Why aren’t we talking more about UFOs?

But the third option is that we understand at some level that aliens would be a Very Big Deal — and that most of the possibilities for alien contact are pretty unpleasant. Sure, one would rather be judged “cute but helpless” than “too boring to care about,” and “boring” is preferable to being deemed “lunch.” But historically, low-technology groups have almost universally fared badly when coming into contact with higher-technology cultures, even when that contact was made with the best of intentions. Perhaps the aliens, if they exist, are advanced enough to have solved that problem. But the alternative is so horrible that I suspect for many of us, it simply doesn’t bear thinking about.