Those aliens, precisely because they are intelligent, are in hiding, of course. What else would you do with the human race and its addiction to violence?
Transmitting higher technology to us just sounds insane. We are violent when we are young. Bullying is just a rite of passage for most young humans. Then we grow up and risk being murdered our entire lives. Although more so in the United States.
Then there is war – or killing sanctioned by almost our entire society. It is almost always backed up by our highest technology. What did we do when we developed the atomic bomb? Why we used it of course on our war time enemy Japan. That’s what we would do with higher alien technology. We would use it for an advantage over each other. Or we could even use it against the aliens who had transmitted it to us.
Some of us will probably be proud. We’ve managed to put fear into aliens. That is, only with our lower technology.
Maybe aliens won’t contact us, but should we try to contact them? As far as intelligent aliens go we could be average. Sure aliens that are a lot more violent would have killed themselves off by now. But there might still be those aliens that have eked through their violent past and still are more violent than humans. Let’s not send them the keys to destroy their planet or let them realize that one errant asteroid can still wipe out most life on Earth.
So I expect that aliens with superior technology will never try to contact Earth. Or each other if violence is common amongst aliens.
Over the years I expect space telescopes will get better and better and as we see the telltale signature of life as we know it – oxygen in the atmosphere – on more and more planets it will slowly dawn on us that intelligent life must be common. And there is a reason they don’t contact us.
We’ve even developed the word that will make them not contact us: xenocide, or the willful extermination of an intelligent alien species. If we don’t get kinder and more gentle as we develop, perhaps xenocide might be performed on us. That is, before we spread like a plague through the stars.
