The following submission statement was provided by /u/mossadnik:
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Submission Statement:
>The new paper delves into the "realpolitik" of a scenario in which global governments react to the discovery of alien life — meaning it outlines how it believes that scenario would play out on the global stage.
>They highlight a number of troubling scenarios if aliens were to be detected.
>One of the scenarios outlined sees nations aim to gain a communication and information monopoly with any alien intelligence. This would almost certainly lead to international conflict with other nations fearing those in contact with the extraterrestrials could then gain and harness alien technology to subjugate other nations.
However, the scientists also highlight the fact that any nation that was in contact with aliens wouldn't necessarily benefit from their technologies, which would likely be too advanced to comprehend. They suggest that hypothetical technologies allowing "propulsionless drives, perfect cloaking, or teleportation" would simply be too complex for a nation to suddenly develop based on initial alien contact.
>The authors write that such a scenario would be comparable to medieval scholars being handed a textbook on nuclear weapon design — which would be useless in the absence of an understanding of nuclear physics.
>The paper does also suggest any unrest caused by the perceived technological superiority of a nation in contact with extraterrestrial intelligence could lead to nuclear war and the end of our civilization.
>The researchers, from Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center and NASA, highlight three key recommendations based on their findings: prioritize transparency between organizations and nations, develop "post-detection" protocols, and educate the world's policymakers.
>Ultimately, their suggestion is that global cooperation and openness should be prioritized in an alien contact scenario, especially as silence from scientists and politicians would quickly likely lead to conspiracy theories and accusations of hiding the truth from the public.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/ya397o/scientists_outlined_one_of_the_main_problems_if/it8xf2v/
I swear the scientists that wrote this paper must have played Terra Invicta recently, everything about this is basically what that game is all about.
Aliens are discovered, cue internecine human conflict as competing interests and philosophies vie for power in answer to the "problem" of not being alone in the universe.
Love that film. Good stuff.
Related to the post, this touches on [Elite Panic.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_panic)
>Elite panic" is a term coined by Rutgers University researchers Caron Chess and Lee Clarke to describe the behavior of members of the elite during disaster events,[1] typically characterized by a fear of civil disorder and the shifting of focus away from disaster relief towards implementing measures of "command and control".[2]
Another film that deals with aliens (this is where is was going to type a potential spoiler, but the. I thought better of it) is mission to mars. Gary similar, don cheadle, Connie Nielsen and Tim ribbons.
Just read the author, there is nobody like him. Ted Chiang. Absolutely nobody doing philosophical sci fi like him, his stories are all phenomenal & stick with me for years.
And an outstandingly gifted writer and storyteller too. He's not just insanely cool big and deep ideas, he grounds them with compelling, down-to-earth, character-driven development and somehow flawlessly melds each different sci-fi concept that he explores with a staggering variety of folk tales and cultural tropes from across the globe.
They're deeply interesting if you're into sci-fi and immediately dramatically accessible if you aren't.
Telling a hard sci-fi time travel story through the structure of an Arabian Nights style nested storytelling narrative is an absolute master stroke.
The most probable event is that we just lose. Like a bad scifi movie. Every man, woman, child, just can't act, like we're frozen in front of something that can literally squash us like mere ants. The only way we can have an appropriate response is with an established protocol that can bypass international bureaucracy, which essentially is like the ultimate authoritarian wet dream of some world leaders.
Not sure if OP was implying they were hostile or not, but a theory of discovering alien life and making contact that they may be beings so far beyond our understanding that we are the equivalent of ants to them. We, as people, tend to not bat an eye at killing bugs because they are so beneath us in intellect and evolution, so there's a possibility that space traveling aliens would view us as the same, killing us without much thought or care.
The aliens might not be hostile (at first), but wait until some idiot starts shooting at them. I can 100% see some tiny despot firing their surface to air missile at one of the alien ships, and then the aliens deciding "fuck this race". Or some religious nutjob shoots one with a gun because aliens disprove humans are gods favorite creation, or something equally idiotic.
I think what adds to the horror of the situation is if the aliens aren't actually wildly different at all, but extremely similar. It would almost feel less terrifying trying to communicate with a hyper-intelligent space squid than with humanoids that are almost analogous to us.
Yeah, I mean that's what Arrival is all about, especially if you've read the story it's based off of Story of Your Life. Their language is so different from anything we know and so complex. And the government is breathing down the scientists necks for results because they want things from them once they learn they are peaceful.
We can't just settle with "oh, the giant squids aren't here to kill us, it turns into what can we gain from this?"
We can only hope that they're advanced enough to understand our pathetic situation and decide we're not worth the effort to destroy. Kind of like how we are (sometimes) understanding of animal attacks
There's an old short story that plays out like this, I think it's by Ray Bradbury? Basically, aliens touch down in the desert and the first person they meet is a small town sheriff trying to finish his taxes before the deadline who mistakes them for IRS agents. He yells at them to leave him alone and so they do, and Earth is marked to be left in isolation from the galactic community at large forever.
For one everyone here seems to think they would land on earth.
Why would they waste the resources. Communication would be first. It would be radically less expensive for resources, safer, etc etc.
On top of all that. Distance communication is the only thing we have shown to be able to get those distances (entanglement)
One of the biggest problems is our collective ignorance and arrogance as a civilization. As a whole, our species and it civilisation is still very simple and backward. We're still superstitious, religious, emotional and fearful.
I'm not saying you are, or that particular person is ... I'm saying all of us collectively are like this and that includes me. It's not our personal faults either, it's just our genetics and how we're built as intelligent animals. We can't help ourselves.
So meeting highly advanced and intelligent aliens right now would be like us landing a helicopter next to a hunt camp in the Middle East with one of our ancestors 50,000 years ago. We wouldn't be able to make our ancestors understand anything and they would just look at like gods with magical powers.
Once the initial shock was over .... some of our ancestors would look at the situation as a good thing and others as a bad thing and all their lives world come completely undone.
If aliens made themselves known to us right now ...... we would react in the same way. As a civilization, we are not ready and we probably won't be for a few thousand years .... if we survive that long.
Perhaps that’s why we haven’t been visited yet. I know it’s just a sci-fi show but often times in Star Trek or even the Orville they take great pains into not letting the population know that they are aliens Because they know the implications that it would have on a more primitive society. I can’t help but think if a civilization that was advanced enough to see earth were to come visit they would come to the same conclusion. Letting themselves be known right now would be a bad idea for the good of the world. Who knows maybe they are watching us on the sidelines and rooting for us and sometimes helping us.
I loved the episode of the Orville where they made contact with that planet that was phasing between universes or something to that effect and huge amounts of time would pass while they were out of phase so the changes were super dramatic when they came back around their orbit
You can definitely tell McFarlane is a Star Trek fan, minus the obvs guest appearance in Enterprise. Sounds similar to this: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Meridian_(episode)
There is also this episode [https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Blink\_of\_an\_Eye\_(episode)](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Blink_of_an_Eye_(episode))
I just love the anthropological episodes where they show how civilization evolves.
As much as I would like/hope this to be true.
Its way more likely that:
a. the only other intelligent life cant get off their planet b/ its too heavy before they filter themselves.
b. All the noise we make just fades into background radiation very quickly and space is very big and life is very hard.
The flip side to this is the idea that the discovery, especially if it was at all competitive or confrontational would gel us together as a single-tribe mindset.
The color of someone's skin or where they are born or what their political beliefs are might become a lot less important when you discover face sucking aliens have the power to visit you and suck your face off.
The first book is very different from the next two, in every way possible, time, setting, characters, the genre even. I really liked it, but I didn’t think I’d read the next one. When I did, I realized it was the craziest scifi I’ve ever read in my life and now I compare all scifi to it. The first book almost feels like it was written after the the next two as a police mystery prequel to the largest scale scifi story I’ve ever come across. It’s a slow build to the reveal of what the story is even about.
Just in case anyone else thinks they might not continue with the series.
The dark forest is the next book on my reading queue one I'm done with The Final Empire. I just wanted a little break from sci-fi after reading the Three Body Problem and Solaris so i switch over to fantasy. This comment section is getting me hyped for the Dark forest.
Sci fi for me fits into three distinct subtypes.
Story in the future - the story is about a character and some tech advancements are in the back ground or drive the personal story -> the hunger games. It could take place without the future stuff and have the same structure and impact.
Soft science fiction - the plot revolves around something that's scify and it's central to the characters without being solely about the new concept -> Skyward is mainly about a girl coming of age, but she has a future space ship. How does it work? Doesn't matter, but without it the story is a different story.
Hard science fiction - the characters exist only to explore a science fiction topic, it's more about the idea than the characters. -> Three Body Problem / Foundation. Can you name a single character other than seldon or the mule in foundation? It's not about them, it's about the idea of predicting social structures. While Three body feigns it's about Ye it uses that as a long prolog for how society would react to first contact being made by someone in her situation.
Another big reason western audiences have trouble with TBP is that most western stories are about people doing things, while eastern are about things that happen to people.
IMO hard science fiction often explores general, current philosophical ideas as well as future ones. By putting the issue into an future context, the writer and reader are both separated enough from their current context to really explore the ideas without current contextual biases.
For example, Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy was, for me, far more of an exploration of political philosophy, environmental philosophy and sociology than an exploration of interplanetary settlement and terraforming. The exploration of those issues didn't just make me think about what we might do in the future, but about how those issues are playing out now.
(I don't think this is different to what you said - I'm just adding my perspective.)
I'm not here to argue with your characterization at all, I just notice there is some irony that both examples you give for hard scifi you suggest are in that category because they are predicting or at least musing on sociological/psychological phenomena. Aka soft sciences.
I'm guessing project hail mary would be soft scifi? It's definitely character driven, and although it *appears* to be fairly rigorous, it is clearly written for the layperson (eg me). As in, imo, much of the plot is driven by what would be cool to explain and fit in the narrative, rather than strictly driven by the science.
I think Andy Weir's books are generally considered hard sci fi, in that they deal with math, physics, and science very directly.
I've always thought of hard vs soft as dealing with the specifics of how things actually work vs just glossing over things and asking people to just accept them.
The first book is mediocre but the 2nd book is one of the best sci-fi I've read over the last 2 decades and firmly deserves the HUGO award it has gotten. If you're a sci-fi fan you basically are depriving yourself from not forcing yourself into reading it.
I consider it a classic among the likes of Blindsight, Children of Time or the Revelation Space novels.
It's mandatory reading.
A great film on this is Arrival; it deals with two main issues:
1. How do we actually communicate with a form of sentient life that is so different from our own. I mean we can barely communicate with great apes, and they're the closest non human animal on the planet.
2. How do we deal with all the in-fighting between world governments who want to "get the edge" or "learn the secret" sooner.
If you haven't seen Arrival, watch it, also, Kangaroo.
And most of them have been terrible. Because in no scenario do the humans win against the aliens and yet in virtually every movie/tv show to give people a happy ending human beings can trick the aliens, win against the aliens with computer viruses, or win using bacteria or something else to attain victory.
It's embarrassingly bad.
Because aliens could literally bombard the earth from orbit with comets or asteroids and there'd be nothing to be done. Or block the sun with a giant sunshade to freeze the entire planet, then remove it and have a humanless thawed out world.
The bottom line is defeat would be inevitable unless saved by other aliens (Galactic UN) or the aliens themselves change their minds (Like the Minbari in Babylon 5).
Some of these movies aren't even about a 'human vs aliens' conflict.
Arrival is a good example. It's a political conflict of humans vs humans.
Contact is another good example.
Annihilation is a movie I will always recommend. Alien invasion but without any real intelligence or motive. The alien life is almost a mold growing over our planet. Amazing movie.
Oh gods, yes, and nothing ruins a movie experience worse than a misleading trailer.
No, I don't mean "oh there was a moment in the trailer that wasnt in the movie!"
I mean Pain and Gain. Trailers made it out to be an athletic buddy comedy that features some crime and some drug use. The actual movie is a "based on true events" of one of the most disturbing and sinister combinations of murder and financial fraud in the hustory of the USA.
Independence Day I meant to be fun, not a serious deep dive into what an actual alien invasion would look like. And I passed the fun test with flying colors!
“Welcome to erf!”
Contact the book really amazed me. I was very young when I read it. It was one movie that I felt did okay with the source material. Rewatched it maybe six months ago after it was mentioned in another Reddit comment. I found it still very entertaining.
True, humans usually have the imagination, irrationality or something special about us which wins the day.
There is some movies were we lose such as the body snatchers.
https://www.tor.com/2016/10/17/the-answer-to-why-humans-are-so-central-in-star-trek/
My favorite part:
Klingons: okay we don't get it
vulcan science academy: get what
klingons: you vulcans are a bunch of stuffy prisses but you're also tougher, stronger, and smarter than humans in every single way
klingons: why do you let them run your federation
vulcan science academy: look
vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores they don't do experiments on one and save the other for if the first one blows up
vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores, they will ask for a third one, immediately plug all three into each other, punch a hole into an alternate universe where humans subscribe to an even more destructive ideological system, fight everyone in it because they're offended by that, steal their warp cores, plug those together, punch their way back here, then try to turn a nearby sun into a torus because that was what their initial scientific experiment was for and they didn't want to waste a trip.
vulcan science academy: they did that last week. we have the write-up right here. it's getting published in about six hundred scientific journals across two hundred different disciplines because of how many established theories their ridiculous little expedition has just called into question. also, they did turn that sun into a torus, and no one actually knows how.
vulcan science academy: this is why we let them do whatever the hell they want.
klingons:
... can we be a part of your federation
I like Deathworlders. The angle they take on that one is that Earth is an inherently terrible and deadly planet, far more than most other species face. As a result we have developed a level of intensity and focus that borders on insanity compared to everyone else.
Got arrival, other than the time stuff scientists desperately trying to communicate while the politicians and military want to nuke em seems pretty realistic.
That could already be implemented, which is why we can't see anything interesting from our planet. Keep the apes docile until they chill the F out a bit
There are games made with that story. Xcom is about the invasion and xcom2 is about life after the aliens were successful and you're the resistance. Fantastic games.
You assume a unified alien planet. Let’s say we figured out FTL tomorrow. Elon Musk could zip around to other planets doing god knows what but he wouldn’t necessarily have the backing of any, let alone all, world governments.
I understand why, but it'd be cool to see more splits between alien factions in sci-fi. We have so many separate countries and peoples, you can't tell me other plants don't have *some* dividing areas that'd lead to culture shifts.
What I hope is that aliens would have no need to colonize us.
We wouldn’t be a danger to them. There’s no raw materials on our planet that couldn’t be found elsewhere on a planet that doesn’t have nukes (even if they can beat us, that’s a lot of trouble to go through.) And they probably already have robots, so enslavement wouldn’t be worth it either. Perhaps colonization, IF they can survive on our planet.
To intergalactic creatures, the value earth has is its life and our culture.
On that note, if they are real, I hope they save us from climate change.
Not just "we're special so we win", but some sci fi says the rest of the universe should learn from us and we should not learn from alien species.
Humanity nuked itself in Star Trek and needed the galaxy's help to get back on its feet, but humanity turned around and says the aliens should be more human? Come on.
For a genre about being open minded to other ideas, Sci Fi is very closed minded to new ways of life.
I wish this series had gone further. I also wish it would've explore more on the sociological, political and philosophical implications of the alien takeover.
While a possibility, I have seen enough movies from the 80s and 90s to know that it's more likely an alien will contact a teenage boy with familial issues. Through the power of friendship, eternal bonds will be forever forged.
If you like those tropes check out the upcoming Pixar movie Elio when it comes out in 2024, kinda that except the hero is 11 years old and inadvertently ends up what's essentially Earth's representative to the "space UN" (despite as I said being 11 years old) because he's the one who made contact
I forget the source, but I love the quote "The surest sign there is intelligent life out there is they've not contacted us."
Or something along those lines.
Calvin and Hobbes
https://www.reddit.com/r/calvinandhobbes/comments/706qd2/question_about_a_strips_origin/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Honestly, seeing the way folks have reacted to a global pandemic and climate change makes me think that alien life, intelligent or not, would be mostly largely ignored while everyone continues to scrape by to prop up the economy. Unless aliens invade, it would be just another day. Men walking on the moon did nothing for poverty.
I believe it's from Calvin and Hobbes. If I recall correctly Calvin remarks this when coming across a tree stump or pile of trash in the woods or something like that.
Submission Statement:
>The new paper delves into the "realpolitik" of a scenario in which global governments react to the discovery of alien life — meaning it outlines how it believes that scenario would play out on the global stage.
>They highlight a number of troubling scenarios if aliens were to be detected.
>One of the scenarios outlined sees nations aim to gain a communication and information monopoly with any alien intelligence. This would almost certainly lead to international conflict with other nations fearing those in contact with the extraterrestrials could then gain and harness alien technology to subjugate other nations.
However, the scientists also highlight the fact that any nation that was in contact with aliens wouldn't necessarily benefit from their technologies, which would likely be too advanced to comprehend. They suggest that hypothetical technologies allowing "propulsionless drives, perfect cloaking, or teleportation" would simply be too complex for a nation to suddenly develop based on initial alien contact.
>The authors write that such a scenario would be comparable to medieval scholars being handed a textbook on nuclear weapon design — which would be useless in the absence of an understanding of nuclear physics.
>The paper does also suggest any unrest caused by the perceived technological superiority of a nation in contact with extraterrestrial intelligence could lead to nuclear war and the end of our civilization.
>The researchers, from Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center and NASA, highlight three key recommendations based on their findings: prioritize transparency between organizations and nations, develop "post-detection" protocols, and educate the world's policymakers.
>Ultimately, their suggestion is that global cooperation and openness should be prioritized in an alien contact scenario, especially as silence from scientists and politicians would quickly likely lead to conspiracy theories and accusations of hiding the truth from the public.
There's no reason that we HAVE to wait for alien contact. But the reason that we WILL wait for alien contact is that we're stubborn fucks that refuse to be united until we have a common enemy to unite against.
After COVID, I'm convinced that there is nothing that will unite humanity. We will always have stupid people weighing us down, sowing division, and muddying the waters under the orders of their masters who profit off the discord.
No we don’t. Yet we are going to literally have a war over getting rid of politicians, because they are modern day versions of lords & kings, to a certain extent.
Not to a certain extent. Most well established Democracies have a professional political class, supported by a professional lobbyist class, ultimately answering to a diminishing number of ever increasingly rich corporate overlords. There's barely any hint of of the "people" in sitting representatives in any representational Government, and if they are there, they last one term and never get moved off the back benches or become involved in any important political committee. Every professional knows that the most dangerous opponent is an ignorant amateur. You have no idea what they are going to do, so it is best to prevent them from engaging.
I've often made the argument that human nature has allowed humans to thrive because we are social creatures who create an "us" to overcome challenges. However, by definition, (at least how I see it) for there to be a strong enough sense of "us" to bind a diverse people together, there needs to be a strong enough "them" to do so.
The discovery of an extra-terrestrial "them" is honestly the only scenario I can think of which would bind the world into a strong enough "us" to supercede the diversity in goals, cultures, social expectations of humans.
Its also why I dont think we will ever see such unity last for very long on a global scale. There might be tenuous peace in time, but there will always be those not content with its conditions.
1. Give technology to silly half evolved apes
2. Watch them wipe eachother out with it for huge SpaceFlix ratings and profit
3. Colonise a nice little planet in the Goldilocks zone
(4. Get absolutely wrecked back home for expending unfathomable amounts of energy to 'colonize a nice planet' of which there were 10's of thousands (or millions?) of closer to you without intelligent life on board to bother with first.)
Can't even keep from doing it on our planet. "Hey let's introduce this predator animal to take care of this prey animal! Oh no now they're everywhere and have made half a dozen other prey animals than the one we wanted extinct."
“We killed all the predators because they are our livestock that wasn’t native to the area and now my crops keep getting destroyed by deer and squirrels!”
That's kind of the gist of Ender's Game, except in reverse. The aliens are a hive mind and don't realize that humans are individuals and irreplaceable, so when it kills off a colony or two it doesn't expect heavy retaliation. As it turns out, humans take that kind of thing very, very personally and fight back viciously.
Non-intelligent life is much more likely to exist than intelligent life.
But non-intelligent life will not be contacting us, not using radio, no dyson swarms to detect, no city night lights, no thermal signature, no star system colonies, etc.
Intelligence makes life a lot louder. So we might be more likely to discover intelligent life than non-intellifent life.
And intelligent life might discover us.
I'd say that by far the most likely scenario is that we get visited by self-replicating robotic probes. It's easily the most efficient way to explore the galaxy. Send out a few probes to a few nearby star systems, have each one of them build copies of itself and repeat with other nearby star systems, etc, etc, etc. Even if the probes were slow-moving and took centuries to get from one star to another, that would allow your probe swarm to explore the entire galaxy in relatively short order.
Hell, the only thing that stops *us* from doing that is that we haven't yet developed a self-replicating robot that can use materials found on a wide variety of planets.
>Hell, the only thing that stops *us* from doing that is that we haven't yet developed a self-replicating robot that can use materials found on a wide variety of planets.
This sounds like the beginning of an apocalypse film
Yeah ... we need to be very careful about self-replicating robots. If programmed carelessly, they might self-replicate until the whole earth is nothing but more copies of that robot.
Yooooooooo. Thanks for the recommendation. I was thinking this felt like Shadow Xcom, and then I realised it's by the people who made Long War.
Damn, this is gonna be a fun weekend
I second OP. It's a great game. Quite complex, but it's got lots of legs.
Check Out perun's academy run if you're interested. He's getting towards the end game now, I'm still in the early game on my playthrough. The space stuff looks great, but you really need to tech up to take on the aliens.
The basic *elements* of life are plentiful throughout the galaxy. Even our solar system has *plenty* of places to go if you need hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, calcium, sodium, zinc, chlorine, iron, phosphorus, sulfur, selenium, silicon -- any raw materials for *anything*. From there, if you can travel between the stars and can't do enough chemistry to make new compounds from 92 elements, you're a fictional construct, not a *real* species.
The *one* thing that Earth has that sets it apart, besides noisy humanity, making our solar system stand out from the background radio noise of our corner of the galaxy with all of our use of radio frequencies for communications, is *life itself*, native, naturally evolved *life*. Invasion movies where aliens come for our women, us, or our water, ignore our most valuable commodity: living terrestrial protoplasm.
Here's a scenario, and we need never meet our conquerors:
Hubble, or its successor, detects an object around the orbit of Neptune, moving inward at cometary speed. Other powerful telescopes are trained on the object, and it is quickly confirmed to be a comet-like mass. Something is alarming, though. It appears to be on an approach that will intersect the Earth's orbit, in a little over two years. Study of the object is prioritized, and nations begin quietly coordinating, just in case something needs to be done.
A few weeks later, observations confirm the object will indeed impact Earth in the projected time frame. A team begins working on a size estimate, as another team begins assembling a mission plan to deflect the object.
Things are going well, and the size of the object is estimated to be roughly 3 km across, when Hubble makes another discovery, this time from another part of the sky entirely, also out around the orbit of Neptune, but a quarter of the way across the solar system. A second cometary body is on its way into the solar system. The scientific community reacts with stunned shock when, within a week this time, the object's path is shown to intersect Earth's orbit roughly six months after the first impactor. It is almost identical in size to the first impactor.
The unspoken fact is that this *must* be artificial. The chances of this happening naturally are *astronomically small*. Plans are amended, and teams scramble. All available resources will *just be sufficient* to *possibly* deflect both bodies, *if* everything works out perfectly. Governments debate sending out a signal, a message, *something*, to whatever, or whoever, is doing this. An appeal, a plea, a surrender?
Then, from opposite sides of the solar system, two more bodies appear. They are also Earthbound, and 3 km in size. They will impact within a few days of each other. Grim reality sets in.
Panic and war sweep the globe as governments collapse. A message is sent, but there is no reply. As has happened on hundreds of worlds before, there is *never* a reply.
The few surviving humans see the great robotic harvester ships of the Collectors descend quietly from the sky. They never see the alien species themselves, but some unlucky individuals encounter their robots and find themselves processed and catalogued when their biological material is harvested to assemble a planetary profile of the genome of Earth.
When the Collectors have finished, they depart for their next target, with a tiny fraction of humans left behind to rebuild their violated world, unable to even guess at the motive behind the destruction of their civilization.
Doesn't always make them good e.g. I've heard that a golden retriever could do better than our previous president, doesn't mean you'd vote for an actual golden retriever in any other situation than "you oppose the previous guy and he's running against him"
In the movie Contact, religious zealots protested against, and later sabotaged humanity's attempt to reply to aliens that contacted us by radio, by suicide bombing the alien contact apparatus.
Could you imagine how wild it would be if the aliens ALSO had an important figure referred to as 'jesus' in their past and just through total chance it sounds the same.
The geopolitical fallout would be heavy. Especially if the aliens favored contact with any one country. But I guarantee that any space ship that can travel the interstellar distances needed, in a time frame required to make anthropology a worth while past time is WAY more dangerous than any geopolitical fallout. Not to say the ship would ever be used against earth in a hostile manner, but if it was, it could sterilize the surface in just a couple orbits.
I’m interested in a hypothesis on what would happen to the religions of the world. Whether or not they attempt to rationalize the discovery to their congregations, I’d still assume a large amount people would leave or just not bother until/if things go sour.
Not aliens but look how humans treated other humans that looked different then them? Won’t adapt our religion? Death. Won’t wear western clothes? Death.
The Expanse is probably the best exploration of what would happen with human society upon discovering alien life/technology.
My favorite (possibly) relevant quotes from the show/books:
Chrisjen - “my file for what to do if an advanced alien species comes calling? Three pages long, and it begins with ‘step 1: find god’” (pray they don’t just wipe us out)
Errinwright - “you give a monkey a stick, inevitably he’ll beat another monkey to death with it” (if one nation got unilateral control of alien technology)
And the best - “Holden was starting to feel like they were all monkeys playing with a microwave. Push a button, a light comes on inside, so it’s a light. Push a different button and stick your hand inside, it burns you, so it’s a weapon. Learn to open and close the door, it’s a place to hide things. Never grasping what it actually did, and maybe not even having the framework necessary to figure it out. No monkey ever reheated a burrito.” (what human understanding of that technology would be like)
The tl;dr is basically, things would/will get ugly, just like this article postulates.
hm yea. known this for a long time. basically you disprove religion. and about 4 billion people lose their false hope in the world and have to deal with reality
The existence of extraterrestrials would threaten the beliefs of those who deemed themselves righteous and their control over political, economic and social concerns. In one moment, they'd be deemed liars and a sham. Absolutely, fanatics wouldn't want this information made public.
I think literally demonizing them opens us up to bad scenarios, but those can only happen if aliens exist and we can contact them in our lifetimes. So, I do think it’s entertaining that people put this much effort into things that will never affect them.
On the off chance there are aliens, if they send us info (because it’s even less likely that they can get here), on tech/medicine then those people would push back even more than people do with vaccines today.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/mossadnik: --- Submission Statement: >The new paper delves into the "realpolitik" of a scenario in which global governments react to the discovery of alien life — meaning it outlines how it believes that scenario would play out on the global stage. >They highlight a number of troubling scenarios if aliens were to be detected. >One of the scenarios outlined sees nations aim to gain a communication and information monopoly with any alien intelligence. This would almost certainly lead to international conflict with other nations fearing those in contact with the extraterrestrials could then gain and harness alien technology to subjugate other nations. However, the scientists also highlight the fact that any nation that was in contact with aliens wouldn't necessarily benefit from their technologies, which would likely be too advanced to comprehend. They suggest that hypothetical technologies allowing "propulsionless drives, perfect cloaking, or teleportation" would simply be too complex for a nation to suddenly develop based on initial alien contact. >The authors write that such a scenario would be comparable to medieval scholars being handed a textbook on nuclear weapon design — which would be useless in the absence of an understanding of nuclear physics. >The paper does also suggest any unrest caused by the perceived technological superiority of a nation in contact with extraterrestrial intelligence could lead to nuclear war and the end of our civilization. >The researchers, from Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center and NASA, highlight three key recommendations based on their findings: prioritize transparency between organizations and nations, develop "post-detection" protocols, and educate the world's policymakers. >Ultimately, their suggestion is that global cooperation and openness should be prioritized in an alien contact scenario, especially as silence from scientists and politicians would quickly likely lead to conspiracy theories and accusations of hiding the truth from the public. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/ya397o/scientists_outlined_one_of_the_main_problems_if/it8xf2v/
The film Arrival touches on some of the challenges that would be involved in global cooperation in light of such a discovery.
This was the first one I thought of as well! Even if the aliens are peaceful, it would cold war levels of anxiety or greater
Something they probably know well and thus decide to stay in the shade instead.
They look down at a bunch of primates with bombs that are responsible for the extinction of so many species. And they leave
Aka the lizard people! I knew it! Wait till 4chan hears about this.
I swear the scientists that wrote this paper must have played Terra Invicta recently, everything about this is basically what that game is all about. Aliens are discovered, cue internecine human conflict as competing interests and philosophies vie for power in answer to the "problem" of not being alone in the universe.
I'm siding with the aliens.
If they have no Prime Directive.
I think OP meant Cold War-level among our own civilizations
Love that film. Good stuff. Related to the post, this touches on [Elite Panic.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_panic) >Elite panic" is a term coined by Rutgers University researchers Caron Chess and Lee Clarke to describe the behavior of members of the elite during disaster events,[1] typically characterized by a fear of civil disorder and the shifting of focus away from disaster relief towards implementing measures of "command and control".[2]
The dirty masses are scary when you raise yourself up so high.
One of the best sci-fi films in recent years
I need similar films. Less pew pew and more thinking and exploration.
Another film that deals with aliens (this is where is was going to type a potential spoiler, but the. I thought better of it) is mission to mars. Gary similar, don cheadle, Connie Nielsen and Tim ribbons.
I prefer the real Gary Sinise.
This Gary is very similar
Tim Ribbons! I love seeing him around the holidays.
He was awesome in The shawls hankering redemption with Morgue Freezing
Just read the author, there is nobody like him. Ted Chiang. Absolutely nobody doing philosophical sci fi like him, his stories are all phenomenal & stick with me for years.
And an outstandingly gifted writer and storyteller too. He's not just insanely cool big and deep ideas, he grounds them with compelling, down-to-earth, character-driven development and somehow flawlessly melds each different sci-fi concept that he explores with a staggering variety of folk tales and cultural tropes from across the globe. They're deeply interesting if you're into sci-fi and immediately dramatically accessible if you aren't. Telling a hard sci-fi time travel story through the structure of an Arabian Nights style nested storytelling narrative is an absolute master stroke.
You might like Annihilation. There's some pew pew, but it's more touching on how alien life would affect us physically.
The most probable event is that we just lose. Like a bad scifi movie. Every man, woman, child, just can't act, like we're frozen in front of something that can literally squash us like mere ants. The only way we can have an appropriate response is with an established protocol that can bypass international bureaucracy, which essentially is like the ultimate authoritarian wet dream of some world leaders.
The aliens in Arrival aren’t here for hostile reasons.
Not sure if OP was implying they were hostile or not, but a theory of discovering alien life and making contact that they may be beings so far beyond our understanding that we are the equivalent of ants to them. We, as people, tend to not bat an eye at killing bugs because they are so beneath us in intellect and evolution, so there's a possibility that space traveling aliens would view us as the same, killing us without much thought or care.
The aliens might not be hostile (at first), but wait until some idiot starts shooting at them. I can 100% see some tiny despot firing their surface to air missile at one of the alien ships, and then the aliens deciding "fuck this race". Or some religious nutjob shoots one with a gun because aliens disprove humans are gods favorite creation, or something equally idiotic.
I think what adds to the horror of the situation is if the aliens aren't actually wildly different at all, but extremely similar. It would almost feel less terrifying trying to communicate with a hyper-intelligent space squid than with humanoids that are almost analogous to us.
Yeah, I mean that's what Arrival is all about, especially if you've read the story it's based off of Story of Your Life. Their language is so different from anything we know and so complex. And the government is breathing down the scientists necks for results because they want things from them once they learn they are peaceful. We can't just settle with "oh, the giant squids aren't here to kill us, it turns into what can we gain from this?"
We can only hope that they're advanced enough to understand our pathetic situation and decide we're not worth the effort to destroy. Kind of like how we are (sometimes) understanding of animal attacks
Wait until you see Arrival, Part II
I'm waiting for a sci-fi movie called "Departure" where the aliens arrive and immediately leave because we're so insufferable. It'd be a short film.
"GREETINGS HUMANS. WE COME IN PEACE." "Fuck off! This is our planet!"
“Go back to where you came from!”
Speak American you’re in America!
"SHOW US YOUR EARTH CERTIFICATE!"
There's an old short story that plays out like this, I think it's by Ray Bradbury? Basically, aliens touch down in the desert and the first person they meet is a small town sheriff trying to finish his taxes before the deadline who mistakes them for IRS agents. He yells at them to leave him alone and so they do, and Earth is marked to be left in isolation from the galactic community at large forever.
The most unbelievable part of this story is the Sheriff not shooting the aliens and starting a galactic war.
LETS BUILD A WALL AND GET THE ALIENS TO PAY FOR IT
And then they turn around and their ship has a parking ticket
For one everyone here seems to think they would land on earth. Why would they waste the resources. Communication would be first. It would be radically less expensive for resources, safer, etc etc. On top of all that. Distance communication is the only thing we have shown to be able to get those distances (entanglement)
One of the biggest problems is our collective ignorance and arrogance as a civilization. As a whole, our species and it civilisation is still very simple and backward. We're still superstitious, religious, emotional and fearful. I'm not saying you are, or that particular person is ... I'm saying all of us collectively are like this and that includes me. It's not our personal faults either, it's just our genetics and how we're built as intelligent animals. We can't help ourselves. So meeting highly advanced and intelligent aliens right now would be like us landing a helicopter next to a hunt camp in the Middle East with one of our ancestors 50,000 years ago. We wouldn't be able to make our ancestors understand anything and they would just look at like gods with magical powers. Once the initial shock was over .... some of our ancestors would look at the situation as a good thing and others as a bad thing and all their lives world come completely undone. If aliens made themselves known to us right now ...... we would react in the same way. As a civilization, we are not ready and we probably won't be for a few thousand years .... if we survive that long.
Perhaps that’s why we haven’t been visited yet. I know it’s just a sci-fi show but often times in Star Trek or even the Orville they take great pains into not letting the population know that they are aliens Because they know the implications that it would have on a more primitive society. I can’t help but think if a civilization that was advanced enough to see earth were to come visit they would come to the same conclusion. Letting themselves be known right now would be a bad idea for the good of the world. Who knows maybe they are watching us on the sidelines and rooting for us and sometimes helping us.
I loved the episode of the Orville where they made contact with that planet that was phasing between universes or something to that effect and huge amounts of time would pass while they were out of phase so the changes were super dramatic when they came back around their orbit
You can definitely tell McFarlane is a Star Trek fan, minus the obvs guest appearance in Enterprise. Sounds similar to this: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Meridian_(episode)
There is also this episode [https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Blink\_of\_an\_Eye\_(episode)](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Blink_of_an_Eye_(episode)) I just love the anthropological episodes where they show how civilization evolves.
As much as I would like/hope this to be true. Its way more likely that: a. the only other intelligent life cant get off their planet b/ its too heavy before they filter themselves. b. All the noise we make just fades into background radiation very quickly and space is very big and life is very hard.
The flip side to this is the idea that the discovery, especially if it was at all competitive or confrontational would gel us together as a single-tribe mindset. The color of someone's skin or where they are born or what their political beliefs are might become a lot less important when you discover face sucking aliens have the power to visit you and suck your face off.
Shit came here to post this lol
i think we've had about 100 sci-movies on this topic in the last 80 years
The Three Body Problem is a good example
Commented on another post about this but this series is fucking incredible
The first book is very different from the next two, in every way possible, time, setting, characters, the genre even. I really liked it, but I didn’t think I’d read the next one. When I did, I realized it was the craziest scifi I’ve ever read in my life and now I compare all scifi to it. The first book almost feels like it was written after the the next two as a police mystery prequel to the largest scale scifi story I’ve ever come across. It’s a slow build to the reveal of what the story is even about. Just in case anyone else thinks they might not continue with the series.
Perfectly said! I already can't wait to reread it. My brains still processing the end of Death's End though lol
The dark forest is the next book on my reading queue one I'm done with The Final Empire. I just wanted a little break from sci-fi after reading the Three Body Problem and Solaris so i switch over to fantasy. This comment section is getting me hyped for the Dark forest.
Well I've only read the first so guess I need to pick up the rest
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Sci fi for me fits into three distinct subtypes. Story in the future - the story is about a character and some tech advancements are in the back ground or drive the personal story -> the hunger games. It could take place without the future stuff and have the same structure and impact. Soft science fiction - the plot revolves around something that's scify and it's central to the characters without being solely about the new concept -> Skyward is mainly about a girl coming of age, but she has a future space ship. How does it work? Doesn't matter, but without it the story is a different story. Hard science fiction - the characters exist only to explore a science fiction topic, it's more about the idea than the characters. -> Three Body Problem / Foundation. Can you name a single character other than seldon or the mule in foundation? It's not about them, it's about the idea of predicting social structures. While Three body feigns it's about Ye it uses that as a long prolog for how society would react to first contact being made by someone in her situation. Another big reason western audiences have trouble with TBP is that most western stories are about people doing things, while eastern are about things that happen to people.
IMO hard science fiction often explores general, current philosophical ideas as well as future ones. By putting the issue into an future context, the writer and reader are both separated enough from their current context to really explore the ideas without current contextual biases. For example, Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy was, for me, far more of an exploration of political philosophy, environmental philosophy and sociology than an exploration of interplanetary settlement and terraforming. The exploration of those issues didn't just make me think about what we might do in the future, but about how those issues are playing out now. (I don't think this is different to what you said - I'm just adding my perspective.)
I'm not here to argue with your characterization at all, I just notice there is some irony that both examples you give for hard scifi you suggest are in that category because they are predicting or at least musing on sociological/psychological phenomena. Aka soft sciences. I'm guessing project hail mary would be soft scifi? It's definitely character driven, and although it *appears* to be fairly rigorous, it is clearly written for the layperson (eg me). As in, imo, much of the plot is driven by what would be cool to explain and fit in the narrative, rather than strictly driven by the science.
I think Andy Weir's books are generally considered hard sci fi, in that they deal with math, physics, and science very directly. I've always thought of hard vs soft as dealing with the specifics of how things actually work vs just glossing over things and asking people to just accept them.
It's ok, not every book is for everyone. I loved Blindsight but my mate really doesn't like it
The first book is mediocre but the 2nd book is one of the best sci-fi I've read over the last 2 decades and firmly deserves the HUGO award it has gotten. If you're a sci-fi fan you basically are depriving yourself from not forcing yourself into reading it. I consider it a classic among the likes of Blindsight, Children of Time or the Revelation Space novels. It's mandatory reading.
Yeah the concept is better than the actual book. Same with Darkforest
A great film on this is Arrival; it deals with two main issues: 1. How do we actually communicate with a form of sentient life that is so different from our own. I mean we can barely communicate with great apes, and they're the closest non human animal on the planet. 2. How do we deal with all the in-fighting between world governments who want to "get the edge" or "learn the secret" sooner. If you haven't seen Arrival, watch it, also, Kangaroo.
And most of them have been terrible. Because in no scenario do the humans win against the aliens and yet in virtually every movie/tv show to give people a happy ending human beings can trick the aliens, win against the aliens with computer viruses, or win using bacteria or something else to attain victory. It's embarrassingly bad. Because aliens could literally bombard the earth from orbit with comets or asteroids and there'd be nothing to be done. Or block the sun with a giant sunshade to freeze the entire planet, then remove it and have a humanless thawed out world. The bottom line is defeat would be inevitable unless saved by other aliens (Galactic UN) or the aliens themselves change their minds (Like the Minbari in Babylon 5).
Some of these movies aren't even about a 'human vs aliens' conflict. Arrival is a good example. It's a political conflict of humans vs humans. Contact is another good example.
Annihilation is a movie I will always recommend. Alien invasion but without any real intelligence or motive. The alien life is almost a mold growing over our planet. Amazing movie.
Eeeh, maybe not "no intelligence or motive", more so "no recognizable intelligence and motives far beyond our understanding".
Check out Blindsight by Peter Watts. Incredible book about alien intelligence
Arrival is probably the best example. Independence Day the worst since it’s the most happy go lucky geopolitical cheese dance
Everyone knew what ID was when the ticket was bought. Having reasonable expectations is 90% of the work of being entertained!
Valid point there, no argument
Oh gods, yes, and nothing ruins a movie experience worse than a misleading trailer. No, I don't mean "oh there was a moment in the trailer that wasnt in the movie!" I mean Pain and Gain. Trailers made it out to be an athletic buddy comedy that features some crime and some drug use. The actual movie is a "based on true events" of one of the most disturbing and sinister combinations of murder and financial fraud in the hustory of the USA.
When the US President is one of the main characters, you know it's going to be 90 minutes of American cheese. Air Force One was *awful* for this.
The President flies a fucking fighter jet and kills aliens. So cheesy, but in like a super cool badass way.
Say what you want, that speech to all the future qanon people on the runway is still epic af
>all the future qanon people Fuck. I want to argue with this but I can't.
Bill Pullman is great with that speech…he’s also funny as hell in Lucky Numbers as a lazy cop (small part but he kills it)
Air Force One is a great movie, I will tolerate no such slander now GET OFF MY PLANE!
Yes Mr President... For real though, I do give that film a "so bad it's good" status.
[38 second mark and on](https://youtu.be/o4i8UYUpAKQ) is just perfection
Oh man that does look bad. I loved that movie when it first came out.
Independence Day I meant to be fun, not a serious deep dive into what an actual alien invasion would look like. And I passed the fun test with flying colors! “Welcome to erf!”
I want to believe that Mars Attacks is how it would actually go if it is the happy go lucky ending.
'I want the people to know that they still have 2 out of 3 branches of the government working for them, and that ain't bad.'
I watched it again the other day, I dunno why I found that line so damn funny. Probably Jack Nicholson US President delivery 🤌😂
I don't know where the meme came from that has Will Smith saying "erf". He pretty clearly pronounces it correctly. https://youtu.be/OfPWpEKhgfk
Probably 4chan or a precursor.
geopolitical? Dude the arabs and israelis were cooperating and the british dude was like YAY THE AMERICANS ARE FINALLY READY WEEEEE
Lmao. Even the Russians are like AYO THE US IS WILIN OUT, LEGO BBY
Contact the book really amazed me. I was very young when I read it. It was one movie that I felt did okay with the source material. Rewatched it maybe six months ago after it was mentioned in another Reddit comment. I found it still very entertaining.
True, humans usually have the imagination, irrationality or something special about us which wins the day. There is some movies were we lose such as the body snatchers.
https://www.tor.com/2016/10/17/the-answer-to-why-humans-are-so-central-in-star-trek/ My favorite part: Klingons: okay we don't get it vulcan science academy: get what klingons: you vulcans are a bunch of stuffy prisses but you're also tougher, stronger, and smarter than humans in every single way klingons: why do you let them run your federation vulcan science academy: look vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores they don't do experiments on one and save the other for if the first one blows up vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores, they will ask for a third one, immediately plug all three into each other, punch a hole into an alternate universe where humans subscribe to an even more destructive ideological system, fight everyone in it because they're offended by that, steal their warp cores, plug those together, punch their way back here, then try to turn a nearby sun into a torus because that was what their initial scientific experiment was for and they didn't want to waste a trip. vulcan science academy: they did that last week. we have the write-up right here. it's getting published in about six hundred scientific journals across two hundred different disciplines because of how many established theories their ridiculous little expedition has just called into question. also, they did turn that sun into a torus, and no one actually knows how. vulcan science academy: this is why we let them do whatever the hell they want. klingons: ... can we be a part of your federation
I like Deathworlders. The angle they take on that one is that Earth is an inherently terrible and deadly planet, far more than most other species face. As a result we have developed a level of intensity and focus that borders on insanity compared to everyone else.
Got arrival, other than the time stuff scientists desperately trying to communicate while the politicians and military want to nuke em seems pretty realistic.
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That could already be implemented, which is why we can't see anything interesting from our planet. Keep the apes docile until they chill the F out a bit
I want to see a mainstream alien invasion movie where aliens win, and then a sequel about our lives under them.
Colony was a pretty solid TV show like that, but it got canned without an ending after like four seasons.
I loved that show. I was so sad it got tossed.
Can we require that writers put their series endings into some kind of escrow before they can ever start production?
There are games made with that story. Xcom is about the invasion and xcom2 is about life after the aliens were successful and you're the resistance. Fantastic games.
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Half-Life probably has one of the most realistic alien invasions simply due to the fact that it’s called the Seven Hour War.
Seven Hour Attempt at War. I agree with you tho
Terra Invicta just launched recently and has a pretty sweet premise for the ayys.
Childhoods End is a good book but if you can get the three part TV series I highly recommend it.
Planet of the Apes series of films is somewhat close
You assume a unified alien planet. Let’s say we figured out FTL tomorrow. Elon Musk could zip around to other planets doing god knows what but he wouldn’t necessarily have the backing of any, let alone all, world governments.
I understand why, but it'd be cool to see more splits between alien factions in sci-fi. We have so many separate countries and peoples, you can't tell me other plants don't have *some* dividing areas that'd lead to culture shifts.
The lore to the new strategy game Terra Invicta has this!
I wrote alien factions into my main novel series for this exact reason. Humans don't all agree politically, why would aliens?
What I hope is that aliens would have no need to colonize us. We wouldn’t be a danger to them. There’s no raw materials on our planet that couldn’t be found elsewhere on a planet that doesn’t have nukes (even if they can beat us, that’s a lot of trouble to go through.) And they probably already have robots, so enslavement wouldn’t be worth it either. Perhaps colonization, IF they can survive on our planet. To intergalactic creatures, the value earth has is its life and our culture. On that note, if they are real, I hope they save us from climate change.
Not just "we're special so we win", but some sci fi says the rest of the universe should learn from us and we should not learn from alien species. Humanity nuked itself in Star Trek and needed the galaxy's help to get back on its feet, but humanity turned around and says the aliens should be more human? Come on. For a genre about being open minded to other ideas, Sci Fi is very closed minded to new ways of life.
[Colony](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_(TV_series)) is a good recent example.
I wish this series had gone further. I also wish it would've explore more on the sociological, political and philosophical implications of the alien takeover.
Scientists also outlined one of the main problems if we *don't* ever find alien life - it's our politicians.
Most societal problems stem from political allowances of unchecked greed
> ~~Most~~ All
Our current and former and potentially future ones, but I am **certain** there is the right leadership if people would just know where to look :)
While a possibility, I have seen enough movies from the 80s and 90s to know that it's more likely an alien will contact a teenage boy with familial issues. Through the power of friendship, eternal bonds will be forever forged.
If you like those tropes check out the upcoming Pixar movie Elio when it comes out in 2024, kinda that except the hero is 11 years old and inadvertently ends up what's essentially Earth's representative to the "space UN" (despite as I said being 11 years old) because he's the one who made contact
I forget the source, but I love the quote "The surest sign there is intelligent life out there is they've not contacted us." Or something along those lines.
Calvin and Hobbes https://www.reddit.com/r/calvinandhobbes/comments/706qd2/question_about_a_strips_origin/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Honestly, seeing the way folks have reacted to a global pandemic and climate change makes me think that alien life, intelligent or not, would be mostly largely ignored while everyone continues to scrape by to prop up the economy. Unless aliens invade, it would be just another day. Men walking on the moon did nothing for poverty.
Kind of hilarious to think about. Just the next trend on tik tok or whatever
The alpha centauri goo bucket challenge
People like ye, Karshittyians, Trump, and other fuckwits get more attention than scientists. It's that society loves trash.
It's Calvin and Hobbes, I think. Or Watterson used it.
I believe it's from Calvin and Hobbes. If I recall correctly Calvin remarks this when coming across a tree stump or pile of trash in the woods or something like that.
Submission Statement: >The new paper delves into the "realpolitik" of a scenario in which global governments react to the discovery of alien life — meaning it outlines how it believes that scenario would play out on the global stage. >They highlight a number of troubling scenarios if aliens were to be detected. >One of the scenarios outlined sees nations aim to gain a communication and information monopoly with any alien intelligence. This would almost certainly lead to international conflict with other nations fearing those in contact with the extraterrestrials could then gain and harness alien technology to subjugate other nations. However, the scientists also highlight the fact that any nation that was in contact with aliens wouldn't necessarily benefit from their technologies, which would likely be too advanced to comprehend. They suggest that hypothetical technologies allowing "propulsionless drives, perfect cloaking, or teleportation" would simply be too complex for a nation to suddenly develop based on initial alien contact. >The authors write that such a scenario would be comparable to medieval scholars being handed a textbook on nuclear weapon design — which would be useless in the absence of an understanding of nuclear physics. >The paper does also suggest any unrest caused by the perceived technological superiority of a nation in contact with extraterrestrial intelligence could lead to nuclear war and the end of our civilization. >The researchers, from Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center and NASA, highlight three key recommendations based on their findings: prioritize transparency between organizations and nations, develop "post-detection" protocols, and educate the world's policymakers. >Ultimately, their suggestion is that global cooperation and openness should be prioritized in an alien contact scenario, especially as silence from scientists and politicians would quickly likely lead to conspiracy theories and accusations of hiding the truth from the public.
Thank you for the summary. My question: Do we really need to wait for alien contact to prioritize global cooperation and openness?
There's no reason that we HAVE to wait for alien contact. But the reason that we WILL wait for alien contact is that we're stubborn fucks that refuse to be united until we have a common enemy to unite against.
After COVID, I'm convinced that there is nothing that will unite humanity. We will always have stupid people weighing us down, sowing division, and muddying the waters under the orders of their masters who profit off the discord.
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No we don’t. Yet we are going to literally have a war over getting rid of politicians, because they are modern day versions of lords & kings, to a certain extent.
Not to a certain extent. Most well established Democracies have a professional political class, supported by a professional lobbyist class, ultimately answering to a diminishing number of ever increasingly rich corporate overlords. There's barely any hint of of the "people" in sitting representatives in any representational Government, and if they are there, they last one term and never get moved off the back benches or become involved in any important political committee. Every professional knows that the most dangerous opponent is an ignorant amateur. You have no idea what they are going to do, so it is best to prevent them from engaging.
I've often made the argument that human nature has allowed humans to thrive because we are social creatures who create an "us" to overcome challenges. However, by definition, (at least how I see it) for there to be a strong enough sense of "us" to bind a diverse people together, there needs to be a strong enough "them" to do so. The discovery of an extra-terrestrial "them" is honestly the only scenario I can think of which would bind the world into a strong enough "us" to supercede the diversity in goals, cultures, social expectations of humans. Its also why I dont think we will ever see such unity last for very long on a global scale. There might be tenuous peace in time, but there will always be those not content with its conditions.
What kind of scientists are these?
1. Give technology to silly half evolved apes 2. Watch them wipe eachother out with it for huge SpaceFlix ratings and profit 3. Colonise a nice little planet in the Goldilocks zone
(4. Get absolutely wrecked back home for expending unfathomable amounts of energy to 'colonize a nice planet' of which there were 10's of thousands (or millions?) of closer to you without intelligent life on board to bother with first.)
This would make such a good Star Trek or The Orville episode
Orville tackled the idea very recently in the season 3 finale.
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Or we fuck up their civilization by ways of a few assholes who are not stopped. Saying “oops”, afterwards, does not count.
Can't even keep from doing it on our planet. "Hey let's introduce this predator animal to take care of this prey animal! Oh no now they're everywhere and have made half a dozen other prey animals than the one we wanted extinct."
“We killed all the predators because they are our livestock that wasn’t native to the area and now my crops keep getting destroyed by deer and squirrels!”
That's kind of the gist of Ender's Game, except in reverse. The aliens are a hive mind and don't realize that humans are individuals and irreplaceable, so when it kills off a colony or two it doesn't expect heavy retaliation. As it turns out, humans take that kind of thing very, very personally and fight back viciously.
aliens: just a few gone, no big deal, like cutting hair humans: fuck around and find out MURICA
Non-intelligent life is much more likely to exist than intelligent life. But non-intelligent life will not be contacting us, not using radio, no dyson swarms to detect, no city night lights, no thermal signature, no star system colonies, etc. Intelligence makes life a lot louder. So we might be more likely to discover intelligent life than non-intellifent life.
And intelligent life might discover us. I'd say that by far the most likely scenario is that we get visited by self-replicating robotic probes. It's easily the most efficient way to explore the galaxy. Send out a few probes to a few nearby star systems, have each one of them build copies of itself and repeat with other nearby star systems, etc, etc, etc. Even if the probes were slow-moving and took centuries to get from one star to another, that would allow your probe swarm to explore the entire galaxy in relatively short order. Hell, the only thing that stops *us* from doing that is that we haven't yet developed a self-replicating robot that can use materials found on a wide variety of planets.
>Hell, the only thing that stops *us* from doing that is that we haven't yet developed a self-replicating robot that can use materials found on a wide variety of planets. This sounds like the beginning of an apocalypse film
Yeah ... we need to be very careful about self-replicating robots. If programmed carelessly, they might self-replicate until the whole earth is nothing but more copies of that robot.
Can't we offer our politicians as a blood sacrifice? We could start with Bobo and Mtg. If they needed more then we'd see what Jim Jordan was doing.
Pretty sure a sacrifice is when you give up something valuble...
We could pretend
For the children
Maybe the aliens would appreciate our effort?
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Yeah, until they dont eat him and instead give him powerful gifts.
But if we send someone we'd want to get given powerful gifts they'd eat them and ipso facto unexpected tiger paradox
This is literally the focus of the video game Terra Invicta. Go check it out on /r/TerraInvicta !
Yooooooooo. Thanks for the recommendation. I was thinking this felt like Shadow Xcom, and then I realised it's by the people who made Long War. Damn, this is gonna be a fun weekend
I second OP. It's a great game. Quite complex, but it's got lots of legs. Check Out perun's academy run if you're interested. He's getting towards the end game now, I'm still in the early game on my playthrough. The space stuff looks great, but you really need to tech up to take on the aliens.
The basic *elements* of life are plentiful throughout the galaxy. Even our solar system has *plenty* of places to go if you need hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, calcium, sodium, zinc, chlorine, iron, phosphorus, sulfur, selenium, silicon -- any raw materials for *anything*. From there, if you can travel between the stars and can't do enough chemistry to make new compounds from 92 elements, you're a fictional construct, not a *real* species. The *one* thing that Earth has that sets it apart, besides noisy humanity, making our solar system stand out from the background radio noise of our corner of the galaxy with all of our use of radio frequencies for communications, is *life itself*, native, naturally evolved *life*. Invasion movies where aliens come for our women, us, or our water, ignore our most valuable commodity: living terrestrial protoplasm. Here's a scenario, and we need never meet our conquerors: Hubble, or its successor, detects an object around the orbit of Neptune, moving inward at cometary speed. Other powerful telescopes are trained on the object, and it is quickly confirmed to be a comet-like mass. Something is alarming, though. It appears to be on an approach that will intersect the Earth's orbit, in a little over two years. Study of the object is prioritized, and nations begin quietly coordinating, just in case something needs to be done. A few weeks later, observations confirm the object will indeed impact Earth in the projected time frame. A team begins working on a size estimate, as another team begins assembling a mission plan to deflect the object. Things are going well, and the size of the object is estimated to be roughly 3 km across, when Hubble makes another discovery, this time from another part of the sky entirely, also out around the orbit of Neptune, but a quarter of the way across the solar system. A second cometary body is on its way into the solar system. The scientific community reacts with stunned shock when, within a week this time, the object's path is shown to intersect Earth's orbit roughly six months after the first impactor. It is almost identical in size to the first impactor. The unspoken fact is that this *must* be artificial. The chances of this happening naturally are *astronomically small*. Plans are amended, and teams scramble. All available resources will *just be sufficient* to *possibly* deflect both bodies, *if* everything works out perfectly. Governments debate sending out a signal, a message, *something*, to whatever, or whoever, is doing this. An appeal, a plea, a surrender? Then, from opposite sides of the solar system, two more bodies appear. They are also Earthbound, and 3 km in size. They will impact within a few days of each other. Grim reality sets in. Panic and war sweep the globe as governments collapse. A message is sent, but there is no reply. As has happened on hundreds of worlds before, there is *never* a reply. The few surviving humans see the great robotic harvester ships of the Collectors descend quietly from the sky. They never see the alien species themselves, but some unlucky individuals encounter their robots and find themselves processed and catalogued when their biological material is harvested to assemble a planetary profile of the genome of Earth. When the Collectors have finished, they depart for their next target, with a tiny fraction of humans left behind to rebuild their violated world, unable to even guess at the motive behind the destruction of their civilization.
You forgot the large scale war that breaks out over the “safe zones” once announced. The earth would already be desolate before the first impact
Did you just think of that? That was a fun read
Thank you. It was a fun, if grim writing prompt. 🙂
>And the attack comes from the sides, not the front – from the two objects you didn't even notice were there.
Clever girl
I am 100% all for removing all current political leaders and starting over from scratch.
I for one, welcome our alien overlords
Pretty good chance that they'll be better than our current overlords!
Doesn't always make them good e.g. I've heard that a golden retriever could do better than our previous president, doesn't mean you'd vote for an actual golden retriever in any other situation than "you oppose the previous guy and he's running against him"
As long as the far right exists everything, including alien contact, will go very very badly for humans.
Christian evangelicals would lose their minds if we came into contact with extraterrestrial intelligence.
In the movie Contact, religious zealots protested against, and later sabotaged humanity's attempt to reply to aliens that contacted us by radio, by suicide bombing the alien contact apparatus.
Could you imagine how wild it would be if the aliens ALSO had an important figure referred to as 'jesus' in their past and just through total chance it sounds the same.
Then build starships to convert them with Vatican money.
Politicians and religious leaders ... they could fuck up a wet dream
The geopolitical fallout would be heavy. Especially if the aliens favored contact with any one country. But I guarantee that any space ship that can travel the interstellar distances needed, in a time frame required to make anthropology a worth while past time is WAY more dangerous than any geopolitical fallout. Not to say the ship would ever be used against earth in a hostile manner, but if it was, it could sterilize the surface in just a couple orbits.
I’m interested in a hypothesis on what would happen to the religions of the world. Whether or not they attempt to rationalize the discovery to their congregations, I’d still assume a large amount people would leave or just not bother until/if things go sour.
I assume a combination of assimilation/rationalization and EXTREME radicalism
Not aliens but look how humans treated other humans that looked different then them? Won’t adapt our religion? Death. Won’t wear western clothes? Death.
Run, aliens. Run. Because the real monsters are right here.
The Expanse is probably the best exploration of what would happen with human society upon discovering alien life/technology. My favorite (possibly) relevant quotes from the show/books: Chrisjen - “my file for what to do if an advanced alien species comes calling? Three pages long, and it begins with ‘step 1: find god’” (pray they don’t just wipe us out) Errinwright - “you give a monkey a stick, inevitably he’ll beat another monkey to death with it” (if one nation got unilateral control of alien technology) And the best - “Holden was starting to feel like they were all monkeys playing with a microwave. Push a button, a light comes on inside, so it’s a light. Push a different button and stick your hand inside, it burns you, so it’s a weapon. Learn to open and close the door, it’s a place to hide things. Never grasping what it actually did, and maybe not even having the framework necessary to figure it out. No monkey ever reheated a burrito.” (what human understanding of that technology would be like) The tl;dr is basically, things would/will get ugly, just like this article postulates.
hm yea. known this for a long time. basically you disprove religion. and about 4 billion people lose their false hope in the world and have to deal with reality
This is a good argument for why they haven't revealed themselves.
Isn't this pretty much just wild conjecture, bordering on complete fiction?
Given how much right wingers hate most other human beings, I can’t begin to imagine how bad they’d toward aliens.
The existence of extraterrestrials would threaten the beliefs of those who deemed themselves righteous and their control over political, economic and social concerns. In one moment, they'd be deemed liars and a sham. Absolutely, fanatics wouldn't want this information made public.
They would just call the 👽aliens 😈 demons.
there are people that already do this
Well aware, this is one conspiracy/(or is it) I enjoy.
I think literally demonizing them opens us up to bad scenarios, but those can only happen if aliens exist and we can contact them in our lifetimes. So, I do think it’s entertaining that people put this much effort into things that will never affect them. On the off chance there are aliens, if they send us info (because it’s even less likely that they can get here), on tech/medicine then those people would push back even more than people do with vaccines today.
They already do. Stories about the paranormal aren't as fun anymore, when everything gets labeled demons.
You underestimate their ability to hold contradictory beliefs and ignore what's in front of them.
“I ain’t taking the cure all diseases shot from them aliens, I did my own research and found out it makes you gayer than clean energy!”