Mankind's crowning achievement

Muise... wrote: »

Music, certainly, because if they have the mathematics necessary to build craft to get here, they will understand it. Visual art, not so much.

Maybe, maybe not. Take music on our planet among our own kind. Listen to traditional Japanese classical music and it's arhythmic, atonal and extremely dissonant to western ears. Apparently it appeals to different parts of the brain. The local ear was trained to it growing up in the culture. So to an alien Mozart's best could sound like white noise or nails down a blackboard. They might come from a world with a vastly different soundscape for a start.

Visual art? Actually that might have slightly more in the game. Representational stuff anyway. They might marvel at the craft of reproducing nature. Abstract art might confuse them as quite a lot of it requires a secondary explanation. Then again if they came from a world orbiting a dwarf star or somesuch their visual references could be way off ours.

They may even see "art" of all forms as backward. Their art might be some weird cultural stuff. If they're artificial intelligences(much more likely for all sorts of reasons) then it may not register at all.

Our technology? That might impress in some areas, in much the same we might be impressed by the ability of a stone aged man to knock up a handaxe. Nuclear weapons would likely give them cause for concern. The sheer power required to deflect a H bomb would be colossal. We could be a threat to them on the ground. Again in the same way that a modern SEAL team would want to take serious care going into deep forest if Neandertals lived there.