Interstellar is the best movie of all time.
The good people don’t matter. The bad people are the ones who are going to exploit the aliens anyway.
If Aliens show up they will be advanced enough to utterly immune to whatever we throw at them!
They would never be stupid enough to give us their Warp Drives(which warps Space and Time beyond Localized Pocket Universes) nor any comparable technology.
The most they would give us is the ability to create Localized Pocket Universes and that won’t give us the ability to fight them considering they can alter Reality on a higher level than we can!
Any giant Star or Galaxy-sized Energy Beam attacks that get thrown at their general direction will be casually sucked into a hole in Space & Time!
We will only meet their Minions and Less Competent Civilians! The ones who know how to use their Warp Drives and other advanced Tech will not show themselves to us! We have no way of beating them!
It’s always interesting to see the assumption that any alien race with more advanced technology than us would have to be more evolved intellectually than us.
Neither Pythagoras, Ada Lovelace, Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Leonhard Euler, Alhazen Ibn al-Haytham, nor Blaise Pascal ever learned to use a smart phone or even to drive a car. So almost any current politician, celebrity, or telemarketer is far more advanced technologically than any of them were.
There has been no significant intellectual evolution of the human race between 10BC and 2021AD, only an accumulation of knowledge and technology.
It’s easy to imagine an intelligent alien civilization with an average IQ around 85 or less, but either a couple thousand years head start, an environment more conducive to innovation, or both, being far ahead of us technologically while being less intelligent than us generally.
You make and excellent point but I think reality is messier than this. For example, Pythagoras would probably never grasp Quantum Field Theory as his view of the Universe is so fundamentally different. His reality is one of a nice, clean geometry and elementary forces such as fire or water. To wrap his head around the idea that reality is fundamentally about probability and embraces simultaneous contradictory conditions.
This is why a race that a thousand of years ahead of current us would be “smarter” as a whole, even if individual members are no smarter than individuals today as you correctly point out. Now if they are ten thousand or more years ahead of us, then yeah, their tech will be indistinguishable from magic to us and their view of the universe will be unintelligible.
The Mars Climate Orbiter lost on September 23, 1999 when software from Lockheed Martin used imperial units contrary to the Software Interface Specifications that, like all government space programs, specified use of SI units.
Meanwhile: It was Perkin-Elmer who used a miss-aligned test instrument resulting in spherical aberration in the 2.4-metre primary mirror of the Hubble Space Telescope.
When low tech instruments showed the error, the management at Perkin-Elmer chose to ignore the data and rely on the more “high tech” instrument (a technician could infer that remaining on schedule influenced the decision, but that could be seen as churlish). So not a conversion error for that screwup.
Meanwhile a backup mirror was created at Eastman Kodak that could have been substituted and, as it turns out, had no flaws.
I actually wonder what ever happened to the Kodak mirror, I saw it once, it was quite impressive. Hopefully it was used in some later instrument.
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The individual called Pythagoras was building on the knowledge of his time and place. If that same individual had been raised in a time when Einstein, Bohr and Schrödinger were historical figures I assume he would use his intellect quite differently and would likely advance the understanding of that time and place.
More advanced, but not smarter, I see little correlation between education and intelligence.
In that scenario we wouldn’t ever be able to catch up unless they voluntarily gave us the technology.
EDIT: I should have said voluntarily gave us the knowledge.
This is the crux of the point, that the time one is raised and that age’s assumptions about the world lock our minds into distinct frames of reference. I completely agree with you about Pythagoras and the difference if he was born in the 20th Century, but that is the point. Individually, he’s much smarter than me but his world view probably could not change enough to grasp our science. Likewise, we probably could not grasp the science of aliens 1,000 years ahead of us, especially if they have figured out faster than light travel while we see light as the ultimate speed limit.
Certainly, a dullard could brute force their way to a college degree but as a rule education and intelligence reinforce each other. Essentially, for all of his native intelligence, Pythagoras would score poorly on a modern IQ test because he lacks so many fundamental concepts we take for granted.
I completely agree and even then, depending on how much of our current science we are capable of “forgetting” it may be it takes a new generation raised on those new paradigms to truly make sense of them.
I suspect we are in about 98 percent agreement and differ more over the linguistic subtleties than the essence of the point. An enjoyable discussion with a bright and well spoken person. 
OK to be CLEAR the official government stance from the department of the Navy is ‘UFO’ this does NOT imply Aliens!
UFO means unidentified… doesn’t mean not from this Earth… stop jumping to conclusions.
Yes the Navy has just changed from ‘no comment’ or ‘classified’ to ‘we don’t know you figure it out’.
I think the Navy knows but they aren’t saying because people will just refute it and make fun of it. So the Navy is now officially just calling ‘unknown’ because people don’t know what UFO stands for…
What we are going through with the cancel culture and over-sensitivity to all races, creeds and nationalities… they would not DARE label it.
I wouldn’t either even if I knew 100% what it was… I would make people ‘guess’… it’s not only amusing but other people can just figure it out and make their own assumptions.
The Navy will never be wrong with this approach.
The only Tech they would be likely to give us is the kind that allows us our own Localized Pocket Universes!
We’d gain the ability to create Elementals of any sort we desire as well as create Universes based on said Elementals:
- A Death Elemental Planet(Maldraxxus as a Planet) with Portals to a Localized Pocket Universe themed on the Death Elemental Energies.
- A Darkness Elemental Planet with Portals leading to a Localized Darkness Elemental Pocket Universe based on KH’s Realm of Darkness, Metroid Prime 2’s Dark Aether, WoW’s Ny’alotha, the Emerald Nightmare, Dread Wastes, Twilight Citadel and Telogrus Rift.
- A Light Elemental Planet with Portals leading to a Localized Light Elemental Pocket Universe based on the Ember Ward and Darksiders 2’s Lostlight(down to the Corruption Crystals).
- A Life/Blood Elemental Planet where 1 quarter is a Castlevania/Revendreth-like Castle(filled with Red Atonement Elementals), another is a Yharnam-like City, another resembles GW’s Depths of Madness and the last quarter resembles GW’s Domain of Pain with Portals leading to a Localized Pocket Universe that resembles the Planet itself!