We’d probably catch some kind of incurable disease from space aliens and everyone would die.
Or, they would catch us and keep us as pets.
Either way, I say bad.
I would just like to point out the irony of your location, vis a vis the idea of being plunged into a pot of boiling water and eaten like a crustacean.
I find most alien optimist feel that evolution cures the savage soul like in Star Trek. Well we’ve evolved way beyond monkeys do we cure cancer for them or solve their resource problems? We don’t even treat them like pets we’re more than happy to bulldoze their habitat and hook electrodes to them for a few dollars more (and these are our relatives). Our only hope is that we don’t taste like “Glornax” or have enough physical similarities to make us medical research material. You can be sure that if they expended the enormous expense to come here it would be for their benefit not ours
But why the hell would they visit us? The only thing the Earth has that everywhere else doesn’t is life. Even the most savage and cruel civilization wouldn’t go out of their way to destroy what isn’t even remotely a threat. Just nuke us or send a gamma ray burst our way.
I definitely think curiosity is the biggest motivator to contact inferior ET life, technologically speaking.
**AdmiralCrunch **–love the handle.
You should post more.
Where the hell did that come from? Is that real? Or a truly exquisite Photoshop job? Really, I’d like to know more about it.
Perhaps advanced civilizations lose their curiosity, and turn inward. Maybe that explains why we don’t pick up alien radio signals,or why we haven’t seen any visitors. The old drivers of exploration are gone, when you consider people advanced enough to travel between stars. Gold, greed, and God don’t make much sense when you can stay home and have anything you want. Personally, I like the idea of advanced civilizations setting up those “black monoliths”-live evolves to the point of curiosity, and the monoliths transmit the info. Much less tedious than going from star to star, hpong to find something.
You obliviously don’t know the value of certain Human based extracts on the galactic market do you? As a matter of fact humans are seeded through out the known galaxy for this very purpose for all we know. The Mayan calendar ending in 2012 may signal harvest time for our precious jizmaglobin.and xizycorium (I hear it’s a painful and bloody affair).
Also, since when has curiosity been defined as a benign? The people who hook monkeys up to electrodes do it out of curiosity. Kids blow up and dissect frogs out of curiosity. We tested Nuclear weapons out of curiosity. Pandora opened her box out of curiosity and so have we. Face it our coherent electro magnetic emanations have signaled our doom at the speed of light.
I think they would look at our propensity for violence, our territoriality, our alarming breeding ability and our primitive but crafty tool using intelligence and conclude that we are a potential future threat if we ever discover a means to interstellar space travel.
I also think they would see us as a possible disease vector for themselves.
In either case, contact would be off limits.
At best they would set up surveillance and a quarantine, at worst they would eliminate us from afar.
We don’t have to be a threat (and we probably wouldn’t be in the least). Maybe they just like our planet because it has a similar gravity and temperature. Maybe they just want all the water or nitrogren or whatever. The destruction of our civilization might be incidental to their actual goals.
Or because 6 billion Humans and a million or so Dolphins are what they need to make a meatloaf.
You’d think that any civilization capable of interstellar travel would have long since figured out how to make a dolphin-safe humanloaf.
I like to think they’re going to get out of their spaceship and say, “Our governments are corrupt, we have problems with wars and prejudice, our teenagers are out of control! You’ve GOT to help us!”
Predator postulated a race of hunter/warriors. Not every trip into space is a trip out of curiosity or the pursuit of resources.
There’s a bunch of different, maybe even zany-to-us reasons for someone to travel into our gravity well.
Some critter here may resemble some long prophesied messiah.
“We’ve come to worship your pigeons. They are the most perfect form of <unintelligable noises>!”