Sorry about the misunderstanding Morrus.
As for what would happen, my stance is that rich wealthy and powerful Earthlings would get in touch with rich wealthy and powerful Martians and figure out they can profit from pretending to care about the hostilities between their nations. I mean, we know global warming is going to mess up our whole planet, but politicians get money from oil companies, so they deny the science.
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.
While as Umbran put it we could probably have a similar understanding of the world around us in math and physics if our technologies are of the same level. This doesn't mean in any way that they look at the universe, their place and our place in it in the same way we do.
To hopefully illustrate my point, there are practices and believes in other cultures in our world that seem almost alien.
From Ron Brauman's report on his work for MSF in Uganda in the early 1980's when he struggled to distribute insufficient food supplies:
"We very quickly observed that the food was being taken away from the so-called target population of children under five and pregnant women to be given to the elders in these villages...For the Karamojong...maintaining their elders was of supreme importance for reasons that may be obvious even in the West: social coherence, social authority and decent social standards. Whereas the kids, of course, the death of a child is always painful no matter where one goes, can be replaced easily. An elder cannot be replaced."
You can understand, if you think about it, the logic of this behavior. It's not even twisted or mad, but very practical and human. But can you say you can really empathize with it? I couldn't take the food from a starving child to give to my Nana, I'm pretty sure Nana wouldn't accept it.
We have no choice but to give other things human attributes and to see patterns where there aren't necessarily any. This is our nature. Some people might think a dog baring its teeth is smiling and inviting you to pet it but people who have experience with dogs know you shouldn't get any closer.
We will have no experience with aliens and no way to knowing how they are going to react to anything we do. We can make assumptions based on extrapolations of data we can gather but every assumptions we make should be treated as suspect because of our aforementioned anthropocentric attitude.
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.
I've been making some assumptions and after reading the points made here have made a few adjustments and my assumptions are as follows:
- Our history hasn't changed since we received the radio-signals from Mars. I'm making this assumption to avoid having to change the last 70 years of history, aside from the fact that there haven't been any missions to Mars in that time. We are just now in 2013 thinking about doing something about the others.
- We know nothing except for the following: They can send and likely receive signals. They have sattelites in orbit. We have detected contrails in their atmosphere and can see where, what we assume, the population hubs are. If someone wants to expand on my list on what we know with current technology, please do.
The problem is we don't know anything. We can't. Everything we learn about them we'll attribute our own understanding and morality to. This is what is frightening. Our seemingly insurmountable ignorance.
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.
Bullgrit, sorry about being the first to s**t on your thread by going "look, they're different, kill them!". I understand I'm very likely projecting my own fears when I say something like that we have to kill them before they kill us. I take this stance because I made the assumption that conversation type of communication isn't possible for a considerable time.
If they are not really alien but just a culture of basically humans on another planet then you can take your pick of any Star Trek first contact scenarios and see what could happen.
I suppose my biggest fear is that they are like us but unified. Perhaps in a religious or ideological way. Who are we to they if they have the strong belief that they are the Chosen Ones in their Creator's universe.
