The case for stopping efforts to contact aliens

First, the power of AI could supercharge existing human conflicts, dividing humanity against itself.

we can communicate with other people by sending predetermined messages determined by our genes or culture, or we can invent something new. But in the latter case, to have any chance of communicating, we had better strive to rise above parochialism and seek universal truths. This may be the proximate reason that humans ever began to do so.

The best-case scenario is they retreat to someplace where they can’t be found. The worst-case scenarios are so much worse I can’t even bear to think of them. This isn’t going to be a first-contact story, where humanity achieves enlightenment because we finally realize we aren’t alone in the universe, and we all hold hands and sing around a campfire

Science has not been helpful in the matter of elusive human contacts with other intelligences. It prefers to direct its attention elsewhere, with the comment that subjective experiences, however peculiar, are not its province. What a pity, since subjective experience is all that any of us ever has.