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anybody spending even a moment worrying about this is failing to understand the vast distances and timeframes we are talking about before any alien civilization (if such exist) could detect our presence and respond, much less come visit us.

even if they were as close as say... 1000 light years away, we’ve only been sending out radio waves for about 100 years. that’s 900 more years to get there and 1000 years for a reply message to reach us. in other words, 2 millennia.

for all intents and purposes, unless an advanced alien civilization was within maybe a hundred or two hundred light years of us, it’s irrelevant whether other life exists in the universe, because we will never interact with them. the vast distances involved preclude that eventuality. forget about sci-fi novels and hollyweird movies... we will not be visited by aliens during our lifetimes. and if we are, we’ll all know it. they won’t just show up secretly to meet with top governmental officials... they will broadcast messages back to us on the frequencies that we are broadcasting to them... which means common AM, FM, and TV frequencies. anyone will be able to pick up these broadcasts in their homes. unless they have evil intentions, in which case our descendents will be screwed anyway because we’ve been sending out radio waves for the past century and there is no way to get them back. of course, if the closest civilization is 10,000 light years away, it won’t matter. by the time our signals reach them, we’ll be far more advanced than we are now.

so it’s all a silly moot point anyway. fun to ponder, but not anything we really need to worry about. asteroids on collision courses with us are much more worrisome than alien invasions.