I remember that was an episode of Babylon 5 - if you answered the test correctly, the probe would blow you up. I suppose it’s also a test of wisdom, not just intelligence:-).
But I also remember a short story in a book about humanity having uploaded itself into our sun, and thereby spread out into the stars, using those as supercomputer mainframes. i.e. what will come from us may look very unlike us now - similar to how a seed looks nothing like the plant that it becomes, or a child acts very differently than the adult that it grows up into.
Then again, if aliens now were to encounter the likes of Musk and Bezos as their points of first contact… I shudder to think what they would want to do to us:-( - after all, what would we do to us, if the roles were reversed? The very measure that we ourselves use is precisely the very thing that we fail at, i.e. we don’t look at them and call them “good”, do we? No, we are rather ashamed, but then again neither do we stop purchasing goods from Amazon or using Twitter/X (I mean… I do, but most of us do not).
No more than the more common types of viruses and other steadily-evolving microbes though, plus humans have not changed genetically all that much from chimps even from 6+ million years ago, so most of this is clickbait hype.
We do need to maintain science funding around the world though - the next pandemic could strike at any time, without warning (as the last one showed us), and gee it sure would be good if we could be ready, with modern tools to meet whatever challenge comes our way.
Otherwise it is all too easy to fall for bait traps such as what happened with GISAID, which said the words that people wanted to hear but then were not skeptical enough to look at the source behind who was saying them. So now that’s a treasure trove of data lost to the public as a result.:-(
I see your rizz and raise you a skibidi. (probably b/c I like the way that word sounds in my head… sk-i-bi-di do dah day 🎵 🎶 )
Also, rizz means “the ability to attract a romantic or sexual partner” so… now I have to think about GWB strutting his stuff, thanks for that:-P (that’s surely what made me think of my own word… gotta flush it out somehow?)
And that the reason they do not contact us is that we are simply not worth it:-). (so this being a hint to get our act together first if we want to open up additional communications in the future, I suppose)
Or it could just be a prank, from a billionaire with their own private space force :-P. Nowadays the likelihood of the latter has risen to become higher than the former.
Close - they meow for their cat mothers too in the wild, it’s just that humans keep cats in a permanently juvenile state when we keep them as pets. Also, our patting them mimics their mother’s tongue action, which causes them to purr, which is also an entirely natural sound for them to signal the mother that they are alive and content. We did not change them so much as co-opt what was already there, using it for the benefit of both human & cat:-). From there, some things like level of aggression and body size were bred to suit our mutual partnership better.