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.
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 ambassador 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.
Lots of people getting probed against their will.
Within less than an hour, Rule 34 will come into effect and someone will make a porn-film about them.
His babies are yummy
Same thing that happened to the tribal native people during colonization.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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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.
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.
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
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.
