Please do not try and communicate with them. It likely will not end well for us.

2800 year lag. Should be able to get ready.

Not if they're already a couple thousand years ahead of us.

They would be millions of years ahead of us. It would be an astronomical coincidence if we ever meet another civilization that has only been around for a few thousand years.

No aliens would ever care about us unless they have some need to talk to beings who would be ants, or they have an overdeveloped sense of compassion for lower life forms. But then aliens are alien, and they are bound to have inscrutable motivations for their actions.

Here's hoping we've made it past the Great Filter already, otherwise we still have a way to go before we prove we can actually move out into the Galaxy.

https://xkcd.com/1377/

Yeah, and we're the idiots shouting we're here to anyone who will listen.

Another way to look at it as we're the equivalent of chimps to them, instead of ants. As a species we're not afraid of chimps. That doesn't mean we go into a chimp's native habitat willy-nilly. They're capable and mean, even if they're not as advanced as we are.

You also have to think about how technology and understanding increases. It's not linear. It's as plausible as anything that there there are plateaus. Even if they've been on a plateau for a while, if we reach the edge of the plateau in 1000 years, there's a reason for them to be wary.

I have this feeling that our first contact will be the voyager's golden record with a hole blasted trough it, being sent back as a warning...

Well there's a couple chances for confirmation down.

http://www.seti.org/seti-institute/press-release/looking-deliberate-radio-signals-kic-8462852

No "look at me" signal and no obvious activity that we know how to look for.

One of the things potentially hampering the search for extraterrestrial life is that we do so under terrestrial standards.

Radio signals. Microwave emissions. Terrestrial methods of measurement. It's almost a given that any advanced alien civilisation would develop on entirely different evolutionary lines, and wouldn't use anything even remotely similar to the type of technology we use.

Ruling out the existence of known energy emissions is of course a good first step, but when we're talking about the possible existence of unknown technology, it's still just the first step on a potentially infinite path.

Either way, it will be interesting to see if we can come to any firm conclusions as to what the hell is going on with this particular star, because extraterrestrial activity or not, something interesting is happening there.

I think we're alone in the universe, but even if we aren't, we may as well be - we won't be seeing anyone else in the time we have left.

Well there's a couple chances for confirmation down.

http://www.seti.org/seti-institute/press-release/looking-deliberate-radio-signals-kic-8462852

No "look at me" signal and no obvious activity that we know how to look for.

Hell, maybe this whole asymmetric structure is the "look at me" signal. It's weird, it's visible from pretty sizable distances, it probably works for many millenia without any repairs. Anyone who's really interested can come see it, and the builder knows that people who come see this weird thing it built AND can actually make the trip are interesting to talk to. That or it's a decoy and anyone who can make the trip is known to be dangerous enough to track to their point of origin and "deal with".

Or they just built a power station for some other purpose and don't particularly care what we think.

Yeah, we could be mosquitos fascinated by a porch light.

I still think it's Tyranids.

My reasoning for not seeking alien contact is that evolution teaches us that the most advanced organisms in any ecosystem are always the apex predators. Predators are always smarter, faster, and more adaptable because they have to continually be "better" than their prey or die out. So, any alien we encounter will have "won" their evolutionary race on their home planet and be a predator of some sort. And with that predator background there is an inherent aggressive nature because they, at some point in their past had to hunt and kill prey to survive. That being said, I believe any species advanced enough for space travel will have had to evolve to a point where cooperation beats out the kill-or-be-killed predatory nature, but it is still there.

Personally, I don't want to take the chance that the first aliens we interact with are more ET than Independence Day. Then again, we need to figure out how to leave this rock before we destroy it.

The 150,000 stars we have so far given only the barest preliminary scrutiny, amounts to less than a thousandth of a percent of all the stars in the Milky Way Galaxy (Approximately 100 Billion stars).

Getting rid of a few zeros to keep the ratio, but make the numbers more manageable, that's like saying you've examined 15 people out 100,000, and found one of them to be significantly different than the (very few) others you've looked at. The fact that we managed to see something like that in such a small sample, suggests not that it is extremely rare, but rather that it is common enough. Think it through - for something at all to show up after examining less than 1/1000th of a percent of the stars in this galaxy alone, suggests that there ought to be millions of stars just like this one in this galaxy alone.

Given how little we know about the whole of our galaxy, the odds are much better that this is just as as yet unexplained naturally occurring somewhat "rare" (but not overly so) phenomenon. I expect that when we've examined another few hundred thousand stars, we'll see a couple more like this.

The "rare" phenomenon could still be an advanced civilization.

Yeah, we could be mosquitos fascinated by a porch light.

"If they are out there then they certainly know about us. But they have not contacted us. So at best we will annoy them if we make contact."

They have probaly intercepted our radio and tv signals, looked all the alien invasion movies and figured that we don't want any visitors.

...or just looked at all the news reports on war, terrorism and violence and figured that the last thing they want to do is potentially hand us any kind of advanced technology.

In the backstory for the Monsterpocalypse game, the resource starved martians make a secret pact with the government to trade technology for resources. (thereby subtily steering mankinds technological development in a direction that will prove beneficial to the martians) Resources they use to build a large fleet of ships and ground vehicles.

Then they invaded.

...or just looked at all the news reports on war, terrorism and violence and figured that the last thing they want to do is potentially hand us any kind of advanced technology.

Aaaawww. But I want a Molecluar Separator Rifle! Or a Quantum Deconstructor!

...or just looked at all the news reports on war, terrorism and violence and figured that the last thing they want to do is potentially hand us any kind of advanced technology.

Aaaawww. But I want a Molecluar Separator Rifle! Or a Quantum Deconstructor!

For duck hunting.

...or just looked at all the news reports on war, terrorism and violence and figured that the last thing they want to do is potentially hand us any kind of advanced technology.

Aaaawww. But I want a Molecluar Separator Rifle! Or a Quantum Deconstructor!

For duck hunting.

That duck was coming straight for me!

Of course the Entropy Accelerator and the Dimensional Reductor are for home defense.

Really? I prefer the Singularity Emitter.

Nothing quite like watching would-be burglars collapse inwards with a surprised expression and a loud GLOP.

Really? I prefer the Singularity Emitter.

Nothing quite like watching would-be burglars collapse inwards with a surprised expression and a loud GLOP.

You know that you are just populating a parallel dimension with either criminals or globs of organic matter, right?

*Spaghettified organic matter.

You know that you are just populating a parallel dimension with either criminals or globs of organic matter, right?

Hey, other dimensions do it to us all the time! How else do you explain Ricky Gervais?

You know that you are just populating a parallel dimension with either criminals or globs of organic matter, right?

Hey, other dimensions do it to us all the time! How else do you explain Ricky Gervais?

Andy **** takes offense to this.

Update on the weirdest star in the Milky Way: in addition to the recent dips the star has had a longterm fade in brightness for as far back as we can measure. Comet hypothesis is probably dead, but I don't think anyone has any explanation, natural or sentient, for this new finding. It is completely bizarre.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1601.03256

Abstract from paper is very blunt, lol.

The star KIC 8462852 is a completely-ordinary F3 main sequence star, except that the light curve from the Kepler spacecraft shows episodes of unique and inexplicable day-long dips with up to 20% dimming. Here, I provide a light curve of 1232 Johnson B-band magnitudes from 1890 to 1989 taken from archival photographic plates at Harvard. KIC 8462852 displays a highly significant and highly confident secular dimming at an average rate of 0.165+-0.013 magnitudes per century. From the early 1890s to the late 1980s, KIC 8462852 has faded by 0.193+-0.030 mag. This century-long dimming is completely unprecedented for any F-type main sequence star. So the Harvard light curve provides the first confirmation (past the several dips seen in the Kepler light curve alone) that KIC 8462852 has anything unusual going on. The century-long dimming and the day-long dips are both just extreme ends of a spectrum of timescales for unique dimming events, so by Ockham's Razor, all this is produced by one physical mechanism. This one mechanism does not appear as any isolated catastrophic event in the last century, but rather must be some ongoing process with continuous effects. Within the context of dust-occultation models, the century-long dimming trend requires 10^4 to 10^7 times as much dust as for the one deepest Kepler dip. Within the context of the comet-family idea, the century-long dimming trend requires an estimated 648,000 giant comets (each with 200 km diameter) all orchestrated to pass in front of the star within the last century.