What to Do if You’re The First Person to Make Alien Contact

and not long ago i remember an article claiming that the first aliens arriving on earth would be he to invade us. so lay down earthlings and bow to your masters.

if the aliens don't accept the parallel postulate, then they sure as shit won't know pythagoras' theorem. just sayin.

This is some of the worst @#$%@ advice I have ever read.

Step #1: Tell them you don not speak for all of mankind, only yourself.

Step #2: Answer their questions if they also answer yours.

Step #3: Tell them to talk to other people.

Step #4: Sell your story for as much as you can get.

Or ask them how to post a story on the internet.

It depends... are they the hot alien chicks from my teenage dreams? Because if that's the case, I've got one really good plan.

I would just curtsey before the inevitable goatse. Don't all aliens get right to probing? Why resist?

No, I think that the necessity of self-consciousness is the primary constraint from which all other constraints are derived. This doesn't exclude the possibility of self-conscious life existing elsewhere, but it does exclude the possibility of a universe which is not self-conscious.

Here I should state that self-consciousness as a constraint does not elevated self-conscious entities to the role of creator, it simply means that in any real universe there will be entities which are self-conscious. It is similar to Wheeler's Anticipatory Anthropic Principle.

It basically puts self-conscious entities near the center of the universe, as all apparently existing things appear so only in reference to the self-conscious entity. Apart from such an entity nothing appears to exist or has apparent existence. Nothing could be said to exist. Furthermore with the perception of space-time being relative to the position of the observer, in an observerless universe there would be no space-time.

Which accords nicely with the etymological root of the word "Exist" which comes from Latin "existere" meaning; to present an appearance [to an observer].

Sorry, Wheeler's Participatory Anthropic Principle

You know when you remove experience from the equation. You have a universe which does not present itself in any aspect and has a qualitative effect on nothing. How could such a universe exist? It would all have come and gone without time or space.

Cosmologists now-a-days generally adhere to some form of the Anthropic Principle. Which dictates several conclusions; A) There is no way to study a universe in which we do not exist. B) There is no such thing as a universe in which conscious life does not exist. C) Conscious life is the primary constraint within which the universe is manifest.

I observe C, and all these other constraints like the law of identity and the law of non-contradiction, which states that a thing is itself and cannot be some contradictory thing, are really necessary for the conscious experience of them. Perhaps in a state of quantum superposition a square-circle could exist, but then we'd never be able to experience such a thing. Experience does not allow the existence of self-contradictory phenomena.

So, I maintain that Self-consciousness provides these constraints. Whereby, if quantum decoherence does occur, it occurs with respect to self-consciousness. But again, this does not put the individual ego or self, who also appears as phenomena within consciousness, any determination over that which is external to it. The constraint is a constraint and not a process or ability someone could weild, and it is this constraint which gives us apparent existence to begin with. So it acts over and above all other phenomena including the notions of "existence" and "universe".