It’s the middle of the night. Suddenly, an alien spacecraft appears and lands nearby. It’s all lit up and pulsating with a deep thrumming sound, just like in the movies.
A hatch swings open, light floods out, and humanoid aliens walk down a ramp. They head in your direction.
Face to face, they seem to smile and beckon you wordlessly to join them in their ship.
I absolutely go. I mean, yeah, they could want to eat me or experiment on me. But it’s a spaceship. With aliens. I’d be curious and there’s nothing here on Earth that won’t go on without me or that I’d be too upset to leave. Damn right I’d go.
Sure, I’ll talk to them. Whenever that happens to me, they’re usually just lost and want to ask for directions. I’d be happy to point them in the direction of the nearest more interesting planet.
Well, there was that one time with the probe, when I woke up two weeks later in a dirty bedroom in Bangkok. But that kind of thing can be fun sometimes.
On the other had, if you do, you may spend the rest of your life being experimented on and vivisected.
Any species with the capability to transit interstellar space will be able to command energies and control technology far in advance to our own. Unless you posit a scenario like District 9, where the aliens are dumb workers who have little notion about how to use the technology that surrounds them and has conveyed them to this planet, you have no hope. Nor would their be any expectation that an alien species would regard humanity with respect or decency, and may well view us in the same way we would view a sea slug, i.e. as something to be examined and useful for experimentation, and then discarded when we expire.
Politicians! Run for your life!
This thread reminds me of the Kids in the Hall sketch. “We’ve been coming here for 50 years and performing anal probes, and all that we have learned is that one in ten doesn’t really seem to mind.”
If I saw aliens, I would run down a checklist which would include:
[ol]
[li]Am I dreaming?[/li][li]Am I having a stroke or a seizure?[/li][li]Am I high or drunk?[/li][li]Am I mistaking a commonly observed object for something else?[/li][li]Am I observing a rare, but still terrestrial object, for something else?[/li][li]Is someone fucking with me unintentionally?[/li][li]Is someone fucking with me INTENTIONALLY?[/li][li]Am I having a hallucination?[/li][li]Am I losing my sanity?[/li][/ol]
If I have gone down that checklist and find none of those criteria adequately describe my situation, then I would run as far and as fast as my legs would take me.
They better be some fleet-footed aliens as I’ll be well on my way back to civilization within a short order.