If aliens were to physically visit our solar system, not just be detected remotely or via ancient inactive traces left by a previous visit, then it doesn't matter what our response is. The aliens will be inconceivably advanced and powerful compared to us. First contact with aliens will end however the aliens want it to end.
Seems like there are two schools of thought on this:
"We don't know much about aliens, but we know about humans. If you look at history, contact between humans and less intelligent organisms have often been disastrous from their point of view, and encounters between civilizations with advanced versus primitive technologies have gone badly for the less advanced. A civilization reading one of our messages could be billions of years ahead of us. If so, they will be vastly more powerful, and may not see us as any more valuable than we see bacteria." --Stephen Hawking
"While Sir Stephen Hawking warned that alien life might try to conquer or colonize Earth, I respectfully disagree," Tarter said in a statement in 2012. "If aliens were to come here, it would be simply to explore. Considering the age of the universe, we probably wouldn't be their first extraterrestrial encounter, either.
"If aliens were able to visit Earth, that would mean they would have technological capabilities sophisticated enough not to need slaves, food or other planets," she added. --Jill Tarter, former director of the Center for SETI
We don't know much about aliens, but we know about humans.
Sure, but one of the things that we know about humans is that they haven't been technological for the tens or hundreds of thousands of years that would be necessary to spread out into the cosmos enough to potentially encounter other intelligent alien life.
If you look at history, contact between humans and less intelligent organisms have often been disastrous from their point of view
Indeed. But what could those "less intelligent organisms" have possibly done to make it turn out any differently? It's not like the Dodos made some kind of choice that resulted in them getting wiped out. They were limited by their Dodo nature.
If aliens were able to visit Earth, that would mean they would have technological capabilities sophisticated enough not to need slaves, food or other planets,
Sure, but they might wipe us out anyway because they're in the process of building a K-III civilization and our planet is composed of useful building materials. Or they might upload us all into some kind of cyber nirvana. Or they might take us as pets. Who knows? My point is not to guess what their motivation might be, just to point out that whatever their motivations are we have basically no way at all of influencing or thwarting them. They will do what they will do.
This is one of the main reasons why I don't understand the view of people who lament that we might be "alone in the universe", if an early-filter Fermi paradox solution turns out to be the correct one. If we're alone in the universe then that means we'll be able to decide our own fates. If we're not, then whoever beat us to the stars first gets to make all the decisions.
Those examples involved a "colonizing" culture that was nearly identical in technology and psychology to the "colonized" culture. If aliens exist and they travel here then they're from an entirely different culture that is likely millions or years removed from the state we're in now.
The proper analogy is not the British conquering the people of India, it's the British coming to a small island somewhere that's populated by monkeys. We're the monkeys. We likely won't be able to comprehend what the British are or what they want, let alone thwart their goals.
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