Alien Sociology

From SPACE.com:

Why would extraterrestrials come here for a visit? According to Hollywood, Earth is surely one of the galaxy's "top places to visit before you die." Cinema aliens come here often enough that the State Department should probably set up passport control. Of course, that's fiction. But in the last hundred years, Homo sapiens has been flamboyantly belching clues into space that could alert technically savvy extraterrestrials of our presence. Radar and television, odd chemical compounds in the atmosphere, and even the occasional spacecraft sent beyond the heliopause are all messages in bottles that could conceivably wash up on the shores of ET's planet. When I point this out in talks, a frequent reaction is "Won't they come here and kill us?" I offer this response as proof of the general optimism of 21st century humankind. Nonetheless, maybe this dystopian view is worth considering. Would the extraterrestrials come here — if not to kill us — then to take our resources or compromise our virtue? The answer, of course, falls within the discipline of alien sociology — a field in which the data are, shall we say, sparse. Indeed, since we have no idea what the mores or motivations of extraterrestrials might be, you might conclude that, really, there's nothing we can say about whether the aliens would come here or not. But there's an alternative to this "know-nothing" approach. Let's consider what might conceivably encourage visits by those who've learned that humans are strutting and fretting upon Earth's stage. After all, we've unraveled a few things about astronomy and physics, if not much about alien comportment.

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