Are you saying we'd develop a real-life prime directive of sorts?

Maybe at first it'd be that way, but through mutual contact we'd probably establish some sort of quarantine procedure and mutual exchange of biological material to ensure safe contact once all avenues for infection and undermining of local flora and fauna have been exhausted. It'd probably take many, many years of research, but I think contact would eventually be possible. At our current level of sophistication we can hardly control disease outbreaks among our own population, let alone deal with invasive species, so that sort of stuff is definitely a long-ways off in terms of feasibility. There's no real telling how advanced their civilization would be compared to our own, though, so maybe for most worlds we really would have to abide by a prime directive not to interfere, lest we alter their entire biosphere.

>>957
I don't need no ALIENs tellin' me where I can and cannot breathe. My flag says freedom and if they can't accept that they can prepare to be hacked on.

by the time it's possible it's probably the chinese who'd do it and they won't give a shit about environment quarantine and whatnot

>>959
Maybe, I think they could go both ways. I would be more concerned about private companies or individuals doing that, I can easily see a rich Arab or American sending a spaceship there just to say he was the first to do it without caring what impact he has.

>>954
even if we did go interplanetary, I think it would still be less interesting in the sense that it would just be earth 2.0, (or 3.0, etc) with maybe different amount of gravitational force but that'd be about it. Same wage slaving days will be spent by the working class while the rich will be living in their own private land in the moon or something. Sure we'd be excited for like a week or so but the hype will just fade away after that. Then its back to living the same boring earthly days in another planet.

>>963
Pray for the day humanity becomes post-scarcity and learns energy to matter conversion.

>>963
I don't think so. It would revolutionise every science and every field of study.

Lets pretend they are have a civilization like us. That's a whole new world for us to explore, literally. People can learn all about their history, culture, the wars they fought, their armies, their anime etc. Even if they don't but just have life that still means there is a a whole world of flora and fauna to explore. And an interesting part of all this is that it can help us better understand life on our own planet, if we found a planet that had life that was similar to dinosaurs then we could use theses animals to fill in the gaps of our knowledge of our own dinosaurs in the same way anthropologists can use the anthropological record to fill in gaps(and that record it self might be greatly expanded if we came across a primitive human like society).

But yes, if it did have primitive life and we colonised it instead then to most people it would just be the same old earth days but on another planet after a while but that would take time. First a lot of research would be getting done and out posts established, there would be a lot of romanticism surrounding the idea of travelling to new and empty world and starting anew.

>>959
I've been thinking about this post a lot. If anything, the Chinese would probably send poachers to add alien meat to the TCM canon as treatment for who knows what. Migraines, maybe.

>>954
I don't care about finding another civilization
I care about knowning and seeing the wonders of the Galaxy with my own eyes and understanding reality as much as possible

Actually I think maybe this is not such an issue after all. Because life on other planets is not related to us in any way so our maladies might not effect them at all, it would be like humans getting a jelly fish disease from touching jelly fish, actually even less likely than that.

>>1006
I only care about civilization or at least advanced life otherwise it would be boring. Like how Mars is incredibly boring, why would anybody even want to go there? I don't think it will ever happen, even if it was possible once it actually occurred to those idiots just how boring Mars is they would not want to go any more. It certainly is not worth the effort and I don't think we are anywhere near to it anyway.

>>957
I can’t imagine most people/organizations would be worried about any sort of biological exchange unless it is harmful to them personally. Essentially, as soon as procedures and measures are in place to insulate humans from most adverse effects the alien biosphere would have on us we would run roughshod all over the place with little regard for the impact it would have on the biosphere. Some people care but as a whole people do not care beyond things that affect themselves; if there was some economic incentive it would only exasperate this sort of outcome. We don’t and won’t attempt to control all outcomes, interaction between planetary biospheres will have, only the outcomes that immediately adversely affect humans.

>>1118
Assume the aliens have guns