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326 hostile or predatory (emphasis added).’ The writer’s choice of verb is not entirely reassuring. Others have challenged the optimistic view. The possible downsides of contact are immense and irreversible, argued Brin; given the potentially overwhelming implications, we may be wise to reflect on the full range of possible outcomes, not only those for which we yearn. The risks involved in an encounter with an alien civilization could be real and very great, cautioned MacVey, the chances of benefit remote, perhaps nonexistent. Burke-Ward thought that only a few of the possible outcomes of contact would be neutral or beneficial.* Can we quantify the impact? Ivan Almar and Jill Tarter proposed what is known as the Rio Scale for making an initial judgement about a detec- tion’s potential consequences. The factors include the class of phenomenon (e.g., Earth-specific, message vs. leakage radiation), the type of discovery (e.g., result of a SETI program vs. reevaluation of archival data), and dis- tance. Shostak and Almar tested that scale with imaginary scenarios; the implied consequences ranged from minimal to disastrous.‘ Assuming us to be average has the highest probability of being right, said Von Hoerner.* Yet, SETI advocates have tended to shy away from this analogy when it is applied to behavior, presumably because of our unhappy record in dealing with less powerful cultures. One statistical device used in other fields is the Central Limit Theorem, which states that the sum of a large number of erratic variables tends to follow a normal distribution, assuming the shape of a bell curve.° Can we assume that the consequences of contact are most likely to fall somewhere between the extremes foreseen by many commentators? Or would those consequences be among the statistical outliers? Gaming may help us explore these issues. Simulations are used at the Contact conferences, where teams role-play the first human— extraterrestrial contact. The outcomes have shown that the communication of intentions can be badly misunderstood. In one case, the Human Team found that everything the aliens did was experienced as hostile even though the Alien Team meant those actions to be benign.’ It is difficult to play extraterrestrial parts in the absence of hard informa- tion; we must rely on assumptions. It would help if those playing alien roles considered only those actions that clearly would be in that civilization’s self-interest, rigorously excluding altruistic motivations that might lead to a human-preferred outcome. Trying to understand possible alien behavior by seeing it as a mirror image of our own has been applied very inconsistently, depending on which point an author was trying to make. We use mirror images to show aliens behav- What Is Missing Systematic Mirror Images