Buddy of mine and I were discussing Stephen Hawking's "warning" to mankind dating back to a 2010 Discovery Channel comment that aliens we encounter may not be particularly friendly and meeting an alien species would in all likelihood be catastrophic to the human race.
You, your buddy, and Stephen Hawking, are all failing to realize you are building several hidden assumptions into your model.
The most serious and definitely false assumption, is that the concept of 'species' has any relevance to entities with technology much beyond ours.
Humans are a 'species', because we are biologically reproduced individuals still based on the DNA that evolved via survival of the fittest, over millions of years of life on Earth. As such, we have a lot of 'survival-related' cognitive biases. Ways of thinking that work acceptably well in a survival environment. But which are far from well adapted to technology-based existence.
So far, our technology isn't up to building self-maintaining and self-developing AI constructs. Note that our early efforts in this direction are all machine-based. But that's only because our bio-science is very primitive still. The most efficient, compact, versatile and self-maintaining 'machines' are biological. If we knew how to design and build living beings from scratch, the results would be better than machines in most general-needs circumstances.
At some point in the fairly near future (less than a couple of hundred years, maybe MUCH less), our genetic engineering and science-of-mind will reach the point where we can:
* Make genetic patches to existing adult organisms, including ourselves. Actually we can already do this, but we aren't yet much good at the coding of targeted changes. We don't understand the syntax enough yet, to do it without goofs. Getting very close...
* Address the DNA coding issues of aging. Again, we're very close. Look up Telomere fuses. There are already workable techniques of significant life extension (see mice experiments, telomerase, etc.) And that's just what's been published. I would bet the actual tech is far in advance of that, in closed circles. You DON'T expect the money elites are ever going to allow working life extension for the masses, surely? Btw, WHEN is bloody George Soros going to die already?
* At some point there will be breakthroughs in how organic brains think. With several results: ability to build working simulations of existing adult minds, ability to interface machine extensions to living minds AND their simulations, and most importantly, to modify and extend the capabilities of existing minds.
The point is, that when you integrate the consequences of those developments, you get a situation that is radically, fundamentally different to the world we know now. You hear a lot of people using the word 'transcendence', in discussion, SciFi stories, etc. And it's a very chaotic bottleneck- lots of different possible outcomes.
But I maintain that in NONE of the possible outcomes, are there EVER 'star-faring species'. Those technologies are simply incompatible with the existence of large numbers of technology-using genetically and culturally homogeneous individuals who see themselves as members of a species/culture.
What actually happens, is one or more individuals from a culture like ours that achieves the crucial tech-combination, self-boostrap up. Making themselves into self-engineered, immortal and space-travel-capable beings. And that self-engineering includes modifying and extending their own consciousness - how they think. Human, instinct-based minds are mal-adapted for such an existence. Each individual would self-develop on their own path.
Btw, the speed of light is a great universal quarantine barrier. You can only go starfaring, if you are a self-engineered bio-machine composite entity. Capable of existing as a networked mesh of hundreds of units, radiation-hardenned, each holding full backups of your complete dataset. And capable of adopting states of consciousness/stasis that make thousands of years of sub-lightspeed travel through interstellar distances survivable. In the sense of having enough units survive random impacts along the way, to rebuild at the next star system.
This lead to a line of reasoning: why exactly would aliens even bother to come to Earth?
For a VERY good reason.
There are no material shortages in this universe, for starfarers. Also the whole 'expand and conquer' concept is one of the primitive survival-based cognitive biases, of no relevance to such beings.
So what does have value to them? What cannot be manufactured, that has the priceless attributes of rarity, novelty and truth?
Stories. Just because you've become a being consisting of a huge swarm of machine-intelligence star-faring ships, lived for a hundred million years, and are likely to live to see the end of the Universe, doesn't mean you wouldn't like a good story. And others of similar kind you may meet along the journey, would be the same.
Stories you could make up wouldn't be as interesting to others as _real_ stories. Particularly ones that chronicled the creation of new ones of your kind. 'Baby photos'.
That's what Earth is. Few hundred million years of life arising, then humans, then the struggle of technological development, then at some point (soon) the birthing of new starfarers. Or not, if we f*ck up and destroy the biosphere with a nuclear war or something equally dumb. But even then it's still a good story for those guys.
Hawkings speculated they may "raid" the earth. Well, we could not think of any particular resource which the Earth has that cannot be either synthesized elsewhere, or does not exist in sufficient quantity elsewhere in the universe. Stealing our "molton core" a-la Independence Day 2, notwithstanding 
Even harvesting humans for food... well, most of us probably lament the amount of petrol we use to drive to the local Waitrose (assuming we are not within walking distance or have access to some form of public transportation) to buy some ribs... so we cannot see the logic in spending an insane amount of resources to travel to Earth in order to pick up some human sausages. Unless naturally there's some means of interplanetary travel we've yet to speculate about which has negligible energy consumption over vast distances.
About the only commodity we do have, that we could think of, would be habitable space... assuming alien biology was adequately close enough to ours to make living on Earth feasible (or they have appropriate technology to terraform the planet's atmosphere to make it conform to their requirements and have sufficient means to remove the existing 10 billion parasites living on the surface.)
Any thoughts?
There's nothing here they need, other than stories. But if you meddle in a 'real story' is it still real? No, it isn't.
That's why the 'aliens' will never land and pull any 'take me to your leader' bullshit. Even the knowledge of what they actually are, if humans became aware of it due to the starfarers telling us, would spoil the story from the starfarer's viewpoint.
(Which doesn't mean they'd necessarily mind if we thought it up ourselves - hence me talking about it.)
They _do_ seem to have chats with random individuals now and then. Or at least their bio-constructed remote units do - the Grays, and other variants. The Grays are not 'the aliens', they are just modular constructs, with local intelligence and autonomy, but still part of the main entity (or entities, if there are several hanging around, watching.) I wouldn't be surprised if the Grays are an open-source freeware, code shared among the starfarers.
By the way, there's another whole layer to this. Imagine some technology capable of taking 'snapshots' of living minds, resulting in a dataset that captures the entirety of that mind. There'd be no point doing that unless you also had the capability to run that dataset as a simulation in an virtual environment you had constructed around it. And perhaps re-inject that mind-model to a varying degree into a living being (either existing, or one you constructed from scratch.)
Now imagine that the spacefarers were collecting such recordings, as part of their 'story of Earth'.
And at some points in human history they might have been a bit too open with us about all this. Maybe an oopsie, maybe there are factions among them and they don't always agree on that 'no story contamination' thing.
So, imagine what a primitive human might take away from such a conversation. 'Captured mind model' that is really all you are? How about calling that a 'soul'. Explanation of why they do that, and what happens to those 'souls' when they are awakened in simulated realities? Maybe some stuff abut adapting the simulated realities to bring out the prominent features of each character? 'Heaven and Hell'. Sometimes reinjecting a 'soul' into a newborn? Reincarnation. Perhaps the recording process works best with some cooperation or at least agreement? Selling your soul to the Devil. Multiple starfarers in the Solar System, possibly for millions of years, just watching, recording and maybe sometimes meddling a bit on the side? Pantheon of Gods. Maybe some of them are not so nice? Cthulu, Old Testament, etc. Getting bored with dinosaurs? Big meteorite. Miracles, voice of God, etc? You know what they say about advanced technology and magic. Crop circles? No reason they can't have a twisted sense of humor. Bunch of pranksters, maybe wondering if they could get humans to waste their time making even more elaborate crop circles. Answer: yes.
And so on.
Hope you found this entertaining. It's all just a joke. Or is it?
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