1983 (a Merman I Should Turn To Be) ~ Jimi Hendrix Hurrah i awake from yesterday alive but the war is here to stay so my love catherina and me decide to take our last walk through the noise to the sea not to die but to be re-born away from a life so battered and torn.... forever... oh say can you see its really such a mess every inch of earth is a fighting nest giant pencil and lip-stick tube shaped things continue to rain and cause screaming pain and the arctic stains from silver blue to bloody red as our feet find the sand and the sea is strait ahead.. strait ahead..... well its too bad that our friends cant be with us today well thats too bad "the machine that we built would never save us" thats what they say (thats why they aint coming with us today) and they also said "its impossible for man to live and breath underwater.. forever" was their main complaint (yeah) and they also threw this in my face: they said anyway you know good well it would be beyond the will of God and the grace of the King (grace of the King yeah yeah) so my darling and I make love in the sand to salute the last moment ever on dry land our machine has done its work played its part well without a scratch on our bodies and we bid it farewell starfish and giant foams greet us with a smile before our heads go under we take a last look at the killing noise of the out of style... the out of style, out of style
Truthfully, I think a lot of the reaction would be the result of what the movies portray. In the 50's and 60's everybody would have expected war. In the early 80's, from ET and Close Encounters people would have expected something else entirely. I'm not exactly sure where the public consciousness is ATM, but I think Independence Day would probably be what many people have been conditioned to expect and they would probably react accordingly.
I love the line in ID4: Please do not shoot at the spacecraft, we do not want to trigger an interstellar war!
If aliens are intelligent enough to have developed interstellar travel, it's a good bet that they've also realised how stupid it is to stick around on their home planet, waging war among themselves with finite resources. In other words, they'd be a lot smarter than us So if they happen to be hostile, we're going to be extinct. Simple as that.
