[jolincost]

Oh, I love these ideas! I'm sure advanced civilizations have AIs, suoercomputers, lots of experience with this situation and some heuristics to help them decide, but i love doing the thought experiments with you :)

I agree the mere appearance of an advanced civilization could be a corrupting influence on the soon-to-be space faring savages, but then again the brutes might have other more pressing character flaws. At the same time maybe it would make sense for the advanced civilization to contact them in a covert manner so that there is sort of plausible deniability or non-verifiability to seed the ideas and create some sort of influence but limit the impact, which itself is a strategy which could create a sort of corrupt back channel between the terrestrial population and the advanced influencers.

But judging from the way that state departments handle these things it seems that early and persistent outreach, both covert and overt, and infiltration, and a mix of carrots (advanced tech, trade?) and sticks (erasure?) is the preferred method of maintaining some sort of control and relationship to manage the emerging threat or at least try to guide the development in a manner which the advance civilization sees as promoting whatever values are interests that it has.

Following the track your ideas lay out, seems if there were others out there that we're civic minded in a cosmic sense, they wouldn't adopt a hands off approach