[bluestarultor]

Frankly, with how war-like we are and the fact that any alien race that comes out here would be advanced beyond our wildest dreams, I really don't see any solution but mass death. If they're peaceful, the nukes we send up to greet them aren't likely to make a good impression and they might just decide we're nasty little critters and the universe is better off without us. If they're war-like, well, we're just as fucked, only they fire the first nuke. I mean, at best, they'd maybe keep a few of us around as pets either way, with the peaceful ones likely keeping more of us, but the entire concept of us becoming equal with them relies damn heavily on there being something like Starfleet posting rules that say they can't interfere with developing worlds and then coming to greet us when we're ready. Technologically, that could happen in the next decade, but socially, we're pretty much boned.