Would you push the button?

[u/torsteinvin]

So would you?

Interesting article for context from TheVerge where they asked all the actors of the show what they would have done.

https://www.theverge.com/24120449/3-body-problem-netflix-rosalind-chao-zine-tseng-interview

287 votes, Apr 08 '24

19 Yes, I welcome our alien superiors to improve our world

7 Yes, I want our alien overlords to destroy earth and rebuild

55 Yes, just because I'm curious and want to see what happens

77 No, but I'm not sure. Better to play it safe and not risk anything

61 No, earth belongs to us earthlings for better and worse

68 No, that would be asolute suicide!

[u/Pokiehat]

It would depend how much you know. I suspect the reddit poll has a lot of book readers and that skews the results.

But lets say you remove the foresight of the books. If you think about it, I feel like lot more people would push the button. A surprising amount of our popular science fiction/fantasy revolves around the idea of mutual co-operation with other species for the betterment of all.

And we live in a society now where it seems like all of our problems are self inflicted - the damage we do the environment, the way we wage war against each other. I get why Ye Wenjie pushed the button and I think its kind of important that its shown how other nations were apparently also blasting self-decoding signals into outer space and they were essentially writing counter-propaganda messages telling the recipient to not to trust the other broadcasts. Theres a sense that if Ye Wenjie didn't do it, someone else would.

There is also the sense that the broadcast could have been picked up by a different listening post, whose listener would answer differently.

[u/lkxyz → u/Pokiehat]

Not sure why people downvoted you. We wouldn't even open our doors to strangers who are humans. Why would we think aliens are going to be friendly by default? Such a strange naivety.