I'd rather be contacting them in a few hundred years than have them contacting us. That way, we are in control of the situation, and our interests are promoted, rather than the other way around.
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If you were working with SETI and tommorow night you got a signal that was an authentic alien transmission, and you could decide if you should tell the world or not, what would you do?
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You bet I would tell the world. Willful blindness is not a survival enhancing trait.
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While other stories are about how contact with ET causes the human race to self destruct because we loose our sense of dignity and "suppriority" over all other life forms.
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If we lost our sense of "superiority" I would think it would be motivating, stimulating us to work harder and advance faster.
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Corruption, war, mitirialism, and nationalism could virtually be wiped out
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How so? I think the only way that happens is if humanity is also wiped out.
I think that there may be danger if we lose our will for greatness, and our ambition. The way to win would be to lose some aspects of our pride while retaining others. We cannot lapse into a misanthropic episode like so many of the futurists seem to do. The objective, after all, is the survival and promotion of humanity. We need to be willing to learn as much as possible though. We should strive to learn as much as possible about the alien civilization: their culture, their organization, their technology (important, but not most important, after all the Native Americans aquired guns, but not the industry or organization for armies and city-state society). We should figure out how they work, what is good and bad about their system, then launch programs to emulate everything we can about their level of civilization, programs to develop and build, not merely purchase their technology. It would have to be a full scale WWII style conversion mode effort, but if we are successful, we may end up much more advanced and powerful enough to exercize some control of the situation if we ever made contact.