The British public are to be told all the bizarre details of UFO sightings, it seems. Former Ministry of Defence UFO investigator Nick Pope says that "These files show that whatever you think about UFOs, this is a mystery that is not going to go away".
Possibly. But there are lots of mysteries like that. The real problem of meeting a civilisation capable of inter-stellar travel is that they will have obviously cracked the political code for a permanent sustainable civilisation, but one of the possible options would be distasteful to a lot of people - at the totalitarian end of the spectrum, and to a lot of very powerful political and business interests at the other. So any dialogue with alien envoys would expose us to some very hard choices, and could cause massive political and economic turmoil.
A civilisation which lasts long enough to reach us in any active state would either be some kind of rigid autocracy or a sustainable egalitarianism. The one thing it cannot be is a rapacious consumerist economy which destroys everything which nurtures it. Whichever it turns out to be, we will seem trapped on that same path, which would completely alter Humanity's view of itself, and the whole notion of history and progress.
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