O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
Yeah, but what’ll happen to my dog?
And FuzzyOgre, where’s that bit about sentient meat from?
No. Better to die fighting as men than be slaughtered like sheep. My ancestors charged across more than a mile of open terrain, straight into the heart of the Union line at Gettysburg. The least I can do is face down ET, snarling defiance and earning my place in Valhalla. They will kill me, but I will die a free man.
we have photon torpedos, we are strong. 
Your ancestors charged across a mile of open terrain** while they thought they still had a chance to win the war.** Your ancestors later surrendered unconditionally at Appomattox Court House when it was obvious that fighting would simply lead to death and had no chance of delivering any benefit. In other words, your ancestors weren’t suicidal.
When you die, what happens is maggots eat your corpse. You don’t go to Valhalla. We may as well suck up to the aliens and see if they’ll let us live in peace.
I was thinking along the lines of the old War of the Worlds movie, where simple Earth germs did the aliens in.
There was a pretty hilarious SNL skit back in the Phil Hartman era about an invading alien race (complete with 50’s sci-fi movie silver jumpsuits) that invited our world leaders to inspect their vastly superior technology before we surrender in awe, but when our military experts reported back, all of their technology was actually several hundred years behind ours, muskets and stagecoaches and so on. When the amazed general asked “but how did they make the flying saucer?” the analyst shrugged and said “I dunno…maybe they found it?” 
The governor of California and Doodles Weaver’s niece have had success fighting aliens. Maybe we should ask them.
Harry Turtledove wrote a short story called The Road Not Taken, where it turned out that there were simple techniques for both antigravity and FTL travel; so simple that even Bronze Age cultures could discover them. We just happened to miss them. So instead of pouring our efforts in trying to improve hyperdrive and antigravity, we went in other technological directions. Which is how 21st century Earth ended up being attacked by the Roxolani; aliens with starships, antigravity - and armed with black powder muskets and cannon. The attack went…poorly.
If aliens from outer space ever come and we show them our civilization and they make fun of it, we should say we were just kidding, that this isn’t really our civilization, but a gag we hoped they would like. Then we tell them to come back in twenty years to see our real civilization. After that, we start a crash program of coming up with an impressive new civilization.
Either that, or just shoot down the aliens as they’re waving good-bye.*
— Jack Handey
Wait a minute…what!!! 
On the upside, we’ll see them coming. There will be this energetic source heading right at us that will likely start increasing dramatically as they shed energy entering the local environment. So we’ll at least have a few years to start begging for mercy.
I would assume that the chance of encountering a sapient technological civilization anywhere within a few thousand years of our technology level is pretty slim. If this is technology that crossed the gulf between the stars, we’d be screwed. It would be a little like humans engaging in a full-scale nuclear conflict against sea sponges.
I’d say our best bet would be to try and convey that we are sentient creatures and hope to hell that they have some sort of cultural bias against wiping us out like an ant infestation. We would have to have some sort of sign that would make them say “Hey, maybe we shouldn’t vivisect these fleshy things. They appear to have some degree of intelligence and self-recognition.”
Then we just hope that they have a better track record with less advanced civilizations that we do.
Larry Niven had a short story about an alien race who travel to other planets for trade. Their ships require significant local infrastructure to launch: One of the first things they trade to any planet they visit is designs for a launching laser that can send them to their next planet (and can then also be used to propel our own ships to the stars). Any species that cannot or will not build the launching laser are considered mere animals, albeit clever animals, and not worthy of moral considerations, so they instead launch from that star using a gizmo that causes the star to go supernova.
Sorry, its only 25 years away.
Well, you know, trying to figure out what they’re singing in that song will drive anybody crazy… and that means it’s a danger to the public! Seriously, it happened:
I think the best-case scenario is that they take pity on us, and decide that our solar system should be protected as a wildlife refuge.
I think you misread FREQ_FORCE’s post:
Right, but it was an inane response anyway.