What do we do if SETI is successful?

For a somber, deeply intellectual view of what could happen, I can't recommend enough Stanislaw Lem's His Master's Voice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_%28novel%...

"Given that our civilization is unable to assimilate well even those concepts that originate in human heads when they appear outside its main current, although the creators of those concepts are, after all, children of the same age—how could we have assumed that we would be capable of understanding a civilization totally unlike ours, if it addressed us across the cosmic gulf?"

Me and my dog cannot talk.

I understand my dog and he understands me.

If they experience death then we have massive common ground already.

Humans and dogs have evolved together to be cooperative…

would you feel common ground with a predatory fish? Or a plant? An insect colony?

We all share many similar biological imperatives And these contrived examples because we all evolved on the same planet. Even the worst case scenario of the Dark Forest has many anthropomorphic priors within.

Imagine an intelligent shade of blue. Thank you, Douglas Adams. I suspect we have no idea WTF is out there and I'm not a carbon chauvinist like Carl Sagan was. But I wish I would have lived long enough to find out and I suspect that won't be the case.

> Imagine an intelligent shade of blue

A finite intelligence, willing to talk across the galaxy, talking in finite sequences, using engineering and maths?

I'm sure there's a lot of universal aprioris

There's also a lot of "universals" that people take for granted as universal when it really isn't universal.

Things off the top of my head that humans usually take for granted as "universals":

- Separation of memory and DNA. What if memories were stored in DNA and can be passed between individuals?

- Inability to share memories. What if memories can be passed around like semen and sweat?

- Inability to easily read others' minds. What if kissing/touching someone would share all of each others' thoughts? How would that alien society develop differently?

- Existence of the ego. What if they live in a constant state of ego death, like some humans on certain drugs?

- Separation of the id and the superego. This is... one way to solve an alignment problem, I suppose. Imagine a species which replaced their sense of hunger/sexual craving, with a craving for morality. And they execute creatures like humans when they see a human do anything immoral, such as eating an ice cream when it can reduce your lifespan and thus deprive your children of a parent, or deprive your society of tax dollars.

- And many other possible examples that i can come up with that exists within human "thoughtspace", let alone concepts that do not exist within human thoughtspace

How would you feel if you met an alien species that communicates by raping their children? If that sounds weird to you, what if they can communicate via the DNA in sperm, so it'd be somewhat similar to how human sex transmits information from the human male to the human female?

> There's also a lot of "universals" that people take for granted as universal when it really isn't universal.

It doesn't matter if they kiss to talk or pass on their memories as DNA or they exist in a permanent stat of ego death.

Because we received a modulated signal across the Galaxy, it tells me they:

1) are willing to talk using sequences 2) are technologically inclined, hence they know maths and physics