Repercussions of the Detection of Extraterrestrial Intelligence

I wasnt JUST talking about Christianity here Pretty sure at least some Mus;ims would be pissed too.

"To see what effects the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence might have on religion, Peters and his colleagues surveyed more than 1,300 individuals worldwide from multiple religious traditions, -- including Roman Catholics, evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants, Orthodox Christians, Mormons, Jews, Buddhists and non-religious groups.

They found the vast majority of religious believers — regardless of religion — were overwhelmingly confident that they wouldn’t suffer a collapse in faith in the face of evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. In addition, roughly one-third of religious people thought that the faith of other religions would be threatened, while two-thirds of nonreligious people thought that aliens would sway the faith of the religious as a whole."

http://www.space.com/10670-extraterrestrial-life-religious-beliefs.html

Interesting. I have my own opinion on this that I won't share here.

Regardless, it would be a world-changing event

Is anyone else interested in the legal ramifications of extraterrestrials?

I know one thing, this guy will have a lot of things to explain once he gets promoted to world top scientist

If we ever do manage to detect an intelligent signal., we won't be able to interact with it. We can send a response that would take a very long time to get back to them, but they will likely all be dead by the time their signal even gets to us in the first place. I'm disappointed to say that I have to go with the rare earth hypothesis on this one. One thing the Drake Equation doesn't account for is the age of the universe; A consequence of relativity is the farther out you go, the less time life has had to develop. This means that from our perspective, we are the oldest thing in the universe. There hopefully will eventually be other life out there, but maybe not until all of us are gone.

What if it's a "this is how you build an FTL drive" message?

Oh, we already have that. http://www.space.com/17628-warp-drive-possible-interstellar-spaceflight.html

Sure, if it's possible. But everything we know about physics tells us it can't be done. Even if it can, wouldn't we see the gamma ray bursts from ftl travel around the observable universe?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray

The alcubierre drive only works with a large amount of magical fairy dust and isn't really possible, right? As far as gamma ray bursts and cosmic rays being a product of ftl tracvel, wouldn't we then see clusters of activity around civilizations instead of a mostly even distribution?

Magical fairy dust exists, but it's basically we can't manufacture it, nor can we harvest it up for later use.

You're both wrong. Magical fairy dust hasn't been disproven. Therefore warp drive maybe.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7tU0H6rD-g

At what point did that video disprove anything?

It didn't. That's the point.

So I'm not wrong?

You stated it exists. So you're still wrong, because we don't know if that's true.

Except that we have mountains of evidence that virtual particles exist. Virtual particles are one of the places we'd try to source fuel (for lack of a better term) for an Alcubierre drive.