Stephen Hawking once said,
If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans. We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. [1]
That is, extraterrestrial species may not be as kind as you are. We should be careful in our pursuit of aliens.
Batchelore’s fiction--“from the intersection of computational science and technological speculation”--describes a man-made moon station that beamed a laser toward a near star, Proxima Centauri, and its planetary consort, Proxima Centauri b, in the hope of receiving responses from aliens. And indeed aliens did receive the messages encoded in the laser. With this knowledge, an alien mother ship--with its more advanced weapons and technologies--visited and attacked a defenseless Earth.
The aliens then used billions of minidrones to disperse neural-connection electrodes that attached to human brainstems, reducing humans to compliant zombies. Once the aliens “had assimilated them into its hive mind,” they quickly assessed and identified the most advanced human technology to exploit--that is, blockchain--and applied blockchain to every possible activity.
However, blockchain saves the day:
Power consumption skyrocketed as the networked zombies on Earth and the aliens aboard the mother ship burdened each transaction with cryptographic virtual ledger updates. Unsustainable heat built up in the circuits, the mother ship’s processors were overwhelmed and exploded, and the neural connectors to the humans shorted out, leaving only an eerie electric blue glow that briefly filled the Solar System, before winking out.
This work warns us of the dangers of trying to contact aliens. Be careful what you wish for, as it might just come true. It also mocks the blockchain technology for its large power consumption. An interesting read, you might also want to watch Independence Day.