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.
Trying to overcome language barriers, probably.
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.
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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His babies are yummy
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The reality of course, is they already have seen what we are like and chose not to talk to us.
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.
One group will sell out the rest of us, guaranteed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Was that one guy that tried to contact them their Roswell moment?
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.
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 ?
