1. Intelligent life that had simply sent out colonizing platforms with technology similar to ours would mean that we would integrate them (assuming they just cyrogenically froze individuals and sent out thousands of seed ships):
a. Are the seeders capable of transmitting back, if so, is the home planet alive, how long until transmission reaches them, how long until the home planet can send out another seeder ship/support ship? Can we stop them from overpopulating the Earth? Should we stop them?
b. Are the seeders virus ridden? Are we dangerous to them, War of the Worlds style?
c. Are the seeders the only ones in the galaxy? Or are there warring factions? Are we aligning ourselves to the correct side?
2. Intelligent life superior in technological capabilities would:
a. Star Trek: Benevolent overseer
b. Battleship Earth: Enslaver
c. Independence Day: Eradicator of humans
Would we be able to do anything about it, we may be in a situation that Carl Sagan foresaw that we may have the technology, but not the materials to reach a location should a signal reach us saying: "Hey, we can solve all of your problems if you can get a ship to alpha centauri within the next 8 years with two double a batteries. If you do not reach here in 8 years, we will be eradicated by Sunorian Plague."
Once there were three tribes. The Optimists, whose patron saints were Drake and Sagan, believed in a universe crawling with gentle intelligence—spiritual brethren vaster and more enlightened than we, a great galactic siblinghood into whose ranks we would someday ascend. Surely, said the Optimists, space travel implies enlightenment, for it requires the control of great destructive energies. Any race which can't rise above its own brutal instincts will wipe itself out long before it learns to bridge the interstellar gulf.
Across from the Optimists sat the Pessimists, who genuflected before graven images of Saint Fermi and a host of lesser lightweights. The Pessimists envisioned a lonely universe full of dead rocks and prokaryotic slime. The odds are just too low, they insisted. Too many rogues, too much radiation, too much eccentricity in too many orbits. It is a surpassing miracle that even one Earth exists; to hope for many is to abandon reason and embrace religious mania. After all, the universe is fourteen billion years old: if the galaxy were alive with intelligence, wouldn't it be here by now?
Equidistant to the other two tribes sat the Historians. They didn't have too many thoughts on the probable prevalence of intelligent, spacefaring extraterrestrials— but if there are any, they said, they're not just going to be smart. They're going to be mean.
It might seem almost too obvious a conclusion. What is Human history, if not an ongoing succession of greater technologies grinding lesser ones beneath their boots? But the subject wasn't merely Human history, or the unfair advantage that tools gave to any given side; the oppressed snatch up advanced weaponry as readily as the oppressor, given half a chance. No, the real issue was how those tools got there in the first place. The real issue was what tools are for.
To the Historians, tools existed for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes. They treated nature as an enemy, they were by definition a rebellion against the way things were. Technology is a stunted thing in benign environments, it never thrived in any culture gripped by belief in natural harmony. Why invent fusion reactors if your climate is comfortable, if your food is abundant? Why build fortresses if you have no enemies? Why force change upon a world which poses no threat?
Human civilization had a lot of branches, not so long ago. Even into the twenty-first century, a few isolated tribes had barely developed stone tools. Some settled down with agriculture. Others weren't content until they had ended nature itself, still others until they'd built cities in space.
We all rested eventually, though. Each new technology trampled lesser ones, climbed to some complacent asymptote, and stopped—until my own mother packed herself away like a larva in honeycomb, softened by machinery, robbed of incentive by her own contentment.
But history never said that everyone had to stop where we did. It only suggested that those who had stopped no longer struggled for existence. There could be other, more hellish worlds where the best Human technology would crumble, where the environment was still the enemy, where the only survivors were those who fought back with sharper tools and stronger empires. The threats contained in those environments would not be simple ones. Harsh weather and natural disasters either kill you or they don't, and once conquered—or adapted to— they lose their relevance. No, the only environmental factors that continued to matter were those that fought back, that countered new strategies with newer ones, that forced their enemies to scale ever-greater heights just to stay alive. Ultimately, the only enemy that mattered was an intelligent one.
And if the best toys do end up in the hands of those who've never forgotten that life itself is an act of war against intelligent opponents, what does that say about a race whose machines travel between the stars?
The argument was straightforward enough. It might even have been enough to carry the Historians to victory—if such debates were ever settled on the basic of logic, and if a bored population hadn't already awarded the game to Fermi on points. But the Historian paradigm was just too ugly, too Darwinian, for most people, and besides, no one really cared any more. Not even the Cassidy Survey's late-breaking discoveries changed much. So what if some dirtball at Ursae Majoris Eridani had an oxygen atmosphere? It was forty-three lightyears away, and it wasn't talking; and if you wanted flying chandeliers and alien messiahs, you could build them to order in Heaven. If you wanted testosterone and target practice you could choose an afterlife chock-full of nasty alien monsters with really bad aim. If the mere thought of an alien intelligence threatened your worldview, you could explore a virtual galaxy of empty real estate, ripe and waiting for any God-fearing earthly pilgrims who chanced by.
the past isn't all meanness. you win more with friends you trust than with slaves fighting for you.
even the greediest king needs to feed his soldiers. doing that is a lot easier when your kingdom is prosperous because your people have property rights and solid contracts.
the allies won the second world war because the nazis and the japanese killed or ostracized all of their weirdos. we just kept ours busy cracking their codes.
military conflict is only one aspect of history - and i'd say the bonds formed between soldiers matter more than the violence they inflict on each other.
technology matters - sure. but you need to account for the technology of trust.
a society that is strongly trusting of its internal members because they all have historical records of statements they've made about each other and their relationships, with measured accuracy and self-contradiction frequency - that civilization will be more supportive of its members and quicker to defeat its enemies. see https://github.com/neyer/dewDrop for more on that one.
look at game of thrones, and how powerful the stark family remains, even after they are all killed. they are loved, and that's a power that the lannisters totally underestimate, to their failure. even after Ned stark is gone, the love his supporters bore him causes them to stick together, while the tyrells and the lannisters squabble like a bunch of children. Coordinating group effort is really fucking hard. Love, trust, and friendship are way more cost effective than greed and selfishness.
love doesn't always win. it doesn't have to. it can wait patiently for greed to chase its tail into a corner and starve itself to death. if love does that, someone who loves it will come by and put it right.
look at how many corporations push for diversity - not because they care, but because even a sociopath sees the value in _being seen as_ honest and caring and good. once that becomes extremely difficult to fake, i'm sure it'll affect the entire culture.
That depends on the type of extraterrestrial life discovered.
There's a huge difference between us finding extraterrestrial life within our solar system (microbes on Mars, for example) and extraterrestrial life from outside the solar system finding us. The latter resolves the Fermi Paradox while the former heightens it.
Personally, I'd be really unsettled if scientists found evidence of microbial life on Mars. If life is so common that it can evolve independently twice in the same solar system, the 'Earth is a very rare and special thing' hypothesis is unlikely and there should have been many, many civilizations capable of interstellar travel - and the fact that we haven't encountered any would indicate something deeply weird is going on, most likely extinction events that keep societies like ours from ever reaching other stars.
Hell, it's already weird and disturbing that we're discovering so many exoplanets - including earth-sized exoplanets, including exoplanets in the liquid-water belt. Given the continued absence of alien life, that really shouldn't be happening.
There was an article in American Scientist a few years back about just how big space is, and how even if there are many intelligent species, they'll just never communicate due to the distances involved (barring exotic new physics). It was a bit sobering.
I think it's unlikely we will find any life on Mars, only the most optimistic folks hold any hope and there is nothing that even suggests it.
Whether or not interstellar travel is possible is an interesting question. We are talking about tremendous amounts of energy, time, and incredibly reliable devices. It may simply not be practical or possible. What seems must likely to me is we will sniff out pollution in an exoplanet atmosphere and then there will be lots of discussions and debates about whether or not it could naturally happen.
Lack of any radio communication sure is a puzzle though
Personally I think there are plenty of hints (going back to Viking lander experiments) that there is simple life on Mars. However, there's a cultural reluctance to consense on its existence, unless absolutely positively certain. Fears like yours, about what Martian life could imply about the uniqueness and longevity of our species, are part of the reason for the reluctance.
Note that if life is confirmed on Mars, it needn't have independently evolved. Simple life might be more common, even dormant in interplanetary space, than generally believed – seeding both Earth and Mars from earlier sources. (This is the theory of "panspermia".) Or, the same collision processes that brought the Martian-meteor with maybe-fossils to Earth, could have carried live spores between the planets – so a single microbial-evolution inside our solar system could reach multiple planets.
Of course then your Fermi fears still apply. ("If microbial life is so common, why are broadcasting/traveling civilizations rare?") But it would mean the 'great filter' applies after, not before, microbial life.
The existence of extinction events seem pretty likely to me, but I also think bad timing can explain a lot.
Humanity has had an extremely small window of time in which it could observe non-visual signals from outer space. Radio waves were only discovered in the 1800's. Likewise, it's only after we started broadcasting ourselves that another civilization is likely to be able to detect our existence.
We can detect a broad range of signals (but maybe not everything), but the signal types we know about are still bound by the speed of light. Maybe there's a civilization broadcasting towards us right now today, but we won't find out for another 3,000 years. Maybe our signals will reach someone in 10,000 years, and humanity will be extinct.
That might depend a lot on the kind of life found. Microorganisms vs intelligent beings capable of interstellar communication. On the other hand this would not change most people's religious perspectives where such have any opinion on life outside Earth this knowledge would simply be co-opted.
Science, on the other hand would receive a pretty good boost in funds I imagine.
If we found microbes and nothing more, the larger public would be underwhelmed. We've been trained to think 'alien = adorable/murderous creatures'.
The scientific establishment would be excited, of course, but I fail to see how that excitement would percolate down to the average Joe.
What's more interesting is the long-term impact on human society. We will see a gradual shift from human-centric narratives to more universal narratives
I think one of the best examples of this can be found in Sagan's book, Contact. The battle between the scientists, government, and religious fanatics is played out pretty well (even more exaggerated in the movie.)
But currently, It seems the current position on our finding prior evidence of microbial life has been met by much of the planet with a resounding "Meh."
The news would go nuts. It'll be all anyone talks about on social media and internet forums. Every comedian will have an alien joke. Books, movies, and games will be written about them. Talking about the aliens will carry the same sophistication as talking about the weather. Conspiracy theorists and the paranoid-delusional will confirm their worst fears and blame the government. The government will roll out a Department of Extraterrestrial Security and enforce more airport screenings. A lot of people would buy telescopes. Benedict Cumberbatch will act as one. Potheads will make first contact according to themselves. The stock market will go up (but I can't tell you why -- that's insider trading). People will do cosplay of them. People will draw porn with them. Xkcd will do a What-if and a comic or three. Python will add 'import aliens'. Silicon Valley will spawn at least 4 new startups related to speculative data machine learning about their browsing habits once we show them our internet. Colbert will do a special about being abducted and he never really wanted to leave anyway. John Stewart will claim that Fox News were aliens all along and this is the second wave. Fox News will find a way to blame Obama and John Boehner will finally shed his ninth skin.
Please. Fundamentalists would adapt their interpretation of their scripture to it like they have to every discovery and move on without skipping a beat. Their doctrine is unfalsifiable.
> Fundamentalists would adapt their interpretation of their scripture to it like they have to every discovery and move on without skipping a beat.
Many fundamentalists haven't adapted their interpretation of their scripture to account for the discovery that the Earth is over ~6,000 years old, or the discovery of biological evolution, so I'm not sure what "adapt their interpretation of their scripture to it like they have to every discovery" is supposed to mean.
There's no reason to believe it likely that religion is a constant elsewhere, though, since humanity is the only data point we have. Both assumptions are just projections of human bias, without any basis in fact.
There's no reason to believe it likely that religion is a constant elsewhere, though
Religion is a natural side-effect of our various cognitive biases (make inferences on too little data; assume the familiar; don't constantly try to invalidate what you already know).
These are all shortcuts that allow us to save either time or expensive brainpower. So you can only not get religion if those resources aren't constrained (to the point that wasting them has no impact on evolutionary fitness).
since humanity is the only data point we have. Both assumptions are just projections of human bias, without any basis in fact.
Inductive reasoning is fallacious. Always.
But in practice, it often still works well enough. At least if you put enough thought into designing your model.
Don't some theorize that Neanderthals had religion?
Humanity is also the only data point we have that intelligent life is possible. If you are going to theorize that it exists elsewhere you have to include everything else that is universal for humans or you are being intellectually dishonest.
You can't just pick and choose which universal things you think would exist elsewhere and which wouldn't.
>If you are going to theorize that it exists elsewhere you have to include everything else that is universal for humans or you are being intellectually dishonest.
No I don't, because I don't assume that, if life exists elsewhere, it necessarily evolved to resemble humanity in any particular way. Just because two genetically related hominid species from the same planet might have had religion doesn't mean a sentient starfish from Proxima Centauri probably does as well.
I'm not picking and choosing universal traits, i'm arguing that nothing we know about life, or humans, can be assumed to be universal. We don't know how normal or abnormal we are.
There is a theory that explains this, which says it is a by-product from a survivalist psychology in children.
"children who believe their elders when they say things like "don't go swimming in the river; there are alligators there who will eat you" are more likely to survive than children who insist on finding out for themselves. Such unquestioning belief has drawbacks, like occasionally believing something that isn't true, but these drawbacks are minor compared to the advantage of not dying young." - The God Delusion
If they are anything beyond basic microbes, we may very well find our notion of the nature of "life" challenged, especially if they're something construed as "intelligent". Imagine, say, discovering jellyfish for the first time...now consider finding intelligent jellyfish. Cognitive dissonance follows.
Agreed. We barely know how to communicate with the intelligent species on our own planet except those most closely related to us (the great apes); let alone those more distantly related (dolphins, crows). Imagine the extraterrestrial intelligence were a colony of slime-mold like creatures with a far slower metabolism than ours. I don't think humanity could even begin to interface with them, despite sharing traits with beings that are known to us.
Our new model of dolphin language is one in which dolphins can not only send and receive pictures of objects around them but can create entirely new sono-pictures simply by imagining what they want to communicate.
It's hard to have a conversation when common terms are deliberately misconstrued. Obviously & colloquially, when someone says "how would the world change if humans were given information X" we're discussing social human behavior, not (say) natural geologic change.
That is not obvious (no offense). When I think of "the world", I also think about things beyond "social human behavior". For instance, you could ask how contact with alien life could affect how we use this planet Earth (e.g. usage of natural resources, pollution, etc.). Conceivably, it could also change how we think about (non-human) life on this planet. One can talk about "the world" and talk about humans without necessarily being anthropocentric.
1. Intelligent life that had simply sent out colonizing platforms with technology similar to ours would mean that we would integrate them (assuming they just cyrogenically froze individuals and sent out thousands of seed ships):
a. Are the seeders capable of transmitting back, if so, is the home planet alive, how long until transmission reaches them, how long until the home planet can send out another seeder ship/support ship? Can we stop them from overpopulating the Earth? Should we stop them? b. Are the seeders virus ridden? Are we dangerous to them, War of the Worlds style? c. Are the seeders the only ones in the galaxy? Or are there warring factions? Are we aligning ourselves to the correct side?
2. Intelligent life superior in technological capabilities would:
a. Star Trek: Benevolent overseer
b. Battleship Earth: Enslaver
c. Independence Day: Eradicator of humans
Would we be able to do anything about it, we may be in a situation that Carl Sagan foresaw that we may have the technology, but not the materials to reach a location should a signal reach us saying: "Hey, we can solve all of your problems if you can get a ship to alpha centauri within the next 8 years with two double a batteries. If you do not reach here in 8 years, we will be eradicated by Sunorian Plague."