You really can't reason about alien intelligence at all. Look at how hard it is for, say, a typical American to reason about a devout Muslim in Iran or vice ver

You really can't reason about alien intelligence at all. Look at how hard it is for, say, a typical American to reason about a devout Muslim in Iran or vice versa. In that case we are talking about two beings of the same damn species with a lot of common history. If aliens are coming here their motives could be anything including irrational or just non-rational. I've speculated for a while that a "post-singularity" post-scarcity intelligence would get... bizarre... due to lack of hard scarcity constraints. It would just fan out across state space. It would be less Star Trek and more Lexx. Maybe they do make crop circles as interactive art. Maybe they do strange stuff to us to slowly convert us to their religion. Who knows? We can't know.