This is what a top alien hunter would send if we found intelligent life in the universe

Imagine that you just discovered intelligent alien life. Now ponder what you would send their way.

What would explain our world? What tone should we take - a peaceful one? Or something defensive to ward off an attack?

These are all questions that Seth Shostak regularly grapples with as director of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI) in California.

Whether we should interact with aliens at all once we find them, though, is up for debate.

"That's a very controversial thing, because there are people - including Stephen Hawking - who think it's very dangerous to broadcast a message, because you don't know if these guys are friendly or otherwise," Shostak told Tech Insider. "I think that's a little silly, because we're already telling them we're here with our radar."

Radio signals have been beaming from Earth into the universe for decades, so any aliens who are nearby could find us if they're looking hard enough.

If we end up finding them, Shostak said, he knows what he would send to explain humanity. And it would be big.

"You might just broadcast the reply, 'Hi, we're the Earthlings. We've got a whole bunch of used cars here if you're interested,'" he joked. "I wouldn't just send a short message, because if they're far away, it's going to take a long time to get there. You might as well just send everything at once, so I would send the Google servers; I would just send the internet. There's enough there that they would understand some of it. Someone pointed out to me, 'Well, there's a lot of porn on the internet.' But the aliens don't care, probably."

Think about how many photos, videos, audio files, and text there is on the internet. What better way is there to explain humanity?

"They would slowly put together what some of this stuff means - I think they could. It's a rich source of information," Shostak said. "It's like the hieroglyphics in Egypt. They were actually very quick to decode because there were so many of them."