Do you mean like if an alien just showed up on my doorstep and was like, “take me to your leader”? Because I would ask, “How about we just chill here for a bit?” because nothing good is going to come from the next part.
Maybe we can all just pretend that Bernie is our leader. It’s a nice thought anyways.
Okay but whatever the case, please remember that Barack Obama volunteered to be the emissary for such an event. So if an alien shows up at your doorstep please contact Barack obama.
We’d better hope they don’t have healing technology to share with us because he’ll give it to the insurance industry to manage after slapping a few guard rails on it.
I like to think it’s also the aliens’ first contact too, and they’re really happy to find us after groping around alone in the darkness.
A fantastic amount of talking. The militaries would want to be in readiness, for example, just in case the extraterrestrials are not friendly, and the diplomatic corps would be doing their best to figure out how to communicate with them.
A lot of religions might also be thrown a bit into the air by the arrival of aliens, so there would be some chatter there, too.
Are aliens subject to human rights? Are they beings also made in God’s image, etc.
I don’t think it would be in the advantage of a smart civ to willfully contact another smart civ till it is confirmed that the “to be contacted” civ has a really good understanding of game theory.
You cannot negotiate mutually assured destruction with a civ that does not understand what mutually assured destruction means.
Do I think we would be destroyed if some other alien civ finds us? No. If civ A observes civ B destroying civ C, everyone would want to destroy civ B immediately. The possibility of there being peaceful contact for civ B goes away.
Also, contacting us must be in the benefit of the civ that contacts us (assuming they are rational).
When one civilization meets another, far more advanced, civilization, what tends to happen to the less advanced one?
Yeah, that. It’s gonna suck.
Doubtful. That happened here because we need both resources and living space while harvesting those resources. Anything aliens need can be gotten from hundreds of dead worlds and asteroids and stars. And any civilization able to cross galaxies should be able to make their own mobile livingspaces just as comfortable as a planet.
Except maybe they can’t do any of that any more, and they’re living a nomadic existence as the remnants of a civilization near the end of its life and a stellar event pushed them onto a fleet of generation ships and they’ve centuries roaming in ships that are increasingly taking apart around them.
Just because you can launch a ship or 3000 into space doesn’t mean you can do it well or all that safely.
After all, we have the technology right now, to build such a generational fleet of ships and send them off. We just don’t do it because there’s no real impetus to do so, but I can guarantee that if we knew for certain that absolute death was coming our way with no way of stopping it, escaping would be one of the things we would try to do.
Being able to get here doesn’t mean squat if it was just a random choice based on old light and a “that star looks like the best candidate we can reach in less than 300 years.”
Just because humans haven’t gone outside the orbit of earth doesn’t mean we don’t have the capability of it. We’re just trying to do it safely.
Imagine if we didn’t care how many died as long as some of us made it?
I mean that’s how the old USSR did things…
I forgetted a word
I mean, at that point you’re saying they’re not much more advanced than us, soooo… I’d place bets on us shooting them out of the sky.
Except they have the high ground. They can drop rocks on us.
Also, being able to use technical devices doesn’t mean you understand them or know how to make them.
Maybe the civilization they were in before would be able to do all that, but they can’t now, doesn’t mean they don’t still have a few “super weapons” they can fall back on.
Or, like I said, just throw heavy objects at us. It’s easier to go from orbit to ground than from ground to orbit.
Pretty sure we’d have no communication with the alien that wasn’t just corrupt politicians trying to speak for us to get some sort of trade out of them to increase their own power. It’s too important for any/all normal people to have a voice, and then when the aliens dislike the abhorrent greed we’ll probably just suffer some how more than we already do. I’d say we’re better off not reporting any alien sightings. I would trust almost any human on earth more talking to aliens on my behalf than a so called leader currently. Maybe Ireland, Spain, a handful of others have better than regular Joe leaders, but it’s rare.
Not sure but I have said that it’ll happen under Trump. It has to. The way things go lately this is just expected at this point
Seeing how incohrrent and fractured humanity is, we’d meet them with a jumbled mix of:
- Rabid xenophobia
- Aggressively trying to convert them to a dozen of our different religions
- Forming multiple cults worshipping them as gods
- Creating a shit load of really weird rule 34 AI-generated porn focused on them
- Dismissing their existence as some sort of a deep fake conspiracy
- Trying to sell them some worthless shit for a massive profit
- Trying to sell them fellow humans as slaves
- Trying to steal their technology to conquer the galaxy
- Flooding then with brainrot memes for the lolz
- Trying to destroy them with conventional weapons
And they would see all this and either destroy us in disgust or get the hell out of the solar system ASAP and cordon it off with hazard signs.
The reality of course, is they already have seen what we are like and chose not to talk to us.
Don’t forget, someone from 4chan’s /x/ would try to fuck one of them. In public. At the reveal.
You forgot “eat them”.
The real answer to the Fermi paradox is that ET wants nothing to do with us and pretend they’re not even there.
Or maybe they’d be totally into the rule34 thing.
I like the one about the memes.
Given that they have the means to have travelled from another world (presumably from outside the Solar System, as there are no signs of space colonising extraterrestrials in our neighbourhood we can observe), they must be technologically far superior to us. My guess is that they would treat us, little guys on a blue marble, like we do with ants.
Although ants have a very intricate way of life, with jobs, conflict, infrastructure, etc., most humans don’t put too much thought into keeping them safe, we trample on their cities that we say are primitive compared to our own, and we export some ants to new worlds. Additionally, even among our own species, colonialism was commonplace in all parts of the world throughout the world and its remnants still exists today, as one group of people believed they were superior to another.
Intelligent extraterrestrials capable of interplanetary (and probably interstellar) travel would definitely outclass us in every metric, and they could easily wipe us out, either by accident or on purpose (through disease, conflict, colonisation, etc.)
However, I hope that these extraterrestrials eventually acknowledge our existence as a civilisation. A little like how there are entomologists who study ants for a living and conservationists who preserve their habitats. Or perhaps organisations like UNESCO, in charge of protecting dying cultures and lost traditions, could be formed by these extraterrestrials. Maybe treaties of reparations and acknowledgement of past crimes would be signed between our species, like how many countries do today.
That’s just my thoughts though.
Id think they’d treat us like how we treat a remote tribe that’s been isolated from humanity for hundreds/thousands of years.
I think this is basically us.
I feel like we are not alone because the Universe doesn’t do things just once, and the only thing less likely to be the case is if there’s just two species for some reason, they and us. Which gives that life is ubiquitous and therefore not that interesting, so if we were to be contacted it’d be some alien researcher writing another boring thesis on uncontacted civilizations like ours that are about to kill themselves off due to dumb.
Like, maybe they’d catalogue us for posterity or something. That’d be nice.
Was that one guy that tried to contact them their Roswell moment?
I would assume that it would take a lot of stability to reach a technology level compatible with interstellar travel. It would be only achievable for a specie that reached a very peaceful way of life. So I would assume they would be rather benevolent and avoid any accidental wipeout.
Now would they care at all… maybe as scholars of the universe ?
Within less than an hour, Rule 34 will come into effect and someone will make a porn-film about them.
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If they came to us it would not be for the resources on earth, there are plenty more in space easier to get. I think it would be curiosity. They would study us, and probably all life on the planet.
Hopefully with curiosity comes empathy and they uplift us.
Also could just be determined exterminators or want to diversify diet.
Exterminators could just throw a rock at 0.1c no need to land.
Diet though, reminds me of the Peter Jackson masterpiece, Bad Taste.
Yes but Not landing means they have no love for the game. You cant spell slaughter without laughter and it funnier to see it all happen on world. Plus who knows how long until next purge. Sometimes you have to handicap your self to enjoy the game against inferior opponent.
I mean what’s the point of plasma weapons if you can’t see the “oh shit” moment on the face of the inferior species you are destroying?
Ok, perhaps they come from some Hunter Planet, searching for bars of pure Mars.
M A S T E R P I E C E
That’s a damn understatement.
Just the UZI through the stomach. To imagine that’s the dude that made the LOTR films…
You could see some of his old self in The Hobbit when the ogre king falls to his deathand splats down on the ground. That film was a stinker, though, Jackson should go back to doing comedic gore.
This is now a cinema appreciation thread btw.
Perhaps they’re after the resources which aren’t so common elsewhere, like oxygen. Maybe they would turn Earth into an oxygen farm.
Water is common out there, pretty simple to get oxygen.
Wood. Hard wood usable for building hasn’t evolved anywhere else in the known galaxy. Fine wooden furniture imported from Earth. The Amazon is being cut down and exported to alien worlds.
But seriously though, it depends on the type of aliens we’re encountering here. If they’re malevolent, they will probably wipe the earth clean and take all the resources.
If they’re more benevolent, they’ll just take pity on us, and turn back. Humanity is a problem that will fix itself if you just give it some time.
Sigh… If only… Anyway, don’t blame me, I voted Kodos.
Try to kill them
Or they try to kill us.
But also possibly convert us.
Then try to kill us.
If a civilization has the kind of power to reach us, we wouldn’t pose any problem at all.
Doesn’t mean they wouldn’t try to kill us. Options include:
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it’s possible they have cultural reasons (genocidal xenophobia, paranoia.
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they find us annoying
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we’re just in the way.
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they don’t even notice us and they’re xenoforming Earth.
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they’d rather hang with the whales
One thing is certain, though. The only thing special about earth is the life it holds. (Not that it has life, just that that life is unique.) so if they do show up it’s almost certainly not going to be covertly.
You clearly haven’t watched Star Trek. /s
The aliens could be coming here covertly to observe us like a nature documentary. They may even have non-interference rules for primitive cultures. Or maybe they’re just shy.
physics is a bitch.
Voyager 1 is likely going to be the first probe of human make to pass close to another star (“Close” means a closest approach of 1.7 lightyears, roughly), Voyager one is headed towards Glease 445. That journey will take roughly 40,000 years, and it won’t have the power to slow down as would be needed. It would require considerably more fuel to make a helocentric insertion.
Sure, it’s possible some more advanced probe is going to come along and ‘get there’ first. but whatever.
The kind of delta-v required for that would also be incredibly obvious. the platform coming from another star would be massive, and if the goal was to stick around, there is absolutely no place in space for it to hide. which means if they come, they’re not coming quietly.
(fun fact, the IRL counterpart to Star Trek’s warp drive is called the Alcubierre drive. It’s just theoretically possible. But, it’s not able to go FTL since it violates causality.)
(also fun fact… it’s quite the opposite. I’ve watched far too much star trek. and star wars. and farscape. and babylon 5 and sg1 and, uhm. lots of trashy b-rated stuff we’re not going to mention.)
The /s was to indicate sarcasm. You’re on Lemmy—you’ve definitely watched every episode of Star Trek. /s
I’m with you on the science, but I also leave a little room for the possibility that we don’t know what we don’t know. There is a lot of theory within our scientific cannon about multiple dimensions, folding space time, wormholes, etc, and we barely understand how any of it works. It’s perhaps unlikely, but possible that there is a level of scientific understanding which resolves these issues and makes long distance space travel doable.
The good news is there is almost certainly life out there.
Maybe even closer than we realize. (Potentially on Europa, for example.)
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War, then our extermination.
I think in the event of war, it would be about as long as the time it takes for us to announce the war until it’s over. The technology to freely planet hop from another solar system is like the large hadron collider vs an ant using a leaf to cross a puddle.
Oh yeah, that’s exactly how I see it going down. Before we could finish saying “kill ‘em all!” they’d have killed us all.
Die of some random common illness we don’t have any antibodies for.
Hopefully a species advanced enough to master interstellar travel would be mindful of that kind of thing though. I suppose at least they would probably be protecting themselves against that, so maybe it would go both ways?
I’ve heard that carbon is not necessarily the best basis for self replicating structures. Silicon is able to form a lot of similarly complex bonds that carbon is with a similar chain of reactions to our own. I don’t know if another life form from the ground up would even have diseases, although I guess cancer is pretty likely in any self replicating system due to cosmic rays. That would make it pretty hard to space travel though, one would expect their repair mechanisms to far excel beyond the durability of our own, which is actually pretty crap and easily confused with symmetrical DNA chains, excessive damage, repeating sequences, etc. There are other animals on earth that have better repair systems in place than us allowing them to live virtually forever, but none are mammals. Biological Immortality Wiki
Our strongest EMP rays did nothing to them, but in the end they succumbed to a simple stick.
There is also just the possibility that their common illness affects something biologically they possess that we do not.
I too hope the protections would go both ways. I guess it depends if whatever they’d exhaust is toxic to us
