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.

And you are comfortable being the dog in this cosmic relationship then?

Does it make you uncomfortable to think an alien civilization might be somehow superior to humans? That's a pretty immature thing to be insecure about.

An alien race arriving at our shores cannot be anything but disastrous for us, IMO.

Why go through the massive expense to come all the way here if the intention is something that is not conquering or total dominion over us? We did this to our own fellow humans a couple of hundred years ago.

So yeah, call it immature or insecure. But I prefer they just leave us alone to be honest.

But we hardly evolved past apes at this point (on any cosmic/earth timescale); these aliens have transportation that is technologically something akin to whatever scifi we came up with and deem mostly ideas that are not possible in reality. They could be around for 10s of millions of years while we are here just for a few 300k or so years with our real advancements just starting. They might have gone beyond the 'you land, I take, you die' kind of 'animal' thing we humans have?

> But we hardly evolved past apes at this point

And? Evolution is not "Progress to this $UTOPIC_POINT". Evolution does not mean "progress at all", using "progress" as you seem to use it in the rest of your post.

They may have evolved to not have any compassion for any species that is not their own. They may have evolved to a point of having no compassion whatsoever.