We're not stuck in here with them. They're stuck in here with us!

Dude. Relax. It was fiction.

Liu closed his eyes for a long moment and then said quietly, “This is why I don’t like to talk about subjects like this. The truth is you don’t really—I mean, can’t truly—understand.” He gestured around him. “You’ve lived here, in the U.S., for, what, going on three decades?” The implication was clear: years in the West had brainwashed me. In that moment, in Liu’s mind, I, with my inflexible sense of morality, was the alien.

And so, Liu explained to me, the existing regime made the most sense for today’s China, because to change it would be to invite chaos. “If China were to transform into a democracy, it would be hell on earth,” he said. “I would evacuate tomorrow, to the United States or Europe or—I don’t know.” The irony that the countries he was proposing were democracies seemed to escape his notice. He went on, “Here’s the truth: if you were to become the President of China tomorrow, you would find that you had no other choice than to do exactly as he has done.”

It was an opinion entirely consistent with his systems-level view of human societies, just as mine reflected a belief in democracy and individualism as principles to be upheld regardless of outcomes. I was reminded of something he wrote in his afterword to the English edition of “The Three-Body Problem”: “I cannot escape and leave behind reality, just like I cannot leave behind my shadow. Reality brands each of us with its indelible mark. Every era puts invisible shackles on those who have lived through it, and I can only dance in my chains.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/06/24/liu-cixins-war-of-the-worlds

What's wrong about it? It seems like the obvious assumption that running into intelligent alien civilizations, them figuring out that we exist, would be extremely dangerous.

Scientific American points to an important fact.

"With our latest surveys, such as the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) and Euclid, by my very rough estimation, we’ve taken pictures of somewhere around 100 million galaxies out of the two trillion or so estimated to exist in the entire observable universe.

Shamir’s paradigm-shattering conclusion relies on 263 of them."

They are discussing bias in the selection.

"Unfortunately, this kind of extreme selection introduces many opportunities for bias to creep in. When we test a new idea in cosmology—indeed, in all of science—we work to make our conclusion as robust as possible. For example, if we were to change any of these filtering steps, from the selection of survey region to the threshold for deciding whether to include a galaxy in the analysis, our results should hold up or at least show a clear trend where the signal becomes stronger. But there isn’t enough information about such methodological checks in Shamir’s paper to make that judgment, which casts doubt on the validity of the conclusions."