Someday we will be the Aliens visiting primitives on different planets

Given the large variety of ET sighting reports, it seems to me that we must be really far behind a multitude of other intelligences in terms of development. It may mean we are one of the slowest or last groups in the universe to advance. Making our opportunities to observe a planet of creatures more primitive than us very rare or possibly not even something we could ever do.

im with you on this one,taking into account that i do believe that were visited and observed frequently by ET's we are very far behind in our quest for interplantery adventure and discovery and extremely primative in our understanding of this known universe,i dont think most scientists have an easy time percieving the whole picture.

The Prime Directive. While it's a nice idea, it's just an entertaining hold-over from the idealistic (but non-realistic) utopian ideas of the 60s and 70s. Notice most of the Star Trek shows that mentioned it were pretty much centered on the gallant captain and crew finding unique ways to circumvent it. Think about it. Would you stand by and watch an asteroid take out a planet of 5 billion pre-technical sentient beings if you could easily stop it by destorying or deflecting the asteroid? Of course not. Me either. The Prime Directive would require that you do just that.

If we were to find a technologically inferior species elsewhere, we would certainly exploit them as far as they would let us. If we find a species that is superior to us (or more likely they find or have found us), we'll still probably end up expoiting them too. Exploiting is what humans do. We're quite good at it.