It is presumptuous to imagine that aliens would be impressed if they were to find the Golden Record, a message in a bottle launched to interstellar space on the Voyager 1 & 2 spacecraft. Even if Voyager were to crash on an exoplanet in a million years, and a curious astrophysicist would recover its ruins from the ocean, the fascination of extraterrestrials with Earth would quiet down as soon as their powerful probes would reveal how badly we behave. It is difficult to gain respect from intelligent neighbors when they notice primal conflicts through the open windows of our home.

From the perspective of interstellar observers, our allocation of resources to acts of aggression in terrestrial geopolitics versus peaceful space exploration could have been handled far more intelligently. If aliens are truly intelligent, they would avoid us. They know that mud-wrestling gets you dirty and chess playing is better. Fermi’s paradox suggests that we are not attractive on the interstellar dating scene.