As a sci-fi fan, I think there's an infinite number of great things that could come from it. I mentioned Uplift War, which has humans taking responsibility for raising primates up to be a space faring race and dolphins flying spaceships in water filled suits. The dog race from Fire Upon the Deep learned to communicate, develop Medieval tech, and pass on generational knowledge. Snow Crash has the cybernetic guard dogs. So many cool possibilities exist.

But I don't know if our race is ready to deal with another intelligent species able to communicate with us as equals or near equals. If we learn the true feelings of one animal, and they tell us all animals have thoughts and emotions like we do, can we eat any animal after that? And after we develop animal communication, if we learn plants are sentient as well? Again, in Fire Upon the Deep, there was a plant race that existed on a time scale we couldn't grasp because their lives were so much longer than humans. If we learn eating animals or plants now is about the same as eating your neighbors, what do we do?

We have people now that will abuse animals. Not everyone of all races values all animals the same. Much of my animal research involves owls, but they're a bad omen in some parts of the world so people kill them. Some countries really seem to not value dogs. There's Japan with their whaling. Do these become new international disputes? Do we help or take in animal refugees?

Who gets to make the determinations about animal "personhood" to determine the new animal rights or how we interact with them. Do we end up with animal embassies? Can an animal press charges against someone abusing them? Can a mouse sue a cat for eating her husband?

As for if aliens would treat us badly or even have no regard for us whatsoever as if we were ants is one hypothesis for the Fermi Paradox. Life could be hiding from a galactic murderer or most have already been wiped out by them. And again, look at our history of what we've done to other groups of humans we've come across. We've had millenia to do almost whatever to all life on this planet, and not everyone would go along with a change this massive.

I just look at all going on around the world and it seems we haven't even learned to deal with our own species properly. I just don't think we'd be able to handle another just yet.

Pretty much any aspect of our daily lives or our spirituality would be affected if we had an intellectual peer. It's fun to think about as a series of hypotheticals, but if it were real, I don't know how we'd feel about ourselves. I don't think a lot of species would necessarily be thrilled with us. I wouldn't want to have to be the first person to speak to a bison on the Great Plains for instance and try to explain why humans did what they did to them.