[Allen Tice]

Gail, anyone who wants to devote resources to contacting any (or many) extraterrestrial life forms should absolutely be anchored with real-world and defensive answers to each of your three hypotheses. To any one of those nice, so nice, people who talk about "getting in touch", I'd say "I think your head is more full of methane than Uranus."

Of course, one could smokily imagine that "if" some hypothetical "altruistic" extraterrestrials judged that humanity was truly verging on self-destruction, these outsiders might want to interfere. That might mean almost anything, including variants of your hypotheses. For example, they (or it) might simply not want an entirely wrecked world. To what end? Maybe they might want our spare thermal neutrons, or something, maybe our spare gamma radiation...

Of course, an inevitable corollary of that "altruistic" line of thought is that there might be ETs that have very nearly experienced virtual annihilation themselves (since physics is the same everywhere), and achingly survived, and, so, having good hearts and some sort of culture or treaties among themselves or what-all, they want us to survive (in an ethical sense).

As you imply, more or less altruistic efforts by some humans to preserve or assist our own planet's less materially advanced peoples have almost always been undermined by other humans who want to exploit anything and everything. Should more scientifically advanced ETs exist, earthlings have no guarantee At All that the same wouldn't happen to them.

Another rose-colored view is that these very hypothetical ETs might want to encourage humans (so unified and non-competitive) to master their own development, solve their own problems, and "grow up" to be as cool as the ETs. They would do that by tickling our geiger counters from afar, winking at us from another galaxy and flashing remote pictures of comic book saucers at Apollo astronauts, while meanwhile they sit at home x-million parsecs away twiddling the dials.

Pie in the sky is not a strategy.

A funny corner of physics these days is the one that deals with "virtual" particles that flash into and then out of existence quite rapidly. I advance the theory that hypothetical aliens such as this thread has considered are "virtual" aliens that flash into and then out of existence again, but that are as annoying as a bad dream, and as insubstantial.

Do I want to believe in extraterrestrials, ethical or otherwise? Absolutely not.

Nemo, I have always known that. How? Takes one to...