Smart people do, but they're the exception.
No, not really. Very few people who are so sick they cannot stand manage to get into their workplaces
Perhaps you remember in 2007, when Atlanta personal-injury lawyer Andrew "Drew" Speaker flew from Atlanta, Georgia to Paris, France and on to Greece and then Italy before returning on a flight from Prague, Czech Republic to Montreal, Canada, where he crossed over the border and back into the United States while infected with multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis?
That's Hollywood biology, though, where one man moves around and creates a plague. But, the situation in which the really deadly versions of a disease spreads around takes a bit more than that. HIV, for example, has an extremely long incubation time. For the 1918 pandemic, it wasn't just that a guy with the nasty strain moved around, but that first hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands of people who had the disease were moved around. A situation that specifically favored and selected for the spread of the ugly strain was set up by human activity in large amounts.
However, even with sharing 90+% of our DNA, viruses do not jump easily from species to species with pathogenic virulence.
It happens commonly with influenza.
Unless Martian and terrestrial life share a common origin, it is likely that we share less than 50% of our DNA...assuming they're even carbon based.
You're too focused on viral infection. We don't even know if they have what we'd call viruses. I would expect another threat to be form other microorganisms - their analogs of bacteria or fungi, for example, that just happen to find the interior of the human body, or the interior of one of our major food crops, to be a really cool place to live. They don't have to share our DNA, they just have to be able to grow someplace really inconvenient. The chance of that being true for any particular microorganism from another world is not strong, of course.
One in ten people would smoke a kitten for the sake of smoking a kitten.
As my father would say, that's horsehockey. I think you're letting selection bias influence you. There are individuals who are horrible people, yes, and their horribleness imprints strongly upon us. And we then tend to make our estimates of how common the thing is based on how we *feel*, rather than real evidence.
Our reputation for rational thinking is vastly over rated.
For individuals, yes. But, for actions on the nation-state level, if you look at actual history, you'll generally see a socio-economic basis for conflict. There is no basis for such conflict at the tech levels we are considering. War may come eventually, when we are competing for resources, but not before.
I'm singling you out but it's prevalent throughout the thread. This is a very human centered, anthropocentric, way of looking at it. You're making the assumption that the aliens have political and economic structures as we have here in the developed world. That's a huge assumption.
The issue of needing a socio-economic basis for really major expenditures of resources is not at all anthropocentric. It is thermodynamics, really. As a living thing, you have limited resources. You spend those resources to maintain and expand your resources. If you spend too much, you lose the energy-game, and you die.
The premise is that they are at the same level as us. Bullgrit hasn't mentioned if we are aware they are at the same level.
The tech level makes that close to inevitable, as I mentioned early in the thread. So long as both sides build radios of some form, we'll notice each other.
Umbran, it's true that behind the rhetoric of wars is usually a socio-economic reason but that reason is based on the fear of not having enough. When in the history of "civilization" have we ever gone: "Well that should do it, we have sufficient resources to provide for ourselves and those around us. No more conquering for us." They are considerably closer to the asteroid belt which could have a lot of resources for when we become a space-faring species. We can't afford there to be a asteroid-mining shaft gap.
Our actions are generally driven by what resources it is economical for us to get. In the scenario under discussion, mining the asteroids profitably is beyond our capabilities when first contact happens, so it isn't an issue yet. We may go to war *eventually*, but not in the timeframe under discussion.
What everyone here saying "we would go to war" is forgetting is that nature knows more than "kill or be killed". Nature also knows cooperative relationships...
Your guts, for example. You realize that in your small intestine, you host more bacteria than there are humans on the face of the Earth, by some orders of magnitude? You realize that not only do they live there, but that without them you'd die of malnutrition? Do you realize that *every cell in your body* is an example of such a relationship - your mitochondria are an example of a mutual relationship that has lasted so long, we forget that at one time there wasn't a thing called a eukaryotic cell....
Given some time when we *aren't* in direct competition for resources, we could well develop a mutual relationship that's good for both species...
