Is Humanity Ready for First Contact?

[AFTT47]

I see 3 possibilities:

1. Star Trek - style warp drive is possible and practical. Furthermore, it is doable within a relatively very short time from our current state of development - say 200 years or less.

2. Star Trek - style warp drive is possible and practical but not anytime soon. Starting from our current state of development, it is many hundreds or even thousands of years away.

3. Star Trek - style warp drive is either flat-out impossible or impracticable within several thousand years of our current development.

I don't see how we would be remotely ready for First Contact in any situation other than Possibility #1. Even in that case, I doubt it very much. Technology is moving so fast. I'm 57 years old. When I was a child and young adult, everything I learned had to come from personal contacts or books. Now, I have the entire sum of human knowledge available at my fingertips via the internet. That is an enormous advance. What about 50 years hence? We are on the verge of being able to mix man and machine. If I could survive for another 50 years, I might be able to merge my mind with a planetary computer network and seamlessly take advantage of massive calculative ability and limitless knowledge. I might be a superior being, able to draw upon resources not available to anyone who lives now.

The ages of stars are typically hundreds of millions of years apart! Can you imagine that? Just over 100 years ago, Orville Wright flew the first heavier than air craft for a few hundred feet. Now, we routinely launch craft into orbit. All that advance in just 100 years. Can you imagine how much advance there will be in a thousand years? But the ages of stars are hundreds of millions of years apart!!!

If you collect any two intelligent races at random, they are likely to be so far apart that one would view the other as insects while the other would view their more advanced neighbors as nothing less than gods. They will have nothing in common at all.

I love the fictional universes of Star Trek, Babylon 5 and Star Wars but they are pure folly. In the most optimistic assumptions, races close to the same level of development will be thousands of light years apart. And even then, the lesser race is not likely to benefit much from the more advanced race. This is something Star Trek probably got right. Interfering of the development of a lesser species will probably only hurt them.