Repercussions of the Detection of Extraterrestrial Intelligence

Sooner or later, we're going to find an ETI (or they'll find us) and this will quite obviously have a profound impact on society. What do you think will happen next?



Personally, I think the most likely scenario will be positive. A civilization capable of journeying between the stars would have no need for Earth or its inhabitants. They would have a robotic task force, eliminating the need to enslave us, be entirely capable of growing large amounts of food in space so they don't need to eat us, and since we can't even get into space without explosions it's unlikely they'd consider us to be a credible threat, meaning they have no reason to destroy us. Any materials they need can be harvested from any other planets/asteroids, so they don't need to set up any hostile mining operations and a race that has reached the stars will have very probably dealt with societal issues.

Of course there's the possibility that they united behind a religion which dictates we are blasphemy, or they are beings of pure logic and will destroy or limit us so we don't go around sucking up resources which otherwise could be used by them.

It's a different story however, if contact arises from a probe or transmission rather than giant starships. A transmission is far less impressive than a six kilometre-long FTL-enabled space cruiser, but the information it contains would be of immense value. Perhaps it would contain an encyclopaedia of their knowledge, or the combined knowledge of multiple space-faring civilizations. Perhaps it contains a blueprint for a spacecraft, so we can meet face-to-face in a neutral zone.

PS: Don't bring conspiracy theories into this, at all, ever.
PPS: Because of how astronomers verify signals, there's no way one country is going to end up with the whole transmission and stop everyone else from looking.

http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1104/1104.4462.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potential_cultural_impact_of_extraterrestrial_contact

Don't forget that a good part on Humanity is BAD.
We spend a lot of time killing eachother, so imagine what will happen when all the "i-don't-like-my-neighboor" people will discover a NEW neighboor ?

So altrough there could be some good things, a LOT of bad things will happen...

"Let's attack the people who are 100,000 years ahead of us on the evolutionary scale"

Nobody is that stupid.

There are three major reasons people kill each other:

Resources
Religion
Psychosis

Two of those can be fixed with the technology that contact would bring.

We take bets ?

A contact with another civilisation will maybe bring good to us, but also some bad.
I don't beleive any civilisation is good/blind enough to just uplift us.
A lot of people will refuse the uplift (conspirations, fear...), a lot of people will see them as conquerors even if they have all the best intentions etc.

An advanced technology could help us, but it would require a deep and fundamental change of our specie, which will take time to come naturally.

And if it does not come naturally, can we consider it good ? Are we not supposed to go our own way ?

Eh, it makes sense that it would be insanely large odds we find intellegent life outside our planet. Germs, sure, they developed here, why not Europa?

If there were other intellegent life, how do we know they are that advanced? We are about as advanced as one could think. We don't know of any technology we could fathom otherwise, even while we know about highly experimental technology. The other race will either just have technology working which we only knew about, or be about at our same level. They might have same problems, but they probably will be as interested as we are. They might have their own kind act unreasonably stupid and we might too, and I am sure our own jurisdictions can deal with it, we have prisons to send people who act all retarded over it and they probably do too.

Besides that, it would take a lot just to communicate. Who knows what sort of developed lifeform they are, they might not even compute logic on the same base we do, let alone the same media. We will probably both have to get insanely good cryptographers for years to do basic communication before we can derpedly say "hi" back and forth to each other a few times.

In either case, this is an interesting read. I enjoyed it, I read all of it before this thread was even made.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_Earth_hypothesis

Heh, yes, yes they are

If people see something they don't understand, that can generate fear. Fear generates fight or flight. What if we've already killed visitors and now no one wants to visit Earth because we're a bunch of killin' fools?

If the transmission was intended for us, it would be something basic, establishing a common ground. It's unlikely another life form arose at the exact same time we did. They're probably either thousands of years behind or thousands of years ahead.

Well that's entirely possible. But if it was handled carefully enough, I think most people would be ok. Of course there will always be zealots and xenophobes, but as long as first contact isn't as dramatic as a kilometre-long ship landing on top of the National Mall and instead transmission-based at first, people would likely eventually accept the reality of the existence of an extraterrestrial intelligence.

I, for one, would welcome our new alien overlords.

I'm with Michelle on this one. Look at pretty much everything that happened in the last 150 years. Now imagine those aliens might have some resemblance with arachnids and you will have people lining up 'to defend themselves' with clubs if need be.

A civilization far enough developed to have interstellar travel might only be interested in observing us. I doubt they would make contact at this point. Too soon.

I'm arguing what a thousand years does. For instance, we have nanotechnology on molecular level. I don't see technology getting smaller than that, only more used in bulk. If they are thousand years older, they use technology still familiar to us probably. Possibly better computing if they have large computers built entirely of nanotechnology.

Progress has been getting faster and faster. Look how quickly we went from telephone to mobile, then think how quickly we went from mobile to smartphone. In 1903, the world saw the first heavier-than-air powered flight. A mere sixty six years later we landed on the moon. I know I'm not explaining it very well but here's Ray Kurzweil doing it better:

So one thousand years of time may equal several times that in terms of progress. Technology advancement in general is accelerating:







I strongly recommend reading "The Singularity is Near" (all 500-ish pages + >100 pages of notes), it's not about aliens but it shows how technology is rapidly developing. A thousand-year head start would be incredible.

If you want a book about alien intelligence I recommend "The Eerie Silence" by Paul Davis.

I know it's a giant post, but it's not my fault nobody thought to give the forum spoiler tags.

I consider Blindsight to be compulsory reading material when it comes to alien intelligence.

And the great thing about that book is; the author (the amazing Peter Watts) released it free to read.

To be honest, I'm not sure how long our current civilization will last. Many great humans have graced the Earth with pretty awesome "technology" for their times and eventually, something happens that sends us all back to the starting point. If we lost all our data, I don't know if the next civilization can pick up where we left off.

It's not just about data, it is way worse than most people realize. A solar flare could potentially paralyze an entire continent. No clean water, no electricity, no planes, no cars; not much later food will run out and hospitals fall apart. We keep sticking microchips in everything from our phones to our fridges but we don't harden any of it. Everything is cheaply build with the expiration date ticking even if everything goes according to plan.

It's even worse when you look at food. Most of today's crops are maximum yield but genetically not very diversified. It makes it extremely dangerous to rely on them because a pest will wipe your harvest out completely instead of just a large portion. Same goes for food animals, too. It gets worse: You know how a lot of the genetically manipulated grain, corn, whatnot US companies sell can't be used as seeds? Yup, if you can't buy new seeds you are screwed.

If you want to know how the breakdown of civilization will look like just take large storms and floods as example. They take out a lot of the infrastructure that is needed for our daily life. Remember the Philippines, taifun Haiyan? The earthquake that cause Fukushima? Hurricane Katrina? Now usually there is help coming in a couple of days. If you can survive for a couple of days you will get fresh water, food, medical treatment, warm clothes, shelter... But what happens if nobody can help because everybody got hit at the same time?

Oh yah, I can totally see a majority of us, if not all of us, wiped out this way. There have been other species of humans... but I'm not sure that any other form than our current would care about bringing back a lost civilization. ¯\(°_o)/¯

We eat our cats, and within a week or two come up with something better.

Some people die, others move on. Just like any other disaster.

Society wouldn't be able to completely break down in any first world country for over a month under any conditions besides complete annihilation.

There are more highly trained professionals and more redundancy in the system than there has ever been. If 3 billion people were to die, we'd still have loads of electrical engineers who would be able to make circuits. We'd still have loads of medical professionals who know the effects of various chemicals on the body. We'd have more than enough boy scouts to set up basic water filtration systems.

In order for society to break down completely, everybody everywhere would need to actively dislike every convenience they've been given in the past few decades, and there is far too much greed in the world for that to happen.

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/the-best-storage-device-is-you.57410/

An intriguing idea. If it's for long term storage you really do not need to access it quickly. You just need a universal instruction manual on how to acquire the tools needed to access it, and another, slightly smaller, universal instruction manual telling an advanced civilization what it is, why it's important, and maybe what is the best way to read it.

As for the whole ET thing, it will most certainly be initially negative, no matter the contact (unless they play God and very visibly save Earth for some reason). Reasons: Shock, fear, outrage at religious organizations for *lying* the whole time, misunderstanding, and oh did I say FEAR?

Depending on our reaction after that, it could turn into something beneficial. Maybe even mutual.

Remember, the only people dreaming about conversing with aliens and learning from them are scientists and anonymous nerd dudes on the Interwebs (and some not so anonymous ones.....). The rest of civilization is just too focused on the stuff going on here on Earth right now.

I disagree with Stephen Hawking on a lot of things, but he does have a point. Why the hell are we still on this rock when all the red flags say GTFO or die a slow species death?

Anyway. My opinion, partly based on reading journals, partly based on reading novels, and partly based on Star Wars (maybe).

I'm pretty sure the pope has said that aliens would not contradict the bible. Or something along those lines.