First Contact: What Will We Do?

After class on Thursday, I was left wondering which of those boxes on our Schmitt chart we would actually fall under if we were to contact an alien species in real life. It's something that I don't think we settled in our discussion and I am still not sure what we would, or should, do in the event of first contact.

The first question is "what would we do"? While it is still a hard question, I think that we can answer it with a little more certainty. Looking back at human history (and even current events) we can see that the general reaction of humanity to something new and different is fear. We can also see that the usual reaction to fear is violence. Now, I cannot say for sure that we will attempt to destroy, or even harm, the first aliens we meet, and it would probably differ depending on what the lifeforms are like, but I can say that it seems to be the most probable outcome.

But now we need to discuss whether or not this reaction should occur. It might seem obvious that a reaction out of fear would be a bad thing, and it might call up memories of mistakes that mankind has made in the past, but an encounter with extraterrestrial life is not the same thing as an encounter with another human civilization. There would be no way of knowing anything about them or what they want. All people are essentially similar, but there is no guarantee that the same will hold for an alien life form. Furthermore we can't be sure that we will be the imperialists in this case. For all we know the other race will want to enslave us. It might seem cold, but it could be a species ending decision to act without caution.

On the other hand, we certainly don't want to become Ender. It would be a massive crime to destroy an entire intelligent species, especially if they meant us no harm. And even if we don't destroy them, we could end up in a pointless war when we could be learning from each-other. We might even provoke an otherwise peaceful race into destroying us. In the end it's a decision that could only be decided on a case by case basis using the best judgment available, and could only be judged in hindsight.