> High risk with the highest reward I don’t understand people who think this way. Let’s imagine there is definitely an alien and we find it. Assume it follows

> High risk with the highest reward I don’t understand people who think this way. Let’s imagine there is definitely an alien and we find it. Assume it follows a similar tech trajectory as humans. If we find it in the millions of years of pre-civilization we got nothing. Probably don’t even notice it. If we get it the thousands of years before communication tech, we also get squat. If we get it in the couple hundred years between comm tech and the present, we maybe can do something? If we go beyond the present either they have killed themselves, or they’re inconceivably more advanced than us and the idea that we found them before they found us is kind of laughable. The probability that we’re the first civilization to have “found” them is laughable. By all means, space and communication tech is interesting. Go make it. If finding aliens would have some philosophical value to you, go look for them. But to think that they’re likely to change society seems weird.