is the most valuable thing?
What is the moral imperative?
What is freedom?
With those, we become privy to the metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics, ethics, and politics of their philosophy. Nothing direct about religion, but open all the same to tell us anything from “we don’t care about any of that” to “science is our god”.
But, those questions don’t belong in our first set of communications. They don’t belong in the fifth. They should come way, way after we’ve learned a great deal about the ET’s nature, culture and history, and found some common ground on which to frame the questions.
My first question would be what senses they posess and what modes they use to communicate. Of course really, I’d probably just ask what their physiology is like, which would include that, but I think we’d know a lot more about how to understand anything else they tried to tell us if we first knew whether they percieve the world through smell and communicate by magnetic waves, or they percieve the world through echolocation and commuicate with interpretive dance. Or maybe we wouldn’t. Qualia would be the key, but how do you communicate that?
Reproduction (seriously!) and child-rearing would be another topic I’d want to know about. How is the culture transmitted across generations? How are members of the community created?
For people who are interested in these sorts of speculations, OctaviaButler has created some of the most believably “alien” aliens in literature, and some astoundingly alien ways in which they might choose to relate to humanity. We tend to assume aliens would see us as fellow beings, as savages, or as insects (depending on how relatively advanced they are), but Butler shows that those are far from the only possabilities.
But the OP didn’t ask what the first questions should be. Any question is going to presupose an enormous amount of contact and communication necessary to make questioning possible. Thousands of individual communications would probably be necessary before any question more complex than “What follows in this series of numbers?” could be asked. I think most questions would become appropriate by no later than the point at which we could ask them and expect both them and the answer to be understood.
I’d ask, "Can and will you tell us how to build an electric battery with an energy density of at least 10 MJ/kg*?
[sub]*This is comparable to the energy storage density of gasoline, and is around 100 times the energy storage density of NiMH rechargeable batteries.[/sub]