No, My Sun Was Green, Honest!

Herr D made this on heromachine.com. He said
 this is approximately how he envisions First
 Contact to go officially.                                           

I think of this picture every time I see a Geico or Allstate advertisement. Herr D assures me there is a historical precedent. Apparently when cars were still new, there was a certain state that only had two cars in it. They ran into each other.

I do realize we're speaking of several orders of magnitude of difference in probability, but similar events DO repeat themselves throughout history. People tend to make mistakes based on their learning. Since people tend to learn from their ancestors, they tend to make ancestor-style mistakes. The only way to get around that tendency would be to learn from other sentient races or to travel to the future to learn from your descendants instead.

No time travel discussion.

Oh, don't worry, Shelob. They think I'm speaking hypothetically. So, have any of you had one of those moments being a hero and prevented an accident? I have. I climbed into a moving vehicle and stopped it. No one was right in its path--but that just meant it was less scary.