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alpha0  ·  4961 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What do you say to an alien?
According to an alternative point of view, we should say as little as possible. Per this speculative line of reasoning, highly advanced species would not view intergalactic encounters in the romantic light that we seem to view it.

We must also consider the possibility that the "aliens" in question may potentially be "reasoning" and "self aware" machines who have already struggled against and overcome their organic creators. Its quite hard to win the argument for "sanctity of life" with a self-aware machine.

(In that light, the voyageur message, complete with return address, is a potentially grave error that future generations will dearly regret, with the silver lining that it was sent before we had the tech to nano-encode our genome on the far too revealing message ;)

I think central to these thoughts is the consideration of the correlation between advancement in technology and (for a lack of a better word) enlightenment.