If we receive from deep space instructions for building a machine, and nobody knows what the machine will do, should we build it? How about if every country in the world has a copy of the instructions?
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@sharpblue It depends what you believe the machine-builders' ideology to be. Different countries expect different things of aliens. (Eg. in the USSR, orthodoxy dictated that any SETI signal would have been sent by good communist aliens, because obviously they'd have evolved past capitalism.)
@cstross @sharpblue Both Lem and Hoyle/Elliot wrote contrasting SF on the subject
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master's_Voice_(novel)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_for_Andromeda
