Repercussions of the Detection of Extraterrestrial Intelligence

Virtual particle ≠ negative mass.

I think that, given the kind of planets we're finding and the life on earth we're finding, the galaxy is absolutely crawling with life.

However, i also believe that that life is largely of the non-intelligent kind, with a logarithmic distribution ranging from millions of moss and bacteria planets to thousands of multicellular planets to small amounts of complex ecosystem planets.

I don't think we'll be encountering alien intelligent life anytime soon, and given my above view, they'll likely be far, far away, too far for meaningful "daily" interaction or harmful interaction.

Therefore, i chose Beneficial/Neutral because it might teach us a thing or two about alien life, but overall it's no star trek. It's too quiet for that.


The dysytopian version is that it's omnipresent but everyone's hiding because predators have a tendency to be the most advanced, and sticking your neck out == death. But i don't like that.

Predator or not there's barely any reason to kill us all.

That depends on the Apes or Angels idea (That our civilization is just a spec of dust in history and thus, any aliens will be vastly less or vastly more advanced, but certainly not like us).

A race sufficiently similar may find benefit in destroying a potential enemy or conquering a colonizable world.

Can travel between stars
Can't colonize Mars.

Ok...No.

-Not every alien starsystem will have "mars"
-Not every star system in the neighborhood will have earth-likes within a small range of mass to sustain human life. (e.g. mars is too small to sustain a sufficient atmosphere)

It depends on how the Drake Equation goes in reality to rule out such scenarios.

Listen to yourself. How can a species cross HUNDREDS of lightyears and yet not have the technological capability to live practicality anywhere with solid ground? Why bother with a war when there's plenty of other completely empty systems?

Gliese is like, ~30 lightyears away and a probable life candidate.

As i mentioned above, it depends on how the drake equation plays out as there's definitely an optimum between better colonization and better interstellar travel, in this case dominated by Drake and not by technology in itself.

it depends on whether "life islands" are rare and stretched apart, but also whether suitable low-hanging fruit colonizeable planets are plenty or rare.

If you can travel interstellar, just fire an RKV and there's no need for war, just cleanup.

You're missing the point. There are no "life islands" for space-faring civilizations. They can settle wherever they like.

requirements to settle mars: obscene, ever-lasting
requirements to go a few stars further and capture a planet: Single large investment on the scale of above colonization, but has pay-off.

There's a big gap between building a (short range, meaning sub-100 ly's) interstellar spaceship and colonizing an easily settable planet and maintaining life in space or a planet with similar needs (e.g. mars).

For a significant amount of time, colonizing a habitable planet is going to be a much lower-hanging fruit than sustaining life anywhere, mostly because of the time component.

You're assuming their biology is suited to Earth-likes, which is likely not the case. Any species with the technology and resources to travel between stars would have no difficulty settling anywhere. They can just terraform or drop a few robots down and wait while a habitat is built.

I think it's a mistake to humanize an alien's reasoning. There could be hundreds of reasons to hide from or attack other civilisations. Heck, earth could be their holy planet because a revolution around the sun takes 365.25 days. Or they need a planet with a decent magnetic field in the habitable zone. Or they really like lots of water.

Looking at what usually happens when "advanced" humans found "non advanced" humans in history we should be happy that no advanced aliens have visited us yet. Either there are fewer of them than probabilities say or they avoid us because we are stupid insects to them.

Predictions about technological advance are always kinda of ... naive I think.
Like try to imagine what a super good scientist from 100 years ago might have predicted about today: Most likely complete rubbish from our view. Then relate that to what we predict about the future development: Most likely complete rubbish from the view of a person 100 years in the future. And then there is the whole exponential growth thing.... who knows maybe tomorrow somebody discovers something super crazy and the world will change massively within a few years. Like what happened when the internet was created in a few dozen years.

Still kind of fun though!
Sci Fi authors have probably covered all imaginable possibilities of interstellar travel from impulse drives with hibernating crew (Alien), over warp drive, wormholes (Babylon 5), hyperspace (Star Wars) to instantly teleporting by folding space time (Dune). Somebody is bound to be close.
And while we have exponential growth in scientific discoveries we need some very specific breakthroughs if we want to explore space properly. Hibernation ships might be possible in theory in a couple of decades. But you would have to be very desperate or properly insane to board them.

Everything else however is pure speculation as far as I know. The Alcubierre drive is based on theoretical solutions that have not been proven to exist as far as I know. Not to mention that we don't exactly know what those exotic particles might do to the human body.

Yes I know, I've mentioned it earlier. My point is that the technology you'd need to develop to cross interstellar distances would allow you to colonize almost any planet you like, regardless of the condition. No magnetic field? MAKE ONE! No water? Drag in some comets from the Oort cloud.

You're making the mistake of comparing human actions to an alien species. Granted, we don't have much to go on, but trying to guess the actions of aliens based on human psychology is silly. Also:

Stupid ethics committee.

you are VASTLY overestimating the technology to travel interstellar.

If we want to, we can do it.

I wish real life worked like this.

Also, the repercussions of successful detection (and interaction) of extraterrestrial life/intelligence would, without a doubt, result in one of two things:

1. We kill them all.

2. They kill us all.

As a race, we're not socially-advanced enough to maintain interstellar peace. We can't even do it amongst ourselves.

there's no political, economical, military or scientific reason to do it, yes.

Oh, I didn't realise we were talking about a concerted international effort. I thought "we" was a localised or at best, national usage of the term.

No, no I'm not. It would take massive resources, which means nuclear fusion, asteroid mining, robotic construction, sustaining a suitable climate, radiation shielding etc.

Why kill them?
Why kill us?

The world doesn't consist of paranoid, xenophobic maniacs.