How Should Earth Respond When Aliens Say Hello?
space.com
space.com
My answer: I would assume that any message we receive from aliens comes with a primer. If it doesn't how then could we read it an know it's a message? The next obvious step is reading, understanding, then extrapolating from the message. Where they're from, who they are, how their message came to us. Like in Carl Sagan's "Contact" the message might come to us from a way station and not the actual source of the aliens themselves. The message might me an invitation, a warning, a plea, or simple salutation. Or it might be something in the middle. They are alien. And we do have trouble understanding humans born only 500 years previous.
How should we respond? Hopefully in the same way that message arrived, that seems obvious. What should we respond with? Something with similar content most likely. Something along the lines of this "Alien" response hoax to the Arecibo message: http://rationalblogs.org/rationalwiki/wp-content/uploads/sit...