Should we assume that Aliens would be friendly?

No.

Aliens might be friendly. But let's hope they do not land in the U.S. and ask "Take me to your leader."

1) FTL ain't never gonna happen

It's a science fiction thing, and usually a bad science fiction thing. People have no concept of what's required just to get to, say, 15 percent the speed of light, which would be a monumental fucking achievement in the history of the human race.

Every proposed method of FTL is deep into the theoretical realm, precisely because that's where scientists can discuss ridiculous ideas with relative impunity. We're talking about proposals based on other theoretical tech that not only is way beyond our grasp, but may never come to fruition.

Right around here is usually where someone comes in with, "You just need to have an open mind, man! Anything is possible if you put your mind to it!" as if you can assemble the greatest minds in human history, give them a good pep talk, and wait for them to build you a warp drive.


2) If an intelligent civilization is capable of reaching Earth, there is nothing we possess that they could possibly want

Seriously, the energy required to get here would exceed the combined energy all of the human race could muster. Interstellar travel requires stellar mastery or at least something like Bussard ramjets (ramscoops) that collect fuel from the interstellar medium. A civilization with those capabilities isn't going to concern itself with a primitive civilization that still scrapes energy from dead plants, with members who cannot stop murdering themselves long enough to speak with one voice.

As Michio Kaku has said, the biggest danger with aliens isn't that they're going to invade us, or take our planet, or eat us -- the biggest danger is that they won't even notice us, and we'll get "paved over." In other words, maybe they'd use our solar system for raw materials, or carve through the immediate neighborhood for some inscrutable purpose.

When we build our highways, do we stop to consider how we'll impact the lives of ants?



Homo sapiens has existed for about 200,000 years.

At light speed it would take 2.5 million light years just to reach the outer spiral of the next-closest galaxy, Andromeda. At sublight we're talking about millions upon millions of years to get there...long enough for ten thousand civilizations to rise and fall during the journey.

Safe to say we will never meet an intelligence from another galaxy, and there is no motivation for even a hyper-advanced civilization to leave its own galaxy to explore another. The distance is just too great.

AI is another thing that's not happening, at least any time soon. Noam Chomsky and Michio Kaku are both much more measured on the subject than enthusiasts like Ray Kurzweil, and from a design perspective, creating a true AI would really be akin to trying for godhood, and would be the most massive and difficult undertaking in the history of the human race.

Of course, I'm talking about actual AI. The stuff we call "AI" right now is not real AI because it's not intelligent -- it's designed to appear intelligent, but fundamentally it's no different than a chatbot or a video game NPC. That is, the "AI" doesn't understand the conversation, it doesn't understand the words, it doesn't realize it is engaging in a conversation, it doesn't know that it exists, it doesn't think at all. It's just a piece of tech coded to trick the user into thinking they are communicating with a machine, through tricks and clever algorithms. The intelligence is in the people who design those AIs, not the "AIs" themselves.

As far as the time and distance problems, it's not hard to envision these being minimized by hyper-advanced beings, perhaps ones that are no longer dependent on short-lived organic vehicles. Given what we currently know about the universe, which is essentially nothing, it's a bit premature to rule out faster than light travel.  As for the issue of motivation to leave one's galaxy, you're right.  I got nothing.  What would hyper-intelligent beings do all day anyway?  Exploring other galaxies would become a banality at some point.  Maybe attempting to transform the universe in some fundamental way or even leave it, if such a thing even made sense to talk about.  Neither of these seems like it would require travel to another galaxy though.