Why? Why would you expect it to be any more benevolent or any less murderous than the actual aliens visiting? Presumably it would be trained on their values, not ours.
But I generally wouldn't expect aliens to be "murderous" at all. Why send a group or probe lightyears away just to kill or enslave a primitive species? If they have the ability to do that, we wouldn't really have anything of interest for them.
Try though. Space is mind blowingly large and anything with the ability to traverse interstellar space alteady has access to unlimited resources and energy, likely closer than us. We live in a tiny backwater of the galaxy.
We literally have nothing of value to such a civilization. Gold and diamonds a just more rocks to any serious space faring civilizations. Energy is also unlimited and free.
Unless they find us delicious our only value would likely be an exchange of knowledge.
Wood however... You're not gonna find a lot of wood in space.
Brains will be uploaded to machines, or human descended AI's will will be built and tasked with exploring the places it's unsafe or too time consuming for us to visit directly. The square jawed men with laser guns will have to stay at home and watch. Maybe those AI's will be built to start cloning humans once they find a good spot or something, but it's never going to make sense to ship squishy meat sacks and the metric tons of accoutrements required to keep them alive all over unless/until we find a way around the speed of light or perfect hibernation.
They might want the wood though, and they might not know how to grow it. From there we can see 2 scenarios. The likelier one hopefully being trade: we could probably teach them to grow wood, and also provide them with seeds, perhaps on exchange for some of their space-faring tech.
Alternatively there's the pessimist scenario, where they're not interested in trading for it, we're not willing to give it freely, and so war ensues.
Personally I'd just give them a few pine-cones and explain basic horticulture as a gesture of good faith, I guess the end result is rather contingent on which human they talk to.
Of course this is putting aside any ideas of deciphering our books or tapping into the internet. Not much we'd be able to do to species that can travel the stars.
I think he modeled his habitats as large ecosystems as well in the novel. That's not strictly necessary and would simplify the design a lot.
Also, it was a fictional story so not the best source for information. Which is kind of proving my point about sci-fi messing up everyone's conception of what the future could hold.
Killing/enslavement just as a side effect. You have to tell it explicitly to NOT kill/enslave covering any edge cases. Even if they do we can turn out to be sufficiently different that the probe doesn't consider us relevant from aliens' standpoint.
That question makes no sense. It presumes that they are at all interested in, or even notice, us. We're special, from our PoV. That doesn't mean we are special.
Did you notice how many ants you drove over on your last car trip? Did you even care?
To a space-faring species, we are probably just as interesting as ants. After all, you are assuming that they'll send their brightest minds to visit us, but it is equally likely that we are "discovered" by their equivalent of joy-riding teens.
Regardless, there aren't that many possible values aliens could have. It is hard to come up with something outside basic game theory - you can see how most religions tend to converge on the same practical principles over time, like basic property rights and not causing trouble pointlessly.
A race of aquatic arthropods could be mostly solitary, cannibalistic and regard age and size as primary dominance characteristics and their notion of property rights might depend entirely on whether they can eat the owner of said property, though sublimated through some complex set of social rules and protocols. Maybe the CEO of a company only has to offer a single leg to be eaten during a hostile takeover.
Humans are not naturally prone to bouts of violence like other species and human societies do not tolerate impulsive violence in adults. Instead, the vast majority of human-on-human violence is deliberate: people plan, carefully and rationally, the killing of their fellow human beings in order to achieve their goals. This is known as 'war'. This is very rare among species, and more violent species cannot form complex societies at scale, despite being also quite smart in some cases (chimps, octopuses).
We even unconsciously internalized this idea to some degree, since most people are comfortable with the idea of militaries existing and being necessary but also agree that solitary murderous psychopaths should be put in prison.
That... does not check out. There are plenty of violent people, I've met many.
We need to have some baseline for what we consider as "intelligent species" in this context and most intelligent species will need to have a system where they can pool their resources together towards something in a sustained social manner. This rules out a lot of social patterns such as beings that are solitary, canibalisitc and hell bent of eating each other.
Damn, I really enjoyed that book. Best of the series so far, in my opinion.
I read a sci-fi story where the probe lands on Earth, and then teaches us enough science to get our own ships together, and tells us where to go to meet the probe makers. So they don't have to go anywhere and can sit comfortable at home and wait for the aliens to come to them.
This is a likely scenario of misinterpretation between species haha.