@suzieseaside wrote:
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More about what messages we would send. I think we are mad to be advertising ourselves to other lifeforms. Some romantic and naive notion about contacting extra-terrestrials. If they get the messages they are likely to be hugely more advanced.
They might not be interested in us, but there is no reason to think they would be benign and might find our planet an attractive resource (if we haven't completely messed it up). As Stephen Hawking said - human beings have a terrible history of mistreating, and even massacring, other human cultures that are less technologically advanced — why would an alien civilization be any different?
My message would be, with apologies to the League of Gentlemen - This is a local planet for local people, there's nothing for you here.
Not that that would put them off!
I don't see why or how that assumption can be made - any message sent out into space by us is unlikely to be discovered before many millenia have passed due to their relatively slow speed. Who's to say what level of development we will have attained by then?
We are just as likely to be far more developed than any visiting estra-terrestrial.
