Watch enough movies in which aliens contact humans, and you’ll notice a trend: the people deciding how Earth should respond to the extraterrestrial communications are usually politicians or scientists.
But the UK Seti Research Network (UKSRN) thinks the average person should have a say in how Earth responds if aliens ever decide to say “hello” to humanity.
THE ONLY REASON WE HAVE NO COMMUNICATION WITH aliens is the Earth is on the blacklist because we have not handled our atomic+problem and still threaten each other with atomic war. When that is handled we will be contacted.
any extra-solar species that has the technology to travel here for a face to face to say “hi”, could destroy us and our planet without even trying. regardless, it cannot hurt to say “hi” back.
Niels Kjellerup is quite certain that the extra-terrestrials will be morally quite like himself.
In this respect, I think you will find him to be typical of your respondents, although, of course, they will all be mistaken.
Denver is of a second type: not prejudging the extra-terrestrials, but wary of their power. There will be more like him, too, but far fewer than the Kjellerups.
Of the Milky Way Galaxy’s (MWG) approximately 300 billion stars, “mass ratios” indicate that 6-billion (2.0%) are long-lived, Main Sequence yellow or red-dwarf F and G-type suns. Extrapolating 21st Century observations, at least 2.4 billion (40%) of these six billion cool, dim systems incorporate geo-physically active, warm-and-wet Earth-type planets orbiting in “habitable zones” amenable to spontaneously self-emergent life.
Assuming that 480 mm (one-in-five, 20%), habitable planets evolve indigenous organic strains, while one in a thousand (.001) well-situated Earth-type planets matures at least one Advanced Extraterrestrial Civilization (AETC) –a high-tech culture capable of interstellar communication, perhaps quantum-physical telesponding– then (pace Frank Drake) over a typical galaxy’s coherent span of c. 12.5 billion years-to-date our Island Universe’s number of star-faring AETCs becomes a minimum .20 × 10^−4 × 2.4 × 109 = .48 × 105 = 48,000 per Milky Way-type galaxy.
To answer Fermi’s 1950 question, Where are they? we reply: Our galaxy, thereby Minkowski’s visible Universe, is very young, while star-faring super-cultures are widely dispersed in space-and-time. This is fortunate, because all full-fledged star-farers pose existential threats to developing competitors. (Think Earth’s socio-culturally imbalanced technological advances over the negligibly short time-span from AD 1750 to 2000+.) Though isolated AETCs in the Milky Way alone may already have appeared by tens of thousands, these cultures rarely if ever interact.
Given our historical experience with advanced civilizations encountering less developed civilizations, it would seem to our collective advantage to “go dark.” I’d hate to end my days due to an extra-terrestrial flu virus.