I'm going for a 3. Reason as follows: when two sentient species meet, one will be vastly technologically outside the reach of the other. Consider if we invaded us on 1st January 1900. Whitewash - nukes, cruise missiles, heavy tanks, helicopter gunships, assault weaponry, tactical radios, low orbit precision bombing. They've got artillery! Yay! So if they're not hostile, then there's nothing we can do to hurt them anyway and they'll soon set us straight. If they're hostile then either we get them or they get us. Easily. If by freak accident we wipe out a friendly contact, no big deal. We're still here and can push the advantage.
Cutting to face to face contact reactions, inserting disclaimers about broad but limited knowledge:
From what I've gathered from a very limited interest in psychology and such things, you're (I'm told) applying too much actual thought to the reaction on actually seeing aliens or certain evidence of aliens. The arrival of a truly alien species trying to make contact or just visibly existing would cut out all the thinking parts of the brain entire and step into the gut reaction which kicks in when, as a child of five, you lie in bed, staring at the wardrobe door that's open a crack, convinced the vampire inside is staring out at you, waiting for you to go to sleep...
Thought is discarded in favour of pure reaction and the reaction is fear so intense that if you can't get away from it right away you'll go insane, fear that will make you claw, hit, kick and struggle to be elsewhere, but you probably won't think about the gun at your side until you're a mile away, huddled in a ditch shivering and crying.
The good news is threefold: (1) the other side, may be braced for contact, assuming they believed it possible for other intelligent life to exist and so may be able to take a little of this calmly before reacting in the same way to us, with the benefits of the tech that allowed them to cross the stars. (2) to embrace the concept of alien correctly, the vast majority of potential contacts are probably so alien that we wouldn't even comprehend them as contact. And neither would the other side. (3) Dropping back into comprehendable technologies and attitudes, there's as good a chance that contact will come from Von Neumann probes as with any kind of manned ships. Von Neumann being the gent who outlined how one approach to the possibility to the existence of alien sentient life would be for a species to build self-replicating, self-maintaining space probes that would scatter through the stars, working on set lines to render any location producing, say, radio waves in certain frequencies which didn't carry a specific under signal (don't want to kill ourselves, after all), uninhabitable or better yet dust in space. So the concept of contact wouldn't even occur - most likely we'd get time to say "Hmm... that's an interesting thing. One of Jupiter's moons just disappeared." before fragments of said moon hit us.
no subject
So if they're not hostile, then there's nothing we can do to hurt them anyway and they'll soon set us straight. If they're hostile then either we get them or they get us. Easily. If by freak accident we wipe out a friendly contact, no big deal. We're still here and can push the advantage.
Cutting to face to face contact reactions, inserting disclaimers about broad but limited knowledge:
From what I've gathered from a very limited interest in psychology and such things, you're (I'm told) applying too much actual thought to the reaction on actually seeing aliens or certain evidence of aliens. The arrival of a truly alien species trying to make contact or just visibly existing would cut out all the thinking parts of the brain entire and step into the gut reaction which kicks in when, as a child of five, you lie in bed, staring at the wardrobe door that's open a crack, convinced the vampire inside is staring out at you, waiting for you to go to sleep...
Thought is discarded in favour of pure reaction and the reaction is fear so intense that if you can't get away from it right away you'll go insane, fear that will make you claw, hit, kick and struggle to be elsewhere, but you probably won't think about the gun at your side until you're a mile away, huddled in a ditch shivering and crying.
The good news is threefold: (1) the other side, may be braced for contact, assuming they believed it possible for other intelligent life to exist and so may be able to take a little of this calmly before reacting in the same way to us, with the benefits of the tech that allowed them to cross the stars.
(2) to embrace the concept of alien correctly, the vast majority of potential contacts are probably so alien that we wouldn't even comprehend them as contact. And neither would the other side.
(3) Dropping back into comprehendable technologies and attitudes, there's as good a chance that contact will come from Von Neumann probes as with any kind of manned ships. Von Neumann being the gent who outlined how one approach to the possibility to the existence of alien sentient life would be for a species to build self-replicating, self-maintaining space probes that would scatter through the stars, working on set lines to render any location producing, say, radio waves in certain frequencies which didn't carry a specific under signal (don't want to kill ourselves, after all), uninhabitable or better yet dust in space. So the concept of contact wouldn't even occur - most likely we'd get time to say "Hmm... that's an interesting thing. One of Jupiter's moons just disappeared." before fragments of said moon hit us.