New question: What would happen if we found extraterrestrial life that was more intelligent than us?
This question is difficult to answer mostly because we haven’t made contact with aliens before, so we don’t know how people would react. While I suspect most people would be curious and excited, at the same time, knowing they are more intelligent could leave people feeling scared and competitive. Often, when we discover new animal species, we are the more intelligent group, or we find ways to make ourselves more intelligent. Thus, it would be hard to know how we would react if things were the other way around.
Economically, it’s hard to predict what we would do because it’s unclear whether visiting the aliens would be commercially appealing. Will people be scared of other intelligent life forms, and will we need to allocate funds toward defending ourselves? Will people want to prove their intelligence to the extraterrestrial life, and will we need to send people to visit them to demonstrate our capabilities? Religiously, the concept that there could be beings of greater intelligence or importance than humans could be quite alarming. Understanding how religious figures might amend their scriptures to fit the presence of higher beings is also unclear.