I don’t know why the common conception is that if there’s life out there (and I think there most certainly is), that it’s smarter than us. Chances are it’s just some weeds growing, with like, a misshapen pig-type creature thrown in for good measure. If other life was so much more intelligent, then it would have come here to hang out with us already.
On the other hand, maybe other life is so intelligent that’s why it hasn’t come here already.
A good point. If there is intelligent life, we’d probably attack them first. All scenarios featuring terrifying aliens just show them doing to people what people at their worst have already done to each other. We are those terrifying aliens. We are the ones who are going to send a Lockheed spaceship over the aliens’ Whitehouse and blow it the fuck up while extraterrestrial Bill Pullman can only watch helplessly through his multifaced eyes. We already annihilate other species by the hundreds of thousands, so xenocide isn’t that big of a deal.
And the worst part is, I don’t think fighting an alien species will unify us, especially if we encounter tham while having a technological edge. There’ll probably still be nation states in a couple of centuries and fighting over an inhabited planet sounds like a pretty believable recipe for global conflict on earth.
