Aliens.page

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One question is: what do we know about aliens? May want to look at Great Filter (may want separate page just to discuss implications of Great Filter for cause prioritization, but may be too unrelated to host here). Should we bother worrying about them?

Another question: given what we know about aliens, is it a good idea to try to get their attention with e.g. SETI?

See Cato Unbound series "[Politics, Social Theory, and SETI](http://www.cato-unbound.org/issues/december-2014/politics-social-theory-seti)".

Robin Hanson [endorses mild regulation to discourage the summoning of dark supernatural powers](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/10/dont-summon-dark-lords.html) (may rephrase, idea is not as crazy as it sounds). This includes folk ones and alien ones, since many would be willing to pay (or pay off others) to stop summonings (if we haven't already agreed on which unknown powers we should be afraid of). (This may be a bad / inaccurate paraphrasing of Robin's position.)

See also [Open Research Questions \- Foundational Research Institute](http://foundational-research.org/open-research-questions/#Aliens) for some questions regarding aliens.

Paul Christiano: <https://sideways-view.com/2018/03/23/on-seti/>, <https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/jhcwBXuNCWEsJdfKe/weird-question-could-we-see-distant-aliens>

[Risks of downloading alien AI via SETI search](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Jng2cZQtyuXDPihNg/risks-of-downloading-alien-ai-via-seti-search)