I just watched one of my favorite movies, Contact. Afterwards, I began asking myself the same questions I usually do. Would we even recognize a truly alien lifeform as intelligent? I mean, say we encountered a big mass of green goo. Kind of like the blob. Hell, let's say it is the blob. A dude gets it out of a meteor that fell to earth and it immediately devours the guy. Ok, first of all, there could be quite a few reasons it ate him and then everyone it encounters. It could be that our flesh is simply liquefied by it's substance. Possibly it's species communicates by enveloping and mixing with whomever it wants to talk to. Won't work with us. I guess you can see where I'm going with this. And we, of course, panic. It looks like it's eating people. Seems quite hostile and inimical to human life. The problem is that instead of finding out anything about this entity, we react with typical hostility and immediately try to kill it. And they say that dolphins are as smart as people are. Ok. Then why can't we speak dolphin? I know that there are scientists out there working on it, but we are talking about animals from our own planet with intelligence. I doubt they care if we figure them out, otherwise they might be trying to help us figure them out. But here we are, not even understanding the animals on our own planet that have intelligences comparable to ours and we have the arrogance to assume that we could figure out an alien if they landed????? For that matter, with our prejudices, could we even emotionally deal with an alien society? What if they had three sexes? What if they were completely androgynous? Lots of people have a problem with the concept of gay marriage, can you imagine the uproar a hermaphroditic race would create? Or a society that considers monogamy a sin? I don't think the human race is ready for alien contact. We need to grow up as a species I think before that happens.