What Do We Do If Seti Is Successful?
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First Contact
The article discusses the implications of SETI's potential success in detecting alien life, sparking a thoughtful discussion on the consequences of such a discovery and how humanity should respond.
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People are so caught up in the 3I/ATLAS stuff, for example. Should we beam a message to it? What should we think of it? It's a circus.
Let's go back to Boyajian's Star instead. Can we really be sure the dimming is not caused by a mothership coming from that direction? It explains everything, right? Maybe that's how they communicate, by sending a paper plane and opening a large occlusion origami that says "we come from this general direction" (I'm cosplaying Avi Loeb here, satirically).
There's something about interpretation in all of this. Space is full of radio signals. We determine lots of them to be natural (with good reason).
I'm afraid proposing "we should answer" (in case of electromagnetic signals) could lead to a scenario in which people are encouraged to believe something without the means to verifying it. Some idiot group could do it just to increase the popular optimism about space in order to induce a favorable perception on the development of space technologies with the ultimate goal of just bumping some industry with money. It's the kind of world we live in right now, unfortunatelly.
If we want to be serious about humanity's place in the universe, first we need to be serious about our home right here. I don't think we're mature enough to have responsible control over technologies that could be used to send a powerful signal into space.
The same richest elites that refuse to acknowledge and do anything to revert climate change, will do nothing (except try to escape Earth in spaceships) if and when any humanity detects and anticipates any Earth destroying apocalypse inducer (asteroid/meteor or extreme solar flare) from out of the depths of space.
To a more naive, metaphor-blind audience, your mention of Don't Look Up makes it look like the scientists are warning about an alien comet and I'm the one ignoring it.
I'm very familiar with apocalyptical narratives of all kinds, but what I'm approaching here is much different. I'm talking about the integrity of scientific endeavours. In particular, space exploration endeavours.
Is it really a circus? Seems almost everyone who knows what they're talking about says it's just a natural object.
Anything can be a circus if you listen to people who don't know what they're talking about.
However, there is a chance he could be underestimating that audience, or at least part of it.
Finding a new type of comet is a scientific breakthrough, and I think his work points in that direction (still a guess from him though, but an educated one). He is trying to cake up those potential genuine discovers with sloppy sensacionalist makeup on top, and that's why I call it a circus.
If in a few months we confirm that 3I/ATLAS is a new kind of comet, he could use the papers he wrote to say he found evidence of that new type first, and also described its landmark characteristics. It would "legitimize" him. But the alien stuff would probably continue to be garbage. He can then say the scientists were skeptics, but he was right.
Now, what angle the aliens narrative serve? Why would a scientist subject himself to being a clown? I don't exactly know. In his case, I don't think it's good stuff.
I chose Tabby's Star to satirize him because my description of a mothership deploying an origami-like occluder matches the overall conclusion from the research at the time (a disturbed exomoon). It's an object from that system that changed is shape. In fact, "disturbed exosatellite" and "unfolding mothership from a planet" are quite compatible descriptions. What matters here is epistemology (we can't know if it's natural or not). Also, it's a good demonstration that we (general public non-astronomers) don't need his antics to imagine things.
Not sure. Can some of HN at least agree that if it's the Empire we all join and act as if we love serving the Emperor and then put subtle code in the planet killing weapons that overload and self destruct if pointed at human listed planets?
Earth might still be at risk, but never underestimate the human ability to sell large tracts of land to foreign investors in exchange for a few concessions.
I will do my part to find out which humanoid-like species are genetically compatible with as wide of coverage humanly possible.
[1] - https://theinfosphere.org/Bender_Bending_Rodriguez#Relations...
I read an article about post cold war US society. Basically, from 1989-2001 the United States was in a transition period that culminated with the first opportunity to seize on a "universal bad" (terrorism) because the USSR filled the role so readily for so long, US society was set adrift with partisan factions that couldn't find a common enemy to get behind in times of internal struggle.
That is the gist of the article, sub USSR for aliens and all of humanity for US society and you have the same basic outline
- Setup a massive array of antennas in space for reception only
- Try to decode their radio traffic and understand how they are exchanging information
- Steal their their knowledge and use it to advance human race forward.
- Reduce all our electromagnetic emissions to minimum to deny them the same advantage. Forbid anyone from sending signal towards them so we have time to technologically catch up to them without them noticing.
Any kind of contact will ends up in abysmal disaster as we have seen in the past, when advanced civilization shown up on shores of less advanced one.
This isn't quite why I wrote this, but it's close enough: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2023/alien_communication/ If we're going to argue in the form of fiction.
It's not actually sci-fi. They sent a message with Arecibo that was also encoded if not within a beacon signal. Just because it was a scifi plot does not mean its not something that could be done to good use. If humans wanted, we could send a similar beacon signal even if it's not pulses of all the primes between 1-101 with the same data from the gold plate.
At one point, flying like a bird was scifi. Traveling to the moon was scifi. Having a computer that fit in the palm of your hand was scifi. There's a lot of actual science that has been inspired from a scifi idea.
This is going to be difficult. Immediately there would be cults that would be inviting them to earth to salvage us.
We have a saying in Holland "the innkeeper trusts his guests like himself" which seems to apply here.
There's no reason to assume their society would have developed along similar lines. I'm sure there's alien civilisations that are more aggressive than us, but also ones that are less so.
I don't think we'll ever meet any though as our lifespan is just so short on a universal scale. And FTL travel seems to be impossible otherwise we'd have seen signs of it.
Of course according to our current physics understanding it is also impossible but I don't think humanity is very smart yet. But this thing might be right.
What signs? Projects like LIGO that measure gravitational waves are still measuring cataclysmic collisions of ultra massive bodies. Maybe once the detector is good enough to detect exoplanets and smaller objects we can start drawing some conclusions.
I don’t believe FTL is possible, but on the off chance that it is, we’d be so deep into technology-as-magic territory that any speculation on detectability is totally pointless.
What is the minimum amount of aggression necessary to evolve sentience? What is the maximum amount of aggression in an interstellar space-faring species? Where is humanity on that scale?
A super-aggressive species would likely self-annihilate before possessing sufficient energy to travel interstellar distances... So the jury's still out on us.
Many animals like cats do it. Its not a human concept but one from superior smarter predators which should occur regardless from what planet they are. The greater the differences in intelligence and power the easier it is to justify cruelty.
I do think it's less likely because to actually travel space they would need to be so technologically advanced that we simply wouldn't be worth fighting or destroying. Maybe studying which could be cruel in its own way.
Presumably any alien species was also shaped by evolution, so is also likely to be similarly competitive. Maybe you can escape your evolutionary past. But maybe not.
It is a bleak view. When I even think about the behaviors of some of the animals (e.g. seals, praying mantises) we share existence with, it seems like it could be accurate. On the positive side, the concept of the infinite game (e.g. culture) is what should give us hope.
Though I personally love the idea of advanced, civilized extraterrestrial life. I hope it exists (statistically feels likely but yet to be confirmed). Even if it turns out we humans are at a near lockstep with another civilization it'd be game changing if we could communicate especially.
All that said, maybe there's a "galactic civilization onboarding" program once a species meets a sufficiently advanced criteria independently, with no outside intervention. Perhaps the universe will turn our ideas on their head, and assumptions may not apply.
Our understanding of the world, for however great it is, is still likely full of things we can't fathom and unknowns we don't know. Its fun to speculate but the reality is we are only basing most of our knowledge on how things might be in the universe based on our singular planet's path of evolution.
It makes it truly hard to think of what alternative life forms may exist.
Lockstep evolution is extremely improbable. Even 1000 years head start is massive, a more realistic one would be tens of millions of years or more.
The space is finite, so is Milky way. Eventually, even if its far in the future, species will compete for resources and energy. The smarter ones realize that problems are easier solved as soon as possible, and we have dark forest stuff. Mankind is slowly also inching in that realization. We should work hard on improving ourselves massively and spreading out before caring whats out there. I simply can't imagine a realistic scenario where there won't be some immediate attack, ie speeding up some very dark asteroid into relativistic speeds, aimed at Earth.
Also, why should xenophoby, racism and similar perks be available only to humanity. Even we can see how deeply flawed creatures we are.
Indeed, I simply hate losing my sense of whimsy in these discussions because anything is still possible. Though realistically, yes, its worse odds than pretty much any other possibility. No disputing that.
>The space is finite, so is Milky way. Eventually, even if its far in the future, species will compete for resources and energy. The smarter ones realize that problems are easier solved as soon as possible.
Is space not ever expanding? My entire conceptualized version of what space (as in outer space) is that its always expanding, we actually have zero idea where the edges of the actual universe are, or if they even exist beyond theorizing. It may be the ultimate in lending itself to more cooperation than conflict as a result, since new resources are indefinitely being created.
Then again, if you believe expansion is constrained only to the Milky Way Galaxy (I don't see why it has to be, if we can colonize an entire galaxy I feel strongly at that point the technology for intergalactic travel exists at the same time, so we can finally see whats up in the Backward Galaxy[0]). Given this constraint, expansion over time will lead to issues inevitably but who's to say it couldn't be resolved in different capacities? Perhaps even civilizations have a natural apex expansion size (IE, its not actually infinite) and that creates natural growth boundaries. Since we aren't even a galactic species yet, we don't know how that would shape out in reality.
>and we have dark forest stuff
Or we simply don't know what stage other civilizations are in, or if they exist at all (though statistically, I've been told by people who absolutely know more than I do on multiple occasions its extremely unlikely there isn't some form of extraterrestrial life that would roughly resemble plants and animals but civilization is far less guaranteed)
We could actually be the most advanced (imagine that, it seems wild to me, but it is one possible), or it could be that indeed, it may follow the Dark Forest[1] hypothesis).
>We should work hard on improving ourselves massively and spreading out before caring whats out there. I simply can't imagine a realistic scenario where there won't be some immediate attack, ie speeding up some very dark asteroid into relativistic speeds, aimed at Earth.
I agree with the massive expansion, I don't think it should come at the entire expense of understanding what may be out there also, but in terms of resource allocation, expansion should have been paramount since the 1960s at least, IMO.
Eventually this rock, one way or another, will reach its inevitable peak and as a species we would do well to be spread around.
I don't know that we are guaranteed to be attacked. It makes alot of assumptions about how civilization evolves that is very human centric, but it is in fact the only model we have so I can't blame anyone for adopting it without question, but there always exists the possibility that there are other models of evolution that are less conflict driven and promote cooperation
>Also, why should xenophoby, racism and similar perks be available only to humanity. Even we can see how deeply flawed creatures we are.
In the same vain of this, why shouldn't they be? What purpose do those ideas even serve? They're not evolutionary constructs, they're cultural / societal ones created to justify oppressing one group of humans by another. Another civilization could have simply made better choices and evolved on a planet that trended toward cooperation and not conflict.
We only understand our version of how evolution trends, it doesn't make it law of the universe until we actually can study other non-human civilizations.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGC_4622
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis
We would learn that they are gelatinous beings who coi5nt in base 17 and show an antenna to say hello.
It also could not be a message. I think we have ruled out nearby Dyson Swarm (as in thousands of light years), but we could find one in rest of our galaxy or even Andromeda. Dyson Swarms should be noticeably weird infrared stars.
It is also quite possible that we never decode their message. Even with one designed to be decoded, their thinking could be too different.
>The name of the hypothesis derives from Liu Cixin's 2008 novel The Dark Forest, as in a "dark forest" filled with "armed hunter(s) stalking through the trees like ghosts". According to the dark forest hypothesis, since the intentions of any newly contacted civilization can never be known with certainty, then if one is encountered, it is best to make a preemptive strike, in order to avoid the potential extinction of one's own species. The novel provides a detailed investigation of Liu's concerns about alien contact.
Wouldn't that kinda imply that your vision on the topic is almost certainly wrong anyways?
> The Berserker hypothesis, also known as the deadly probes scenario, is the idea that humans have not yet detected intelligent alien life in the universe because it has been systematically destroyed by a series of lethal Von Neumann probes.
Don't get me wrong, it's a wonderful premise for a book which can simply mobilize a plot device to brush this problem aside. However, if we want to bring the conclusions back to reality they have to undergo a customs inspection which flags said plot device.
The probes are out there and were programmed never to come back to Earth.
If we ground ourselves back in reality where the speed of light is probably law and the spooky aliens probably don't get to tamper the laws of physics, the actual game-theoretic winning move is always to grow voraciously, threat or no.
If we received a signal (at light speed) that described how to build a physical alien computer, and then ran a program on that computer, which happened to be AI, we would have alien visitors.
"Normal view! Normal view! Normal VIEW! Normal VIEEeewwww..."
Light is energy, it is a form of electromagnetic radiation, that travels in waves and consists of particles called photons. While photons do not have mass, they carry energy and momentum, which allows them to interact with matter.
But remaining 95% of the Universe is made of Dark Matter and Dark Energy, so if aliens are made of dark matter and use dark energy technology, their laws of physics may be different, and they could be capable of interstellar travel because they may not be limited by light's speed. Their dark matter and dark energy based technology may be incomprehensible or even irreproducible by us humans.
Scientists are still not sure what Dark Matter and Dark Energy are, so 95% of the Universe is still a big question mark to us all.
But it could also be something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Newtonian_dynamics.
Couldn't they have some other way of seeing things?
Though survival of the fittest is likely a law and so they will have a concept of competition between groups of some form (though their definition of groups will be different) simply because those without will be destroyed by the first group that does have that concept.
Sure I'd fight for humanity, but I'd be so disappointed. Maybe even enough to just give up.
(I have to admit I just could not make it through part 2 of the Three Body problem, it went to slow for me.)
The question is moot, because any alien species advanced enough to send directed signals across solar systems, can and will reach, overwhelm and subsume Earth with ease, once we Earthlings manage to contact such aliens.
And if such events happened in the past, that might explain a few interesting notions we humans tend to have.
"Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God." ~Shermer's last law
But what if that was their intention from the very beginning? What if Earth itself is just yet another alien farm?
What if Earth's beautiful and bountiful life (flora and fauna) was the result of terraforming, by aliens, but indirectly using spores tacked onto cosmic flying objects (comets, meteors, asteroids) that they knew will cross such solar systems and crash into inhabitable planets on some not so random chance?
Abiogenesis is the emergence of life from nonliving organics. It is the leading theory regarding how life spawned on Earth, but it is being questioned due to recent evidence.
Conditions for Life: For life to exist, certain conditions must be met. These include:
* Presence of Water: Essential for biochemical reactions. * Organic Compounds: Building blocks like carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen are crucial. * Energy Source: Sunlight or geothermal energy can drive life processes.
Evidence and Research: While no definitive evidence of extraterrestrial life has been found, scientists continue to explore environments on other planets, such as Mars and Europa, which may harbor conditions suitable for life. The study of extremophiles on Earth—organisms that thrive in harsh conditions—provides insights into how life might exist elsewhere in the universe
One prominent theory regarding the extraterrestrial origin of life is Panspermia.
The Panspermia Hypothesis suggests that life, or the building blocks of life, may have been transported to Earth via comets, asteroids, or space dust.
There are several forms of panspermia:
* Naturalistic Panspermia: Life evolves on another planet and is ejected into space, eventually landing on Earth.
* Directed Panspermia: Intelligent beings from another planet intentionally send life to Earth.
* Intelligent Design Panspermia: Life is designed and seeded by extraterrestrial intelligences.
I believe Earth life is the result of Natural Panspermia. But if SETI or other observatories detect and confirm alien signal, then Directed Panspermia might be our origin.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a66036689/a-scientist...
I also think that if such powerful aliens (or actual gods for that matter) were to exist, they wouldn't give a rat's ass about whether we worship them. Because we'd have nothing to offer them. It's like us stepping on ants without thinking about it. Their world is so limited it's meaningless to us. If any gods existed we'd be the same to them.
In any case my intuition will always be to fight hostile authorities, even if its futile. I would never be able to be in the military for example.
For all of humanity's much vaunted intelligence, we really haven't bothered to unitedly plan for any threats from space, natural or otherwise.
If advanced alien beings did visit Earth in the past, they could be easily have become worshipped as Gods by the humans of that time.
Earth is such a tiny speck in the vast emptiness of space, that unless galaxy colonising aliens are capable of traveling in spaceships at FTL (faster than light) speeds, it may indeed take them hundreds or thousands or millions of years to pass by Earth again on their next sweep through the Goldilocks planets in their terraforming list in this corner of the Universe.
This is why it makes sense that we haven't planned for that too occur.
And really, if they do have FTL capability it's very unlikely we would have any tech that would be of any danger to them anyway.
It makes for nice SciFi B-movies but I don't think it's a realistic scenario.
A lot of other people seem to be happy worshipping humans of rather limited intelligence right now.
If yes you are already worshipping and imaginary concept. At least with aliens you would have some kind of connection with reality.
If not the word god is not really a part of the vocabulary.
But I think it's extremely unlikely they would give a rat's ass about what we do or believe.
If you mean "we are in a simulation" then maybe :) I like to think we are the end-of-semester program in a high school.
And for the last one I do not know, I would prefer everyone to leave us alone.
Not possible if our scientific understanding of c is accurate.
I don't care how many episodes of ST you've binged; warp speed is just fantasy.
Very different.
The iconic flip-type TriCorder telecommunicator of Star Trek, became the inspiration of the world's first portable cellular phone (first of which was the DynaTac, quickly followed by MicroTac and StarTac (world's first portable flip phone, and yup, that name is not a coincidence)) by Motorola (more famous iteration later as the iconic Moto Razr). Motorola engineer Martin Cooper said that watching Captain Kirk using his communicator on the television show Star Trek inspired him with a stunning idea -- to develop a handheld mobile phone.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/motorola-startac-rainbow-ce...
Star Trek's teleportation may have been SciFi, but Quantum teleportation has been proven to be doable in reality.
https://www.digitaljournal.com/tech-science/first-demonstrat...
https://www.aol.com/articles/oxford-physicists-achieve-telep...
Iron Man's Arc Reactor is a fusion reactor and pure sci-fi, but the Chinese and Americans are racing to build the first viable fusion reactors. https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a64704814/ch...
Did you know that Radar was invented during experiments with radio waves for "Death Ray Gun" weaponry? A death ray is a theoretical particle beam or electromagnetic weapon that gained popularity in science fiction during the 1920s and 1930s after inventors like Nikola Tesla claimed to have developed one. British scientists, asked to evaluate the feasibility of a radio-wave "death ray gun" (supposedly being developed by the Nazis) finally concluded it was impossible, but realized the same principles could be used for aircraft detection.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-41188464
Galileo was jailed (put under house arrest, till he died of ill health) for his "blasphemous" statements concerning Heliocentricity, etc., but ancient Hindus have known and documented (in their Vedic texts) about Multiverse, Observer Effect, Illusory nature of Reality (e.g., modern science confirms that touch is an illusion of reality, we really cannot touch anything: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TDgey6g65X0) , and fundamentals of mathematics and science since thousands of years, many centuries or millennia before such concepts became understood and accepted by Western scientists or theorists.
Human flight was considered an impossible fantasy, until the Wright Brothers made it a reality.
Space flight was unproven until the Soviets made it a reality.
Did you know that scientists estimated the mass of all matter and all energy of this Universe, but they believe it accounts only for 5% of the content of the Universe? The remaining 95% of this Universe is unknown, but scientists believe it to be comprised of anti-matter and anti-energy, which are not yet understood properly by modern science. SciFi concept, this may seem, but that's the prevailing scientific theory.
Now think about this idea.. What if an advanced alien species, were made of anti-matter and using anti-energy? Would their technology obey the laws of physics as our modern science understands? Would they be able to travel across the galaxy faster than we humans deem possible with our limited understanding of how the Universe works?
'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic', according to Arthur C. Clarke's third law.
The "invention of tricorders" is far, far, far less impressive than breaking the known laws of the universe, after more than a century of literally trying to prove them wrong with experiments.
Now, if they left some time ago...
In all seriousness, I think if we did receive something, it would be classified immediately, and the government, or governments, will move very swiftly with a heavy hand to silence the discovery. At the very least until they know exactly what it is, what it is conveying, and how to respond.
That said, I think that if it got out, a lot of people would absolutely lose their snot. Completely. It would be chaos in some places.
Bit too on the nose, maybe, but a heck of a lot more likely than a coverup by government scientists.
It would definitely be the most important discovery ever made and would move some billions of dollars, but realistically I think people would just carry on with their lives (assuming physical contact with them is impossible in a lifetime).
After some ohhhs and ahhhhs we would switch to the next thing.
If we get something coming from more than 100 light years away we might not have the technology to respond, and if we do it may not matter anyway if we are at risk of not having a technological civilization anymore 100-200 years forward. So the meaningful actions on those cases may not include answering back.
Then it will be the actual use of that message. Lets assume that we will decide that is a signal from a civilization that is out there. It will be a signal meant for us and for any other civilization that doesn't have the knowledge/culture level as them, meant for giving us a common ground for communicating back, or it will be something that just will tell us that someone intelligent is out there, but no mean to understand it?
So the options are that we find apparently benevolent aliens willing to contact us, or that we find out that someone is out there but no way to communicate/reach them. I think the second scenario is the most probable one, and how our civilization will react if widely enough will change with time, novelty at first and indifference a few years later.
We lost 150 years of progress? That's okay, we had 800 more years to advance before the aliens showed up or whatever.
It's such a weird thing I see so many people assuming. We were down to like 16,000 humans on Earth at one point, and that was before we'd developed things that you could theoretically scavenge and jumpstart your tech.
People need to stop doomscrolling; I'm certain this is depression projected.
Green power generation is also making huge strides forward, and battery technology is improving enough to make fully green grids a reality. We already see articles about how some countries are managing to go entire days without burning any fossil fuels for power generation. This will increase over time despite what the doomsayers predict. We aren't there yet, but the progress is almost inevitable.
The bigger problem is that we've already burned so much fossil fuel that we are noticeably altering the climate. This is going to cause a lot of stresses in the future, especially in a post-collapse scenario.
Obviously you're not going to get to 100% in a week if you're rebuilding civilization from the ground up, but if you can retain some of the knowledge you can get a big step up and hopefully avoid some of the pitfalls that caused the downfall of society in the first place.
That has warming by 2300 as 8C in an "emissions continue current trends" path.
Here's chatgpt giving a picture of what 8C warming looks like. Speculative, hallucinations, caveat emptor, etc...but to give a sense of proportion this, last time the earth was 8C *cooler* than now, ice covered 25% of the planet:
> At +8°C, Earth is fundamentally transformed. Large parts of today’s populated zones—South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, southern Europe, the southern U.S.—are functionally uninhabitable for humans outdoors. Wet-bulb temperatures regularly exceed survivable limits. Agriculture collapses across the subtropics; even mechanized, climate-controlled farming is marginal. Most of the world’s food comes from high-latitude regions: a narrow band across northern Canada, Scandinavia, and Siberia. Sea levels are dozens of meters higher, drowning coastal megacities; Miami, New York, Shanghai, and London are gone. Phoenix is lifeless desert. Seattle is coastal tundra, wetter but still survivable.
> Civilization persists only in fragments. Mass migration and resource wars have rewritten borders. Population is a fraction of 21st-century levels. Global trade, universities, and modern governance are mostly memories. Local, self-sufficient polities dominate. The United States as an institution likely dissolves or transforms beyond recognition—2 out of 10 chance of recognizable survival. Harvard or MIT survive, if at all, as digital archives or autonomous AI-driven knowledge systems—3 out of 10. The world would still have people and culture, but not civilization as we know it.
Edit: I would appreciate knowing why I'm getting downvoted when I added citations for *possible* warming paths (from nature!). Yes, the chatgpt explanation is speculative but I mean, look at the thread we're discussing.
[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41612-020-0121-5
And without adaptation you get mass extinction. And the human system may be pretty fragile against the disappearance or deep change of key components of the global system.
The idea has nothing to do with "doom scrolling". Go watch some Cosmos...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsl9f83P0Ys
I've seen Cosmos. It's not a counter to this argument in any way.
The population will be very small, but being very focused and hopefully able to jump start civilization again based on all the materials and knowledge still available.
I hope the second scenario is the most probable. Any aliens that could contact us would already know we can't even get along with each other, much less them. Even the most benevolent of aliens should see us as a "problem". (I was going to say "threat" but who am I kidding.)
what is a realistic timeline for first contact, and how will it actually happen?
so we decode a message that we are pretty sure is of alien origin.
we send a message back and then wait a few decades or centuries.
we don't know how far away the origin of the message is. let's assume that it is less than 50 light years. that's still a round trip of 100 years. in other words it's a generational project, and we don't know if our first response is understood. we'll have to keep iterating until we can confirm that we are actually communicating. and then, the next step will be to try to understand each other.
with a round trip that long, even under the most optimal conditions just establishing a dialog based on say math is going to take a few centuries.
of course once we have a dialog, communication is going to speed up because then we can send longer messages.
but then it could still take anywhere from 500 to 1000 years before a common language is developed and we are able to share actual scientific and engineering knowledge.
once we reached that level of communication however, we can collaborate on developing FTL.
contrary to star trek, it was always my idea that FTL travel is not developed by the inhabitants of each planet/star system on their own, but only in collaboration across multiple such systems. maybe even more than two. driven by the desire to meet each other.
so from the point of the first received message it will be one millennium before we get to learn anything about and from these aliens, and another millennium before we can meet them in person.
and that's the optimistic projection. it could just as well take 10 times as long.
Looks great - curious to know what broweser tech is it built with?
Built 15 years ago and still running!
Is Neptune's Pride still paying your bills?
My day job is working in a small games company called BlueManchu. We made Void Bastards, Wild Bastards, and have a new one we are prototyping now.
so i am being optimistic and hope that FTL is possible.
Not going to happen tomorrow, but perhaps in the next few thousand years something will be ready to begin its journey.
Not that I believe they are the same, but many people will come to this conclusion and they would not be probably wrong. Causality is strange.
“CosmicOS is a way to create messages suitable for communication across large gulfs of time and space. It is inspired by Hans Freudenthal's language, Lincos, and Carl Sagan's book, Contact. CosmicOS, at its core, is a programming language, capable of expressing simulations. Simulations are a way to talk, by anology, about the real thing they model.
CosmicOS is structured to communicate the usual math and logic basics, then use that to show how to run programs, then send interesting programs that demonstrate behaviors and interactions, and start communicating ideas through ”theater” and simulations. This is inspired by Freudenthal's idea of staging conversations between his imaginary characters Ha and Hb.”
Granted, this would be a lot of people, but I think it'd be a midrange of "kinda religious, but not enough to dive in"-types who are mostly freaking out over the revelation.
I’m sure they came up with an elaborate story how Jesus loves sentient mollusks from Alpha Centauri, but I hope most people are smart enough to realise how little sense it all makes. I for one am curious how this plays out, if I’m lucky enough to witness it.
At the end of the day, the Catholics (at least) don't believe they were given full knowledge of the universe at some arbitrary point in the past. Instead, we were plopped into it and expected to explore and understand it. This will require us to occasionally update our teachings - just like how scientists need to update their teachings when they discover they didn't understand something before.
It's unbelievably obnoxious to simply assume everyone who doesn't scoff at religion simply isn't "smart enough". You clearly haven't taken much time to understand the topic if you can't come up with even one good argument. Even Richard Dawkins is able to connect with religious logic to a degree.
I think the idea of Imago Dei is actually the most believable part. I am absolutely convinced that we're the forerunners of this universe. The first scenario where a creation becomes aware of its creator - even if I'm imagining the wrong architect.
I'm not familiar with every religion, but I think most can say the same.
Religion is completely disconnected from reality, making up things as they go.
A signal from a life form would either be conspiracy or a signal from god, so strong that we cannot understand it.
Either way, no real difference with what we have today.
If they go "oh yeah Religion, that's a quirk of your biology, don't worry you will outgrow it in time" then yeah, that's problematic.
If they go "Oh, you say that the savior Jesus Christ was a human? That answers one of our biggest questions. The story never made much sense before. Boy, those Angels must be pretty freaky looking for you then." then that's entirely different.
Resume the search for intelligence right here on Earth?
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