My mother once told us to get "a male realtor; the woman realtors don't care as much because they're just doing it as a hobby - the men are doing it as their full time job."
It started innocently enough, some friends writing simple C programs that would output an ever increasing text file containing the letter 'a'. This rapidly devolved into a competition of who could output the largest files the fastest.
We had progressed to recursively launching spaghetti programs competing with streamlined data-dumpers until we started to hit storage limits on the central server.
I think that if we had inexorable proof of alien life there would absolutely be a shift in the public. I'd love to think we'd grow closer as humanity.