Posted: 10 October 2018 at 7:45am | IP Logged | 7
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I'm paranoid. I still would want to encounter an alien race on a neutral site, and be certain that they couldn't find a way to track our representatives back to Terra.
Both of those are impossible at our current level of technology - when it would take an emergency priority plan to get to Mars any time in, say, the next twenty years, there IS no neutral site in the Solar System.
We have nothing like a cloaking system that would work - I don't even know how well stealth bombers work against both instruments and plain ol' eyeballs. (Then again, I've never seen a stealth aircraft, so...)
The only possibility I can think of in the next 50 years is still a long shot. If we detected an alien exploratory race before they detected us, we might be developed enough to send non-humanoid robots to, say, Titan or Ganymede. As communications would obviously take eight hours back and forth, we'd want to lie about that - say a communications burst every 12 hours. And rather than return them to Earth, we'd want to be able to self-destruct them once discussions were done (or more reasonably, set them on a 24 hour self-destruct that must be deactivated every 12 hours... or after a day, they deactivate and blow up.)
Sure it sounds crazy. But it's at least a margin of safety. And in any case, I suspect that, while aliens could land tomorrow, we won't have extra-terrestrial visitors anytime soon.
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