1 Iki Piki: I have a really bad feeling about this.
2 Serron: Oh, come on. A weird alien ship of unidentifiable origin adrift in deep space and emitting strange energy readings. What's not to investigate?
3 Iki Piki: Yeah, because that always worked out so well on Star Trek.
4 Serron: They never lost anyone important!
4 Paris: Okay then. In we go.

What if humanity's first contact with an alien civilisation was to find a mysterious ship drifting through space?

Interesting.

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2020-08-02 Rerun commentary: It also worked out really well for crew of the Nostromo.

On the original annotation: Interestingly enough, perhaps the most likely way for an alien civilisation to have first contact with humanity would be to find one of our deep space probes, like Voyager 1 or 2. Of course, they're not likely to find it any time soon - this is most likely to happen after a few hundred million years, by which point humanity may well be extinct.

Hopefully we haven't left anything on the Voyagers that can infect and kill another civilisation.