Imagine you are the alien. With advanced technology in health care, nano-technonoly, and cybernetics, the decades and centuries its taken you to travel to Earth are not burdensome.
You arrive here and found the humans broken up in various political, economic, religious, even tribal states, many willing to enact amazing amounts of violence on each other.
How do you make contact?
1) Pick the biggest--the US--and talk to them? 2) Pick their semi-structured United Nations and talk to them? 3) Wait around for a century or two to observe and see if they outgrow this juvenile behavior? 4) Land in force and force them out of such petty behavior.
Posted by scifibum (Member # 7625) on :
5) Drop a small (15km or so diameter) rock on them and watch them scurry, then burn "Kilroy was here" in 100 mile high letters into Siberia and skedaddle.
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
I vote 5) as well.
Posted by Darth_Mauve (Member # 4709) on :
So you've been to Tugunska.
Posted by The Pixiest (Member # 1863) on :
Do the humans have anything I want? If so, I trade.
If I was just looking for land to settle on, I snap my fingers and move on to the next star system.
Though I might pause and study them a bit to satisfy anthropological curiosity.
Posted by Corwin (Member # 5705) on :
A combination of 2 and 3. Talking to representatives in nice if you feel pretty sure their first move won't be to try to blast you out of the sky. Hence the initial period of observation. And if the aliens come in a few years they might want to talk to China, not the US, if it's only one country. Super-powers change. Better to try and talk to something resembling a world government, although the UN is still very far from one.
Posted by Mucus (Member # 9735) on :
3) probably, maybe with some hidden observation and study.
Posted by Hedwig (Member # 2315) on :
6)Hide a wireless speaker in a bush. Set bush on fire. When someone comes to investigate, test his gullibity by giving him a bunch of silly rules to follow.
Posted by rivka (Member # 4859) on :
Only 8!
Hatrack really is going downhill. Posted by Sterling (Member # 8096) on :
Walk around for a centurty or two to see if there is a people on earth who a) won't immediately get hit by a rock and have my advanced technology and wisdom taken from them by force, and b) won't immediately use said advanced technology and wisdom as a rock to hit everyone with whom they've been nursing a long-standing grudge.
Posted by Nighthawk (Member # 4176) on :
You know, this reminds me of an upcoming movie: District 9.
Posted by Juxtapose (Member # 8837) on :
7) Dissect some farm animals and make designs in fields. Buzz some poor honest folk.
Probe anuses.
Posted by Sean Monahan (Member # 9334) on :
8) Reveal myself in the sky to the entire planet at once, and just hang there. Observe with interest how *they* go about initiating contact with *me*.
Posted by The Reader (Member # 3636) on :
I've taken an different approach in a short story I wrote a long time ago. The aliens remain secretive except to a few people who they "recruit" via abductions. The people act as "apostles" in a way, reporting back to aliens as they (the appointed humans) make subtle attempts to make the planet ready to accept the existence of aliens.
The story was rejected by IGMS, and I really, really want to redo it.
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