OT: A New Planet in our Solar System!!!

I think of it this way.  There are three things that could happen when we interact with an extraterrestrial intelligence: (1) they could benefit us; (2) they could ignore us, or (3) they could destroy us.

The earth has been around for about 5 billion years. There have been humans for about 100,000 years (0.002% of Earth's history), and we've had space flight for about 50 years (0.000001% of Earth's history). In other words, we've just barely arrived at the stage where this question even matters. So there's a very high chance that an extraterrestrial civilization is way more advanced than us.

So back to the three outcomes. If you see an ant hill on the ground, you're probably just going to ignore it, or maybe squish a few. If the ant hill is inconvenient (let's say it's right near the door to your kitchen), you might try to exterminate them. But you're almost certainly not going to take time to try to give them gifts or improve their society.

We're almost certainly on the order of ants to the aliens, especially if the aliens are advanced enough that they can travel to us or communicate across the vast distances of space. Therefore, it's in our interests to lay low.