The notion that we shouldn't try to contact aliens for fear they might destroy us is a silly one. I would rather be destroyed by an alien race versus being destroyed by any number of natural disaster or nuclear war.

There's also a good chance that by the time a race can travel between interstellar space, they'll be mature enough not to kill everything they see.

> There's also a good chance that by the time a race can travel between interstellar space, they'll be mature enough not to kill everything they see.

What makes you think that? Humans just put 1 ton hover over another planet yet we still kill each other over which parts of which iron age books we think are more than just stories.

What we do know is that within a populous of a given scientific advancement its possible for there to be a massive variation of individual and group morality as well as individual education level (particularly in regards to science). We know this because it's our current world.

Based on the reality we know about it isn't terribly apparent to me that just because some population has achieved a given level of scientific advancement that some of them won't gleefully steal my lunch.

I don't really see the drawbacks in contacting them. I am sure any specie that is able to travel to Earth will already have the technological means to scout a large part of (if not the whole) galaxy, and would have most likely found us in the first place.

I agree, within the human race, enormous variations in intelligence, opinion, morality, development et al exist. But there is a good chance that aliens, if they exist, don't think or behave like humans. Maybe they are some Borg-like people with a collective mind. Anyway, I'm pretty sure that IF they exist, they leave humanity alone. With the mess we're making, they'd steer clear from the depraved, self-destructing human race. Can't blame them...

I would rather not be destroyed at all.

Competitiveness has been the driver of all human progress. Without it people just stagnate.

So any interstellar race is likely to be very competitive. You hope it doesn't show up as killing, but the reality is when you have two people who both want something, they fight.

I can't remember where I heard this theory, but essentially it goes like this:

If you see an ant on the sidewalk when you're walking down the street, you don't stop to communicate with it, or teach it how to build a television. The theory goes that a civilization with the ability to travel through interstellar space would have a similar knowledge gap to us as we do to ants.

Granted, you also don't stop to ask it if you can build a house on top of its ant hill, so I suppose the analogy works both ways.

But if ants could and did paint little ant-paintings and murals, I bet someone would be collecting said paintings. Also, some website would have people arguing about the nuances of them. If aliens are to us as we are to ants, they might not need to care much about us to spawn a few instances of their minds and cross interstellar distances so as to chat with us as much as we care to. It might be so little effort for them so as not to need much reward. Just as kids have ant-farms.

I think the knowledge gap between humans and ants is less then humans/ alien species that traveled to earth. Hawking is right and we should avoid making contact with any alien species...Security through obscurity actually works well in this situation.

This is a pretty naive view of the universe. Humans have been civilized as we know it for what, 4000, 5000 years? In a little over 100 years we've gone from horse-and-buggy to detecting dark matter and building particle accelerators.

The universe operates on a time scale incredibly more significant than that, and so it's conceivable that there are intelligent beings that have been around for millions of years. Their technology and the form that they take would likely be so far beyond what we know that a similar gap in evolution would be entirely plausible.

That is true, but the analogy stops as we are very familiar with ants. On the other hand, a totally new specy of insect would be worth being studied, and thus preserved - at least partially.

yeah. Like an ant farm...

I doubt ants realize when they are in a farm. Maybe some alien already placed us in an empty galaxy to be able to observe us, I wouldn't care.