Repercussions of the Detection of Extraterrestrial Intelligence

Does not have to be malicious or deliberate.

We could die to the hands of careless aliens, whether through ignorance or just sweeping us out of the way for bigger things.

And the converse is true, we may have detrimental effect on them, without any intention of doing so.

I'm sure we're both clever enough to follow quarantine procedures. And complain about hyperspace bypasses that pass through our planet.

Who says we need to be xenophobic to kill another race? Who says they're not paranoid, xenophobic maniacs?

Quarantine is good and well, but how do you expect human quarantine procedures to hold up against alien lifeforms?

Humans fear what they don't understand. We can't make peace with ourselves - I'll ask you again - how do we maintain peace with another planet?

There are far too many unknown variables. And it is far too easy for anybody to fire a gun. It doesn't even have to be us that fires the first shot. Though honestly, I'd expect us to fire first.

Quarantine should be fine. Just set up a middle ground on the Moon or something with decontamination protocols. It's really no different to normal procedures.

How do we maintain peace with another planet? How do we wage war with another planet? We can essentially sell our culture, our art, our history and in return they can give us technology. We can also sell the numerous genetic samples available to us. Look out your window and it's likely there's over a hundred in your field of view. I think that a reasonable, rational being can understand that there are and always will be violent minorities. To wage war on an entire species because one or even one hundred out of several billion started shooting is not reasonable. Yes, WWI was started by precisely that sort of event but there were underlying factors and I'm sure alien ambassadors would be clever enough foresee extremists and take precautions (eg, not visiting Earth until an overwhelming majority accept them).

What decontamination protocols? How can we account for decontamination of a foreign source we have no idea about?

I don't believe we'll find intelligent extraterrestrial life until we actually migrate into the stars, which gives us a way of waging war. That's just speculation based on the odds of detecting extraterrestrial life (nevermind intelligent life) combined with technological progress and the barriers encountered along the way (sustainable fusion is the way out of our current spaceborne barrier, in my humble opinion).

Why would we sell genetic samples? Whose samples would we sell? What would we get in return? Why do we assume the aliens will have a concept of "money" or value that corresponds with our own?

Why are you assuming the aliens will have ambassadors? Why are you assuming that they'll be clever enough?

I dislike the stereotypical trope that intelligent alien life will be some kind of benevolent spacefaring race with advanced diplomatic and cultural achievements. To classify as intelligent life, they could simply be as advanced as the Neanderthal race. We could encounter them on their home planet. What happens then? If their planet is habitable (and we're in need of living space) . . . would we not conquer it?

I'm the contact scenario where their spaceships find us, in the present day/near future. Why would we sell genetic samples? Because we can't sell a spacefaring race internal combustion engines. The only thing we have of value are things unique to our planet. That encompasses two things: Our biosphere and our culture. They can study our history and learn the delights of a nice steak and we can finally have hoverboards. Of course you're entirely right, there's plenty of variables. But this isn't going to go anywhere without some assumption. And I think the assumptions I've made are fairly reasonable.

@Geers, read Blindsight.

What if they can't eat steak, Geers?

Yes, I know, all hope is lost

Heaven forbid, what if they don't have hoverboards?

Obviously they eat people steak.

Then they can listen to Mozart and give us the secret to their spacecakes.

It's difficult to tell what the repercussions will be, since actual first contact with aliens will not happen for at least a few billion years (unless we/they hack the fundamental laws of the universe and change the speed of light, or something like that). Who knows what the human race will be like then? Personally I think we've long gone extinct, since that's the fate of all dominant species (no, I'm not saying the dinosaurs killed themselves, just that when a species has nothing to hold it back, it will end up destroying itself).

Billion years? That's a ludicrous estimate.

Our intelligence holds us "back".
You can play the "lol humanz so dumb savage animal card" all you like but the fact of the matter is we went from barely flying to landing on the moon in 66 years. That's within a human lifetime. Sure, we nearly blew ourselves up thanks to the Cold War, but we didn't. Because we're better than that. There were some close calls but it was human intelligence that averted catastrophe. Even without superluminal travel, there are several theoretical propulsion systems which can reach significant percentages of the speed of light.

I'm actually reading that right now. Good recommendation, it's a lot of fun to read. Thanks!

Do you like watch the news at all?
We just had a hundred dead in the Ukraine, 8 dead in Turkey during elections yesterday, a horrible civil war in Syria, some crisis in Africa... If you take a single person you often get some reasonable behavior. However, if you take a crowd and add politics, religion, different cultures and languages to the mix, you get a horde of paranoid, xenophobic maniacs in no time.

How many riots have broken out in your city while you were on your way to work?

No it isn't. You do realise what light years are, right? And that the speed of light is practically impossible to even get remotely near? And in the case of "we're going to them", we first need to research that tech, which is pretty low on the priority list (if it's even on there).

The West isn't the only part of the world.

We didn't not blow ourselves up during the Cold War because we're better (because apparently we weren't good enough for Hiroshima and Nagasaki), but because neither party had taken an offensive strategy; the U.S would have nuked if Russia had nuked first, Russia would have nuked if the U.S. had nuked first. That has nothing to do with humans being 'great'. Landing to the moon and interstellar travel are two completely different things, and provided we find a planet that could sustain life, by the time we get the light from that planet, who knows what might have happened in the meanwhile. Also, significant percentages of light speed aren't everything, you also need to account for the crew that would have to spend years and years on board (I don't count automated vessels as meeting extraterrestial intelligence).

There are 1.3 light seconds between Earth and the Moon, and it took us four days to land (yes, there is orbiting and stuff, but that's not the point). We've improved our tech a lot since then, I'll give you that, but we still have miles, nay, light years to go. And even if we do reach near light speed, space isn't as empty as many people seem to think. Asteroids, comets, gas and dust clouds, sooner or later you're gonna bump into one of those. And when you're going fast enough, that's gonna hurt.

I'm not going to see extraterrestrial intelligence in my lifetime, nor will the sun, I reckon.

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/technology/warp/warpstat_prt.htm
http://www.nasa.gov/vision/space/travelinginspace/future_propulsion.html

Hiroshima and Nagasaki shocked the world. Nobody wanted to see the use of nukes after that. There were several situations during the Cold War where a false alarm was disregarded (thereby preventing nuclear war) because a human looked at it and thought "something's not quite right". A few billion years might be a fair estimate if both parties were fumbling around the universe at random, but the search isn't random. We've been blasting out radio for decades and there's been a few pretty odd radio signals detected from space.

You're right, there is debris in space. But depending on the technology used, it can be dealt with.
Wormholes literally circumnavigate the problem, warping spacetime would probably destroy anything the ship came in contact with anyway and slower ships can use a debris shield.

I'm with Geers on the technological side of things, to be fair.

Too bad you can't make extraterrestial intelligence.

Well, technically, you could, but that's not the point.

At least 2 that I remember. The other riots were at night. WTO was the most memorable one.

Our spacecraft are made in cleanrooms, extensively cleaned and quarantined and yet we can't be 100% certain it's truly free of earth life.

microbes have become resistant to all sorts of stuff, an alien probe that's been improperly cleaned could annihilate us all.