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So let’s say that within the next few years astronomers finally see incontrovertible evidence of intelligent alien life. Megastructures, the exhausts from fusi
by dsq 4y ago
So let’s say that within the next few years astronomers finally see incontrovertible evidence of intelligent alien life.
Megastructures, the exhausts from fusion drives, etc. No question about it.
But vey far away, no question of it physically coming here.
Would that in itself have significant effect on human society, and if so, what would it be?
- mr_mitm 4y agoI wonder what it would do to most religions in particular.
- jliptzin 4y agoWhat would that change for religious people? There’s already tons of contradictions uncovered by science that conflict with religions in many ways (such as the earth being older than 5,000 years), the believers won’t ever budge.
- ceejayoz 4y ago"Sweet, somewhere new to send missionaries!"
- meindnoch 4y ago"Omg, God is amazing!"
- ulizzle 4y agoHave you ever watched "All Tomorrows: The Future of Humanity"? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imNtSPM3-r4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imNtSPM3-r4
- peebeebee 4y agoOf course, we will be studying their every move. Enormous amounts of money will be spent on new devices specifically to study them.
- dylan604 4y agoOr made from what was learned
- BurningFrog 4y agoMany bright young minds would be lured into PhD programs.
- ako 4y agoWe’ll be studying what they did a long time ago, as it takes many years for their light to reach us. We’ll be studying their history.
- matthewdgreen 4y agoI’d like to believe that we’ve already found evidence of an expanding technological civilization only 1500 light years away, and civilization has barely changed at all: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ac3416 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ac3416 (note: not very serious, pretty unlikely, but fun to think about.)
- mrlonglong 4y agoIt's most likely to be dust getting in the way. Who knows?
- wolfram74 4y agoMaybe it's a dyson sphere, maybe not. Any stellar engineering project will /probably/ be ambiguous enough that discovery of other industrial life will be a slow gradual process like most scientific discoveries. With fractionally more of the populace accepting the premise with each piece of accumulated evidence.
- tomrod 4y ago> But vey far away, no question of it physically coming here. That we know of. Who knows if Alcubierre drives work. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive
- ceejayoz 4y ago"If exotic matter with the correct properties cannot exist, then the drive cannot be constructed" seems like a fairly hefty obstacle at this point.
- mr_mitm 4y agoPlus, any FTL signal will violate causality. The speed of light being a speed limit is a consequence of the geometry of spacetime. I'm convinced FTL is as impossible as it is to have an angle greater than 180 degree between two lines in Euclidean geometry.
- ceejayoz 4y ago> Plus, any FTL signal will violate causality. I have to say I'm uncomfortable with the idea that we've discovered everything there is to know about the physical rules of the universe.
- mr_mitm 4y agoMe too, and that is indeed not what I said.
- ceejayoz 4y ago"I'm convinced FTL is as impossible", with causality as the apparent reason, would seem to imply a belief that we understand that particular concept fully.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
- moffkalast 4y agoOf course, we could finally stop hating each other and hate the aliens instead.
- cjbgkagh 4y agoI’ve thought about the idea of exporting political dissent to a fake alien threat. “We’ve always been at war with South East Alpha Centauri.” People who find out its fake would be incentivized to keep the charade going those who do not would be labeled cranks. Though I can’t help but think that without political dissent we’d quickly end up with feudalism.
- LarryMullins 4y ago> I’ve thought about the idea of exporting political dissent to a fake alien threat. Heh, predictions of precisely such a scheme have been popular among conspiracy theorists for years. "Project Blue Beam" and the like. It's also the premise of the Watchmen comic book.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- SAI_Peregrinus 4y agoWhy not both? The worst part about how awful the Warhammer 40k universe is IMO is how very human the Imperium is. They hate the xenos. They hate the heretics. They hate themselves, each other, and everything else. Hate! Hate! Hate! An emotion as pure as it is deep! Hate! Hate! Hate! Let it flow, let it run free! —Inspirational Verse, Imperial Hymnal Vol. IV Humans rarely stop hating one another because of a foreign threat, instead we just add more hate to the pile. Quite depressing.
- Maursault 4y agoIt would be far more surprising if somehow how it was discovered incontrovertibly that Earth hosts the only life in the Universe.
- m3kw9 4y agoI wonder how such a proof would look like lol. God coming here to tell us?
- Maursault 4y agoWhat if Earth's spinning core is incredibly rare or unique? How would life evolve without a magnetosphere? What if it not only takes a magnetosphere but precisely one moon of just the right size and period?
- ceejayoz 4y agoWe estimate there are two trillion galaxies. We think our galaxy has 100 billion planets. "Incredibly rare" isn't rare with those numbers, and "unique" is vanishingly unlikely. The chances of there being a planetary formation scenario that happens only once in 2^23 iterations is... low. > How would life evolve without a magnetosphere? Our magnetosphere isn't even unique in this solar system; Jupiter has an immensely strong one. We've likely detected at least one on an extrasolar planet (http://data.iap.fr/doi/bjaffel/20210727/ http://data.iap.fr/doi/bjaffel/20210727/). Plus, Earth-style life needs a magnetosphere; that doesn't mean all life does.
- Maursault 4y ago> We think our galaxy has 100 billion planets. That pool reduces quickly eliminating all planets without surface temperatures permitting liquid water, and of the right mass to permit something to grow. Among those, how many have a magnetosphere for billions of years, water, and the right amount of selenium to permit cell growth but not enough to poison everything? Consider also that the Sun may not even be from this galaxy. Maybe its galactic migration, the Milky Way cannibalizing its host possibly dwarf galaxy, had something to do with it. It makes our circumstances even rarer. I'm just playing Devil's Advocate here. Of course there's other life in the Universe, likely intelligent life. Infinite diversity in infinite combinations.
- JoeDaDude 4y agoIMHO, not very much. Scientists would be all over it, trying to measure and study what they found. The public at large would speculate wildly on what the aliens would look like, what their society or philosophy would be like, etc. But in the absence of any new information, interest would die out and it would be just another bit of knowledge that humans adapt to, sort of like when heliocentrism took over or when evolution was discovered. And there would be denialists and conspiracy theorists, people who would blame it on some group as an effort to change their deeply held beliefs and views.
- echelon 4y agoI disagree. Religions would face a huge obstacle in bridging their creation myths, more people would become atheist and non-religious. Knowing something is possible is a hugely motivating factor. The department of defense and every international analog would want bigger and bolder weapons, money would pour into science. We'd fund astronomy and space exploration orders of magnitude more. There would be a renewed push for humans on Mars and beyond. We'd want to know if alien life was biological or an AGI. We'd push harder on our own advances, but also become more aware of how this acceleration affects us. We'd keep looking for life in our backyard. We'd be worried about it. Popular science and science fiction would communicate that risk and would lead to new cultural overtones. Zombies and superhero movies get replaced with alien invasion films. I think we'd accelerate everything. Edit: my post is proving controversial because of my statement on religion, which totally flies over my main point. With regard to religion: (1) I haven't made any value judgments, (2) the impact of science, technology, and modern culture has deceased religiously in the West measurably. I should think incontrovertible proof of alien life would only contribute to this trend.
- m3kw9 4y agoYou’d see world wide massive effort trying to understand and try to extract as much info from that to be used here. Maybe even all countries pooling resources to build something that can extract as much as possible
- JackFr 4y agoThe question is ill posed. If there is incontrovertible scientific evidence, then they are already “physically” here. I presume the distinction the parent is trying to make is between some form of electromagnetic radiation, versus chunks of matter, but if it’s some form of signal, then they are interacting with us, physically.
- dsq 4y agoThe qualificatiom I made in my question was to ask what the effect eould be on us if there was no two way exchange of information. We see them, they're far away, they are unaware of us or don't care. I see this as the most likely alien discovery scenario, because so far we haven't seen any, so they are probably pretty far away.
- kemyke 4y agoYou can find a possible scenario in the 'The Three body problem' book by Liu Cixin. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Body_Problem_(novel) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Body_Problem_(nove...
- MrPatan 4y ago> But vey far away, no question of it physically coming here If you can see them far away it doesn't mean they are not also close by and you can't see them. You should update "there are aliens close by" to a much higher probability