For practical purposes the resources of a single solar system are nearly unlimited. There is little reason to make the incredibly resource intensive trek to a different solar system. What’s more, by the time you have the technology to make the journey you have already well mapped out all nearby solar systems. There is no need to select one with another species unless you are specifically intending to interact with the species.
It adds a huge element of risk to the equation. What if the species fucks up their planet in the decades/centuries it takes you to make the trip. Even if you wipe them out there might be no place to live. Better to go to a solar system with fewer unknowns.
Potential advantages to having an intergalactic conversation:
Settling the whole “is there other intelligent life out there” question
Possible scientific exchange and learning
Potential Disadvantages to having an intergalactic conversation:
Destruction of the entire human civilization and the extinction of humanity.
I think that not only is this a horrible, horrible idea, but that we should also need to start being as quiet as we can, in regards to emissions on the radio and EM spectrums. We need to shut up, and hope that our presence has been missed by other spacefaring civilizations, because we are point blank not ready for first contact.
The other thing to keep in mind is that they don’t have to be malicious to do us harm. The Europeans brought disease to the Americas; alien species may do something similar. Picture alien plankton filling the seas, or alien plants interfering with crop growth.
If they have the tech to come here, they also have the tech (and patience) to surreptitiously monitor us for a while. Realistically, that would most likely result in either:
They can probably burn away our entire atmosphere with the exhaust of their engines. While speculating about alien visitors and their motivations is fun, it’s also quite pointless since we’d be powerless to do anything about it.
I understand your point, but radio transmissions are just one of the many ways in which sufficiently advanced aliens would be able to detect us. For example, looking at the composition of exoplanet atmospheres is something we’ll be able to do in the near future. If aliens look at our planet that way they’d detect the telltale signs of hydrocarbon burning and a fairly large greenhouse effect, clear signs of our presence. That’s just one example I thought of just now, there’s many more no doubt, several of which we won’t even know about. Trying to hide is essentially pointless.
ETA: something more fundamental is the oxygen level of our atmosphere. Assuming for the sake of this argument that this level doesn’t occur naturally without photosynthesis or similar process, the information about the presence of oxygen in large amounts on earth has been traveling for hundreds of millions of years if not billions. Long enough to reach many, many galaxies. Nothing we can do about that.
Why would we assume aliens even HAVE anything remotely akin to human emotion? When we meet aliens they could well take the form of a hive-minded collective of intelligent crystals that exist on a completely different timescale and seek nothing beyond resource extraction.
Yup. Furthermore, ascribing “emotions” to aliens, much less human emotions, without a LOT of evidence (such as actual empirical observations over a long period of time) is pretty much guaranteed to be a mistake.
If we share even remotely the same sensory suite, we’re already way ahead of the game. Hell, we’re ridiculously lucky if we can recognize each other as sentient beings!
