If you should be selected to make first contact with an alien species, how would you do it?

G, A, F, F (octave lower), C

As hospitably as possible.

Bend over? lol, sorry, all my answers are dirty…and bending over, in general, is probably not the best idea given their track record. I’d show them my babies’ beautiful smiling faces.

@Simone_De_Beauvoir – that’s not dirty – that was my answer.

I really feel like I was on some weird control panel, I really think the conversation would go something like this:

Me: Hello?

Alien: What? (in alien)

Me: What? (in english)

Alien: What?

And so on.

With my luck, I’d probably be a host to a deadly virus. Contact!

As far as they’re concerned, we’re just made out of meat anyway.

Very carefully.

Eye contact
A smile
A firm handshake

trust but verify

I think Zephram Cochrane did a pretty good job with the Vulcans, all things considered.

So… tequila and classic rock?

I’d tell them to hop into their nifty time travel machine so they could go back to the 1990s and chill with this dude

I’d demonstrate our high technology by dazzling them with some Zippo Lighter tricks.

Depending how big they are, a gun of varying caliber to the dome, after which I’d introduce them to my grill and see how out of this world they taste (hey, tastes like chicken).

Body shots!

With tactical nukes.

Seriously. A race advanced enough to travel lightyears to come to our backwoods planet surely has only one thing on their borg mind: our assholes, and all the ways they could probe them.

I think breaking bread and sharing a meal is the quickest and best way to get to know the person or “thing” across the table!!

@Rarebear :)

I’d probably fuck it up completely, get poked and prodded and then dumped back on earth. They’d conclude we were a waste of time, not ready and come back in a thousand years.

Pick someone else.

You know that song in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Play that over and over and over.

@Fiddle_Playing_Creole_Bastard that’s almost what Stephan Hawking said. If they travel this far and are that advanced, they’ll see us as nothing more than a quaint species that needs culling and dominating.

So… I would probably say… ‘Don’t kill all of us, please.. we’re not all as bad as it looks.’

As I am a very optimistic person, I’d begin by rubbing my pecker on one of them.

I’d play them this! Yeah, yeah….that’s right…..don’t mess with us suckers. You’ll never take me alive :¬)

In full accordance to Federation First Contact Policy, of course.
I would have Picard as a consultant at my side, too.

But I hate you, @ragingloli. Really.

You are no Picard.
And Hitler hated me, too. Your feelings toward me are of no importance.

Likewise, I’m sure.

Along the lines of @Fiddle_Playing_Creole_Bastard‘s response…

Years ago—decades ago, in the 1970s—Playboy magazine had an article (see, sometimes we really did read the articles) entitled simply Kill Them and Eat Them. The premise was the same as others have noted: a species with the technology and will to come here to visit such a quaint planet as ours is not here to “learn from” or “exchange with” us, and they certainly would not have come all this way to ‘educate’ us. No. They’re here for food, cheap labor, energy or all three, and it’s up to us to see that they don’t get it from us.

So upon first realizing that a foreign species is here with intelligence and technology superior to our own, the best thing for us as a species is just like the title of the article stated: kill them and eat them. Make them realize that we are hard targets who more or less dominate an unfriendly landscape. Give them no rest, no quiet interlude and no peace—and no mercy—just kill them and eat them as fast as we can and save Earth for ourselves.

If they mark their maps with “Here be barbarians” it’s the best we can hope for.

@CyanoticWasp What if they have too much saturated fat and salt in their bodies? Or their blood has mercury in it and we can’t bury them without violating EPA standards? Or they produce too much CO2 when we burn them.

@josie mmm… alien rinds and nachos on Sunday afternoon watching the ball game. Let’s watch two! In that case, they’d probably be safer snacks than what we consume now.

@CyanoticWasp
”If they mark their maps with “Here be barbarians” it’s the best we can hope for.”
Only if they are stupid.
If they consider you the barbarians that you are, they would likely assume that once you become capable of interstellar travel, you would take your hostility into space.
The only reasonable course of action for them in such a situation is to terminate the Human species while it is still easy to do.
In your primitive state, there are several feasible, if not easy, options, like orbital bombardement, introducing an incurable and highly infectious disease limited to Humans, or even a full scale ground invasion bringing all our their technological superiority to bear.
Seriously, killing the visitors on First Contact would be the most stupid thing to do, unless you have a death wish.

And do not think your nuclear weapons would scare them off. They have already demonstrated their ability to shut them down with ease.

@ragingloli that’s not strategically correct. Unless these ‘things’ are so all-consuming malevolent that they have these types of species-destroying weapons available on what is (at least nominally) a voyage of exploration and discovery—a scout ship—then killing the scouts and explorers as they arrive is the best way to go, so that they just mark off the area as “unfriendly” and avoid it. There’s time to work on planetary defense later, to prepare for a possible invasion.

Ask any of the original settlers of either North or South America if that isn’t correct.

I vote for kill em and eat em. Otherwise they will enslave or exterminate us.

@CyanoticWasp
Doing interstellar travel and likely having encountered unfriendly civilisations, it would be natural for any deep space ship, even scout ships, to have self defence weapons on board, and given their technological level, even these defensive weapons would have tremendous destructive power. Like phasers and photon torpedoes: installed for self defence, yet perfectly able to completely remove all life off a planet.

”No. They’re here for food, cheap labor, energy or all three, and it’s up to us to see that they don’t get it from us.”

”a voyage of exploration and discovery”

Which is it now? Make up your mind, please.
In the latter case, your approach might work, but if it is the former case, the one you initially assumed, do you really think they would let a few pathetic barbarians stand in the way of conquest? After all the work that went into discovering and analysing the target, a rare life bearing planet? Do you really think the european kingdoms, especially the spaniards, would have stopped their conquest of the americas just because of some resistance by the natives? no, it would have just made them even more brutal in their approach.

And besides, considering the logistics to build a starship and the energy required to traverse the galaxy at FTL, it is fair to assume that they are not in need of energy or cheap labour

@ragingloli no civilization facing the same kinds of resource issues that we face (and that every other species on this planet faces, so I’m guessing that it’s sort of universal) is going to send a “massive invasion fleet” to a little Podunk planet at the far edge of a small galaxy that’s light-years away—at least until they know what’s there. (And we’re light-years away from anyone who may be out there.)

And the only way they’re going to know what’s there (here) is by sending scout ships, because it’s unlikely that even with whatever wonderful technology they will have developed to see and hear better than we can, there is no substitute for “boots on the ground”—or some kind of unmanned craft that can send back good data. And even if the unmanned craft send back that good data, it’s more likely that we’d be identified as “a likely candidate” for whatever resource they wanted: food, cheap labor (unlikely, I think) or energy (maybe not so likely, but the heat energy at the core of this planet could be useful, given the technology to utilize it)—or a nice place to take over and make “their own”, I suppose, if the environment is hospitable enough for them. And if the food is tasty.

All I’m saying is that if we continue to annihilate and consume the scouts, they’ll mark us low on the “hospitable” scale and look elsewhere.

Again, I have to emphasise that any civilisation, alien or otherwise, would almost certainly be concerned about its own long term security.
Wiping out a scout party before they can send back a status report would only result in one thing: they would send another one to check what happened to the first one, probably not alone, probably more heavily armed.
Either way, they would eventually know that they are dealing with a civilisation that is not only composed of barbarians, but barbarians with weapons of mass destruction (and willing to use them on innocent people, since you already have) and aspirations and the means for infant space travel.
Long term projections would include a malevolent, violent civilisation capable of interstellar travel, taking their barberism out into space, and ultimately, to the civilisation that sent the scout party in the first place.
They could end up with an Earth based Romulan Empire at their doorsteps.
Sure they could do the stupid thing, do nothing and hope for the other, more positive possibilities on the projections list, like you destroying yourselves or you growing out of your barberism, the proper thing to do however would be to act against you as soon as possible and strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger. Those who attempt to poison and destroy their brothers. And you will know their name is the lord when they lay their fingers upon thee.

We have had contact several times.

This is starting to sound like a scene from ‘The Big Bang Theory’ where they sit around and discuss seriously and passionately, odd topics the rest of us laugh about or wouldn’t even think of. I thought this was a fun question. I didn’t expect the discussion to get so heated and serious. hahaha…. everyone’s geek is showing. smile Love it.

I would hope to be armed with one of my killer chocolate cakes, that they would understand it to be deeply nourishing, and that one of them puts the kettle on.
Tea, I find, is generally a great leveler and my cake melts hearts and minds.
Oh, bad news if they are intolerant of chocolate though… or perhaps that’s the fail-safe..?

I would clumsily stand on the tiny alien representative causing a major diplomatic incident leading, despite my sincere apologies, to inter galactic war.

@flutherother
It would not be an intergalactic war. It would be a small bug squashing. With you being the bugs.

@ragingloli I will be more careful where I put my feet in that case.

i will send them a collection of Charlie Chaplin’s movies and ebooks on Newton’s Principia, Einstein’s Relativity and String Theory and ask them to select which one is the funniest

@krrazypassions String Theory… for sure.