How about we consider that the earth has been visited by beings from a more advanced planet for a long time and that these visits are likely to continue as we are a subject of one of their scientific studies?

Long ago on a planet far away advances were made that allowed one group to escape their own planet and initiate exploration of worlds far displaced from their own. These advances happened simply because the inhabitants of that far-away world looked up from their lives and saw things they didn't understand and this absence of understanding spurred them to seek out answers. Maybe someone there looked into their own night sky and wondered about what they would find if they could only visit those distant lights in the sky. Perhaps like us, they created stories about how all the stars in their sky came to exist, they grouped them into recognizable shapes and gave them names and created stories about them so that the long nights could be passed comforting their children and regaling visitors with the recitation of ancient tales of conquest and heroes now enshrined in their own heavens.

Once the announcement about their successful effort to escape their own planet was made to the citizens of that planet there was much pride in the accomplishment and, in some societies, jealousy reared its ugly head. Fearing that their own local citizens could be dominated by those of their more scientifically successful neighbors, a space race began much like our own with multiple societies striving to outdo the accomplishments of the other and thus claim superiority.

Over time, their probes pushed farther past boundaries than our own scientific advances have allowed and they eventually discovered our planet and all of our ancestors bumping around down here trying to make sense of our own place in the world.

The challenges faced by these alien visitors are much the same as our own when we send probes to Mars or other planets. Like our own efforts, sometimes we are wildly successful and other times our probes miss the mark or crash or never make it out of our atmosphere.

They face similar challenges to our own. Do we know enough about the target to be able to insert ourselves into orbit so that we can use our stripped-down instrumentation to glean anything useful about the world we are visiting that may allow us to eventually send and land a probe on the surface, if it has a detectable hard surface? Imagine that the first successful insertion of a probe into orbit around an alien (to them) world would be greeted with a lot of enthusiasm back home. Competition between societies heats up over time to see who can successfully land a probe on the surface and transmit environmental data back to their home planet? Which society will be the first to send live citizens to visit the distant planet and then later, to return them successfully to their homes?

Assume if you will that all this occurred in the context of a space race on their own home planet and that some groups were less successful than others - due to funding, lack of data, etc. That means that some of their own visits would not end well for the probe or for the pilots or other personnel. Assume that the personnel involved in those efforts were trapped here on this planet with no way to return.

Do you not think that they would attempt to survive and, as a survival mechanism, would eventually come to ally themselves with inhabitants of the planet they became stranded on so that their own knowledge of processes and techniques and materials, etc could be conveyed in a way that both groups benefit from the knowledge transfer?

Perhaps on that far-away planet the competing groups are locked in a competition that has resulted in them discovering our own world and that each time one of their vessels returns to their home planet with a new collection of plant, rock, and liquid samples to add to their gallery of cattle tongues, hearts, and anuses they are greeted as heroes and feted with parades and that these celebrations only drive further exploration as the thirst for knowledge in their societies is strong.

Maybe they mourn as we do when a probe with a crew of their heroes, some of their most accomplished citizens, doesn't return as planned. Maybe they compose songs to help their own descendants remember the glorious heroes who dared to explore distant worlds. Perhaps they send additional missions to attempt to ascertain why their crews never returned and whether they are still alive and only need rescue.

Maybe over a long enough period of time they see the inhabitants of that distant world, a science project for them, become more and more technologically advanced with each visit and they begin to worry that situations they find could spiral out of control and bad things could happen to their study subjects. And then, out of a sense of moral obligation, if such a thing could be postulated for a group far away from our own planet, they attempt to warn those less advanced people that there are lines that should not be crossed, that some behaviors can be very detrimental to survival, that some things that seem to be monumental achievements are in fact a collection of Pandora's boxes that should be left on the shelf, unopened forever.

What about it? All speculation. Who really knows?