What do you think realistically would happen the moment we meet extraterrestrials?
1mon 9d ago by lemmy.world/u/wabafee in nostupidquestions
Seeing how incohrrent and fractured humanity is, we'd meet them with a jumbled mix of:
- Rabid xenophobia
- Aggressively trying to convert them to a dozen of our different religions
- Forming multiple cults worshipping them as gods
- Creating a shit load of really weird rule 34 AI-generated porn focused on them
- Dismissing their existence as some sort of a deep fake conspiracy
- Trying to sell them some worthless shit for a massive profit
- Trying to sell them fellow humans as slaves
- Trying to steal their technology to conquer the galaxy
- Flooding then with brainrot memes for the lolz
- Trying to destroy them with conventional weapons
And they would see all this and either destroy us in disgust or get the hell out of the solar system ASAP and cordon it off with hazard signs.
The reality of course, is they already have seen what we are like and chose not to talk to us.
Don't forget, someone from 4chan's /x/ would try to fuck one of them. In public. At the reveal.
Or maybe they'd be totally into the rule34 thing.
You forgot "eat them".
The real answer to the Fermi paradox is that ET wants nothing to do with us and pretend they're not even there.
I like the one about the memes.
Given that they have the means to have travelled from another world (presumably from outside the Solar System, as there are no signs of space colonising extraterrestrials in our neighbourhood we can observe), they must be technologically far superior to us. My guess is that they would treat us, little guys on a blue marble, like we do with ants.
Although ants have a very intricate way of life, with jobs, conflict, infrastructure, etc., most humans don't put too much thought into keeping them safe, we trample on their cities that we say are primitive compared to our own, and we export some ants to new worlds. Additionally, even among our own species, colonialism was commonplace in all parts of the world throughout the world and its remnants still exists today, as one group of people believed they were superior to another.
Intelligent extraterrestrials capable of interplanetary (and probably interstellar) travel would definitely outclass us in every metric, and they could easily wipe us out, either by accident or on purpose (through disease, conflict, colonisation, etc.)
However, I hope that these extraterrestrials eventually acknowledge our existence as a civilisation. A little like how there are entomologists who study ants for a living and conservationists who preserve their habitats. Or perhaps organisations like UNESCO, in charge of protecting dying cultures and lost traditions, could be formed by these extraterrestrials. Maybe treaties of reparations and acknowledgement of past crimes would be signed between our species, like how many countries do today.
That's just my thoughts though.
Id think they'd treat us like how we treat a remote tribe that's been isolated from humanity for hundreds/thousands of years.
I think this is basically us.
I feel like we are not alone because the Universe doesn't do things just once, and the only thing less likely to be the case is if there's just two species for some reason, they and us. Which gives that life is ubiquitous and therefore not that interesting, so if we were to be contacted it'd be some alien researcher writing another boring thesis on uncontacted civilizations like ours that are about to kill themselves off due to dumb.
Like, maybe they'd catalogue us for posterity or something. That'd be nice.
Was that one guy that tried to contact them their Roswell moment?
I would assume that it would take a lot of stability to reach a technology level compatible with interstellar travel. It would be only achievable for a specie that reached a very peaceful way of life. So I would assume they would be rather benevolent and avoid any accidental wipeout.
Now would they care at all… maybe as scholars of the universe ?
Within less than an hour, Rule 34 will come into effect and someone will make a porn-film about them.
If they came to us it would not be for the resources on earth, there are plenty more in space easier to get. I think it would be curiosity. They would study us, and probably all life on the planet.
Hopefully with curiosity comes empathy and they uplift us.
Also could just be determined exterminators or want to diversify diet.
Exterminators could just throw a rock at 0.1c no need to land.
Diet though, reminds me of the Peter Jackson masterpiece, Bad Taste.
M A S T E R P I E C E
That's a damn understatement.
Just the UZI through the stomach. To imagine that's the dude that made the LOTR films...
You could see some of his old self in The Hobbit when the ogre king falls to his deathand splats down on the ground. That film was a stinker, though, Jackson should go back to doing comedic gore.
This is now a cinema appreciation thread btw.
Yes but Not landing means they have no love for the game. You cant spell slaughter without laughter and it funnier to see it all happen on world. Plus who knows how long until next purge. Sometimes you have to handicap your self to enjoy the game against inferior opponent.
I mean what's the point of plasma weapons if you can't see the "oh shit" moment on the face of the inferior species you are destroying?
Ok, perhaps they come from some Hunter Planet, searching for bars of pure Mars.
Perhaps they're after the resources which aren't so common elsewhere, like oxygen. Maybe they would turn Earth into an oxygen farm.
Water is common out there, pretty simple to get oxygen.
Wood. Hard wood usable for building hasn't evolved anywhere else in the known galaxy. Fine wooden furniture imported from Earth. The Amazon is being cut down and exported to alien worlds.
But seriously though, it depends on the type of aliens we’re encountering here. If they’re malevolent, they will probably wipe the earth clean and take all the resources.
If they’re more benevolent, they’ll just take pity on us, and turn back. Humanity is a problem that will fix itself if you just give it some time.
Sigh.... If only... Anyway, don't blame me, I voted Kodos.
Try to kill them
Or they try to kill us.
But also possibly convert us.
Then try to kill us.
If a civilization has the kind of power to reach us, we wouldn't pose any problem at all.
Doesn’t mean they wouldn’t try to kill us. Options include:
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it’s possible they have cultural reasons (genocidal xenophobia, paranoia.
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they find us annoying
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we’re just in the way.
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they don’t even notice us and they’re xenoforming Earth.
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they’d rather hang with the whales
One thing is certain, though. The only thing special about earth is the life it holds. (Not that it has life, just that that life is unique.) so if they do show up it’s almost certainly not going to be covertly.
You clearly haven’t watched Star Trek. /s
The aliens could be coming here covertly to observe us like a nature documentary. They may even have non-interference rules for primitive cultures. Or maybe they’re just shy.
physics is a bitch.
Voyager 1 is likely going to be the first probe of human make to pass close to another star ("Close" means a closest approach of 1.7 lightyears, roughly), Voyager one is headed towards Glease 445. That journey will take roughly 40,000 years, and it won't have the power to slow down as would be needed. It would require considerably more fuel to make a helocentric insertion.
Sure, it's possible some more advanced probe is going to come along and 'get there' first. but whatever.
The kind of delta-v required for that would also be incredibly obvious. the platform coming from another star would be massive, and if the goal was to stick around, there is absolutely no place in space for it to hide. which means if they come, they're not coming quietly.
(fun fact, the IRL counterpart to Star Trek's warp drive is called the Alcubierre drive. It's just theoretically possible. But, it's not able to go FTL since it violates causality.)
(also fun fact... it's quite the opposite. I've watched far too much star trek. and star wars. and farscape. and babylon 5 and sg1 and, uhm. lots of trashy b-rated stuff we're not going to mention.)
The /s was to indicate sarcasm. You’re on Lemmy—you’ve definitely watched every episode of Star Trek. /s
I’m with you on the science, but I also leave a little room for the possibility that we don’t know what we don’t know. There is a lot of theory within our scientific cannon about multiple dimensions, folding space time, wormholes, etc, and we barely understand how any of it works. It’s perhaps unlikely, but possible that there is a level of scientific understanding which resolves these issues and makes long distance space travel doable.
The good news is there is almost certainly life out there.
Maybe even closer than we realize. (Potentially on Europa, for example.)
War, then our extermination.
I think in the event of war, it would be about as long as the time it takes for us to announce the war until it's over. The technology to freely planet hop from another solar system is like the large hadron collider vs an ant using a leaf to cross a puddle.
Oh yeah, that’s exactly how I see it going down. Before we could finish saying “kill ‘em all!” they’d have killed us all.
A little bit of pee comes out.
I'd be PSYCHED. For whatever comes. It'd galvanize humanity. I think our problem is that we don't have enough external enemies. That's why we fight each other. Best game on the planet. Bet if aliums showed up we'd come together to destroy them and have a barbecue, and we'd lose, but it'd be nice to all feel like friends for once.
I think if we didn't unite when the air could cripple people, we aren't uniting over anything external.
Die of some random common illness we don't have any antibodies for.
Hopefully a species advanced enough to master interstellar travel would be mindful of that kind of thing though. I suppose at least they would probably be protecting themselves against that, so maybe it would go both ways?
Our strongest EMP rays did nothing to them, but in the end they succumbed to a simple stick.
There is also just the possibility that their common illness affects something biologically they possess that we do not.
I too hope the protections would go both ways. I guess it depends if whatever they'd exhaust is toxic to us
I've heard that carbon is not necessarily the best basis for self replicating structures. Silicon is able to form a lot of similarly complex bonds that carbon is with a similar chain of reactions to our own. I don't know if another life form from the ground up would even have diseases, although I guess cancer is pretty likely in any self replicating system due to cosmic rays. That would make it pretty hard to space travel though, one would expect their repair mechanisms to far excel beyond the durability of our own, which is actually pretty crap and easily confused with symmetrical DNA chains, excessive damage, repeating sequences, etc. There are other animals on earth that have better repair systems in place than us allowing them to live virtually forever, but none are mammals. Biological Immortality Wiki
Trump will post on Truth that we had a war and we won.
Something similar to what happened to india or Indonesia when the British/ Dutch showed up
Do you mean like if an alien just showed up on my doorstep and was like, "take me to your leader"? Because I would ask, "How about we just chill here for a bit?" because nothing good is going to come from the next part.
Maybe we can all just pretend that Bernie is our leader. It's a nice thought anyways.
Okay but whatever the case, please remember that Barack Obama volunteered to be the emissary for such an event. So if an alien shows up at your doorstep please contact Barack obama.
We'd better hope they don't have healing technology to share with us because he'll give it to the insurance industry to manage after slapping a few guard rails on it.
Trying to overcome language barriers, probably.
One group will sell out the rest of us, guaranteed.
A breakdown in society as people report it as hoaxes, missinformation spreading everywhere, religious groups fragmenting over if they prove or disprove their gods existence. The same bullshit whenever world shaking event happens.
They would be sick of our shit in 5 minutes
It depends on what the extraterrestrials are like. I think its probable they would be as incomprehensible to us as we are to fish or bugs. I am confident that a significant percentage of people will immediately freak out and react with aggression regardless of what they are like, and that the wealthy will be looking for any way to make money from them, even if it means selling out life on earth.
His babies are yummy
At this point?
I see 100% of the world, all the narcissists and psychopaths in power, asking them to please take them away from this horrible world
Take me wit u?
Watch the movie “Contact” for a good depiction of this.
A fantastic amount of talking. The militaries would want to be in readiness, for example, just in case the extraterrestrials are not friendly, and the diplomatic corps would be doing their best to figure out how to communicate with them.
A lot of religions might also be thrown a bit into the air by the arrival of aliens, so there would be some chatter there, too.
Are aliens subject to human rights? Are they beings also made in God's image, etc.
Pretty much everything from the graphic-novel Signal from Space.
General societal breakdown in various sectors.
Also, it would unite most of humanity in ways we have never seen before.
Contact is another good novel that explores what would happen if we got verifiable radio signals from an alien race.
I miss Carl Sagan.
To be realistic I think they would have scanned our airwaves and observed from afar and decided to get the hell out of this quadrant of the galaxy. If they needed our resources then it would be like the "Independence Day" movie, only the aliens would easily win.
Hopefully more like war of the worlds.
"hey check out this video, they have a contingency plan if we send in ground troops"
"They sneeze on us and we die?"
"....... We have to check if that works."
I can see three options.
- Division, this would divide a lot of groups, and cause a lot of internal rifts.
- Unity, a foreign entity could easily be a powerful unifying force.
- Biological disaster, either through incompetence or ignorance, we or the aliens don't practice good biohazard containment, spreading infection throughout our world.
I don't think it would be in the advantage of a smart civ to willfully contact another smart civ till it is confirmed that the "to be contacted" civ has a really good understanding of game theory.
You cannot negotiate mutually assured destruction with a civ that does not understand what mutually assured destruction means.
Do I think we would be destroyed if some other alien civ finds us? No. If civ A observes civ B destroying civ C, everyone would want to destroy civ B immediately. The possibility of there being peaceful contact for civ B goes away.
Also, contacting us must be in the benefit of the civ that contacts us (assuming they are rational).
Their attitude towards us really depends on what their evolutionary pressures were. If resources were/are plentiful, they might have a less aggressive nature and simply wish to meet us. Otherwise, we might be on the chopping block.
As for us. I imagine a decent portion of humanity would immediately default to rampant xenophobia or weirdly sexual obsession.
With every major discovery in science ultimately being pretty boring to someone outside the field it might become useful, I would expect to be disappointed that the aliens look exactly like humans or something like that.
- They remove our ability to leave the planet.
- Continually
Done.
What do you mean "meet"? The way we would reach contact is by radio signals at first, not by actual physical visits. So at first we would only be communicating with probably a very long light delay as they'd be very far away. Realistically speaking neither would be able to visit the other in any feasible way, unless they have technology that is far, far beyond what we can imagine right now. Interstellar travel is very hard.
In that scenario how do you think of us would react knowing there is someone out there and we just confirmed only through radio.
I think there would be a whole lot of excitement, possibly a lot of religious turmoil.
I'd recommend the movie "Contact" which explores this exact scenario :)
Its so hard to say. So much depends on what is possible interstellar travel wise. If light speed is the limit it would likely be with probes and its kinda unlikely that if they could send things out that far and communicate back that they would need many elemental resources and they would have energy needs solved. Honestly I think its very unlikely we would meet any unless we travel outward. Like I think its more likely their probes would meet our probes and maybe we could get somewhat of an idea of where we came from and where we are going but it would take years to have communications. If there is something faster then its essentially magic by our standards and that just makes things more up in the air.
That's what I was thinking, a probe would gather some information. Maybe we would send a probe of our own in their direction.
I like to think it’s also the aliens’ first contact too, and they’re really happy to find us after groping around alone in the darkness.
If you subtract the satire from the movie Mars Attacks, pretty much that. Uh uh uh.
So we need to stockpile a crap load of Slim Whitman albums.
Breed with them and eat them.
Not sure but I have said that it'll happen under Trump. It has to. The way things go lately this is just expected at this point
Lots of people getting probed against their will.
Pretty sure we'd have no communication with the alien that wasn't just corrupt politicians trying to speak for us to get some sort of trade out of them to increase their own power. It's too important for any/all normal people to have a voice, and then when the aliens dislike the abhorrent greed we'll probably just suffer some how more than we already do. I'd say we're better off not reporting any alien sightings. I would trust almost any human on earth more talking to aliens on my behalf than a so called leader currently. Maybe Ireland, Spain, a handful of others have better than regular Joe leaders, but it's rare.
Depends, did we find them first or did they find us first? I project our colonial past as a fear of what more advanced aliens would do. Because that's what we would do to any alien natives. Very unlikely we are technologically tied in progress.
If they find us first, then mass panic at least at first.
Same thing that happened to the tribal native people during colonization.
Anal probe.
The extraterrestrials would soon enslave or kill us, and plunder the planet for resources. Positively, should humans travel to another planet, we would soon enslave or kill the inhabitants, and plunder the planet for resources. Luckily both won’t ever happen; space is too big.
Why go through the hassle of plundering an inhabited planet in a remote system when there are near unlimited uninhabited planets to pick all over?
To name two examples: One of the substances found on Earth but likely absent on most exoplanets is liquid water. Another candidate is free oxygen (O₂) . On most exoplanets, oxygen is often bound in compounds (like CO₂ or H₂O) rather than existing as a free gas in the atmosphere.
I'd imagine for a civilization advanced enough for not only interstellar travel but suggestively FTL if they are running some kind of logistics operations across star systems, they would not have issues neither of hoovering gas clouds or splitting molecules and recombining them into desired materials nor have a problem with any amount of energy required. Damn, their physics and chemistry is probably at a quantum level so they can make whatever elements they want and have the need of none.
Unless FTL travel and communications is stupid simple that we have missed some basic discoveries that would solve the Fermi paradox because we didn't know what to listen or look for.
Depends where and how. If alien space ship crash landed on earth, I'm pretty sure every government would be eager to salvage every bit of priceless tech onboard.
But if it was a diplomatic mission with controlled first contact over radio signals, then it would probably go very differently.
YOU ARE BUGS
Pish ever exterminate bugs from home? Gas, trap, plug the holes, and They'll will always come back.
Only difference is what humans lack in strength and numbers they make up for in will and tenacity. Plus bugs aren't vindictive. They just be living.
Depending on how similar our physiology is, a lot of very contagious infections like when we entered the Americas.
Assuming the intent is meeting and not conquer or eradicate, because if we meet them they are certainly more advanced in technology than us.
Probably looking for similarities in communication and maybe some kind of high security hosting behavior.
After communication has been established, hopefully diplomatic ties are established.
When one civilization meets another, far more advanced, civilization, what tends to happen to the less advanced one?
Yeah, that. It's gonna suck.
Doubtful. That happened here because we need both resources and living space while harvesting those resources. Anything aliens need can be gotten from hundreds of dead worlds and asteroids and stars. And any civilization able to cross galaxies should be able to make their own mobile livingspaces just as comfortable as a planet.
Except maybe they can't do any of that any more, and they're living a nomadic existence as the remnants of a civilization near the end of its life and a stellar event pushed them onto a fleet of generation ships and they've centuries roaming in ships that are increasingly taking apart around them.
Just because you can launch a ship or 3000 into space doesn't mean you can do it well or all that safely.
After all, we have the technology right now, to build such a generational fleet of ships and send them off. We just don't do it because there's no real impetus to do so, but I can guarantee that if we knew for certain that absolute death was coming our way with no way of stopping it, escaping would be one of the things we would try to do.
Being able to get here doesn't mean squat if it was just a random choice based on old light and a "that star looks like the best candidate we can reach in less than 300 years."
Just because humans haven't gone outside the orbit of earth doesn't mean we don't have the capability of it. We're just trying to do it safely.
Imagine if we didn't care how many died as long as some of us made it?
I mean that's how the old USSR did things...
I forgetted a word
I mean, at that point you're saying they're not much more advanced than us, soooo.... I'd place bets on us shooting them out of the sky.
Except they have the high ground. They can drop rocks on us.
Also, being able to use technical devices doesn't mean you understand them or know how to make them.
Maybe the civilization they were in before would be able to do all that, but they can't now, doesn't mean they don't still have a few "super weapons" they can fall back on.
Or, like I said, just throw heavy objects at us. It's easier to go from orbit to ground than from ground to orbit.