If aliens abducted you to learn about Earth's culture... - inb4 "we're all fucked"

[Alex Krycek]

I suck at drawing so.... Everyones probably dead.

 

[The Curmudgeon]

I've always wondered if aliens would understand that picture. If they did, would they care? I like to think that aliens would be truly alien and wonder what the fuck they're looking at.

As for topic question: I would tell them everything I know, but encourage them to just visit Earth themselves. Of course, everything I know is flawed, limited, and biased so they wouldn't get anything valuable from me anyway. I would also beg them to take me with them. Consequences be damned! I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. Even if it meant ending up in a bizarre or horrific situation, at least I don't have to me miserable on Earth.

 

[Lemmingwise]

People seem to be making assumptions here. He didn't say that you're the only one they're testing. They may be testing a hundred, a thousand, a million. But would you want take a chance on your fellow humans when the aliens might have pulled everyone but you from a Reddit meetup? We'd be fucked.


Humans basically perform this test all the time. We genocide ant colonies without even thinking about it, because we recognize them as so stupid they might as well not exist. Replace those ants with dogs or cats and it becomes a problem. I don't see a cat as my intellectual equal, but I do see them as intelligent enough that making them suffer for no reason is morally wrong. An ant, on the other hand, I don't care about killing. Because it's an ant.

Again, you're making assumptions. They're not necessarily killing us because they're on some holy quest to purge the universe of unintelligent life. Maybe our planet is in the way of their galactic superhighway and they don't want to blow it up if there's intelligent life there. OP didn't give a reason for the genocide, he just said it could happen.

Anyway, as far as I'm concerned the correct answer would be to draw the Fibonacci sequence or something in dots. They'd understand it for sure, and it demonstrates an ability to comprehend semi-complex math, which based on current human knowledge is something only the smartest race in existence can do. Even animals can paint or create music. Only humans can do math.

If that's not enough for them, then we were probably doomed from the start anyway.

Then it falls into the same problem with people trying to comprehend a god; it's methods of testing will be far superior to anything we can outguess on how to prove our intelligence.