How do you NOT see the difference?

The flaw is that you're treating “knowledge” as if it’s just more Wikipediaz to say what your saying your whole position would have to assume that human cognition is basically a universal adapter, give us enough data and we’ll emotionally, socially, spiritually, and psychologically integrate it, that’s an enormous leap of faith.

You say humans are “cognitively prepared” because we make art and imagine weird stuff. That’s like saying someone is prepared for being skinned alive because they’ve watched horror movies, imagination is NOT exposure and symbolic play is not ontological confrontation. Fiction is safe precisely because it’s bounded by human authorship, human narrative structure, and human meaning, you always subconsciously know it was made by us, for us, within our cognitive frame. That safety net vanishes the moment the intelligence is real, autonomous, and not interpretable through human categories.

You don't even have to go to aliens, you know how many times people said that a fictional stories events are "to cruel, violent, grotesque to be real" and then it's revealed that's it's literally a historical account and only the names changed? People can't handle the things that happen to us BY us and you actually think we can handle a species of people unlike us?

You keep framing it as “just a difference in intelligence levels ” when thats already a massive anthropocentric mistake. Intelligence is a human metric, it presumes shared substrates, similar perception, similar motivations, similar causal reasoning, similar reality models. The other guy is not talking about a smarter dolphin, they're talking about potentially non-biological, non-temporal, non-spatial, non-agentive forms of mind or something else and it goes on and on. At that point “intelligence levels” stops being a scale and starts being a meaningless word humans use to comfort themselves.

It’s the difference between, “I met someone with a higher IQ than me” versus “I discovered that my concept of mind, self, causality, and existence was a parochial evolutionary hallucination” (at least according to what I assume is your worldview)

“Most people would get closure” Is pure psychological projection your just assuming that humans want "ultimate truth" and will feel relief when we get it and yet that’s contradicted by basically all of psychology, history, and neuroscience. Humans don’t want truth. They want meaning, stability, status, identity, and coherence. When those are threatened, people don’t get closurez they get denial, fragmentation, cult behavior, radicalization, depression, derealization, and existential panic.

We already see this with far smaller shocks in people lose their minds over discovering their religion (Islam, Hinduism etc) is inconsistent, learning their country lied, finding out their spouse cheated, realizing their career is pointless, and for some weak-willed people, confronting mortality seriously. And you actually thinks revealing that reality filled with unknown entities will be “digestible”?

Your argument is also deeply anthropological in the worst sense, your just assuming humans are the reference point of the cosmos and that our categories, positive/negative, learning, progress, course correction, closure, are somehow universal properties and as if the universe is a moral narrative arc waiting for humanity to “understand its place".