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If You Meet ET in Space, Kill Him
Should an alien species resist, we will have discovered life.
In Stanislaw Lem ’s final novel, Fiasco, humans (spoiler alert) send a ship to contact aliens on a distant planet and, when they don’t respond to radio messages, attack. In a 2014 paper, anthropologist Ben Finney—who has collaborated with SETI scientists to study historical precedents of intercultural contact—wrote that European scholars used to think they could translate ancient Mayan hieroglyphs based on math and astronomy. SETI researchers talk about communicating information, starting with prime numbers, but hopefully leading to a cure for cancer, a unified theory of physics, and all the other wisdom an advanced civilization could offer.
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