So what will happen when intelligent life is discovered?

I can see the rest of my 401k circle the drain because some alien credit status goes in the toilet....

 

There is no doubt in my mind that which people laugh at and say impossible can be very probable such as life on gas giants, life on planets we cannot fathom life to be on. Those that can't fathom warping space or faster than light speed, who knows what we'll discover in the next 100 years? It was Einstein who came up with so much of what we deem as the ultimate and look how long it took our race to to develop a mind like his or Stephen Hawking's for that matter.

I think for some they will want and look for reasons to go to war or a new financial market, but I also believe they will be so far away that all we will really have for awhile is radio communication, that will drive us to develop a true space program to "bridge the gulf" that separates us.

Then for some, even IF we do not find life but a planet somewhat capable of sustaining us, I could see becoming a commercial race to lay claim to the "mineral rights", just as there was a race to the "Americas". There will be governments and private enterprises racing for the fastest way to travel there.

It's fun to think and dream of the possibilities, no matter how improbable or "impossible", because, in my mind that is what inspires progress.

Now I do have a question, all this with Keppler 22b has me wondering if this planet is 600 light years away how did we get there so fast?

Since I was a kid I have always thought, what if the human race came to this planet from another that was dying? What if we are the result of a few "of course ships" that crash landed here and found it habitable. The ships were destroyed, the "Gods" others from the "mother" planet using us as an experiment after we had declined their efforts to "bring us home".

Just as it is impossible for our mind to grasp infinity or eternity, it is impossible for us to truly grasp the true past of our entire planet, we have only what we "believe we can prove" as references to go by. If we discover life on other worlds, what we have "believed and swore to be true and concrete" may be shaken to the very foundation as they are proven wrong.

What we believe NOW, as crazy as it sounds maybe 100+years from now proven to all be nothing more than building blocks for further "truths and facts" of science. Much like we look at the Romans and Greeks and ancient Chinese sciences as building blocks and have proven some of their "truths" to be wrong. It was just a blink in Earth's life that we discovered we were not the "center of the universe", that we actually revolved around the sun. We haven't TRULY been able to prove the existence of of other planets for an extremely short period of our entire history. Looking back even just in the 1900's there were factions truly believing there was life on Mars or Venus. And as for Mars, if we were advanced and observed Mars for centuries seeing wars and destruction and then they sent a probe here, having seen their "nature" of hatred and wars and destruction, and we somehow were able to direct without their knowledge where the probe landed and we set it down in the Sahara or Mojave or even the Antarctic, where their "rover" could not possibly find any source of life except maybe microbial would we not do it? Or would we want to run the risk of that "hatred and prejudice" infiltrate our society that advanced beyond wars and hatreds millennia ago? Part of me says we'd jump at the chance, part of me believes we'd say we want no part of it and lead them to believe there was no life here in hopes they would leave us alone, much like we observed they did to their Moon.

Anyway, that's my essay on this topic...lol.
--- merged: Dec 6, 2011 1:34 PM ---

3rd Rock From the Sun, when Dick tells Mary, "and Dennis Rodman?"

"He's one of us."

 

We will kill them out of fear or they will kill us because we are insignificant to them.

 

I've thought something similar too. Humans are a genetic experiment that either got out of hand, lost its "funding" or there just aren't quite enough of us yet for harvesting. Sightings of UFOs are probably their idiot teenagers that just get too close and are seen. Just imagine an alien boss monitoring our news channels and calling an underling into their office and pointing at the screen and asking if the underling's kids used the spaceship last night.

Didn't they use that joke in Men in Black as well?​

 

Love the humor.

Yes they did. I believe one of the agents got tickets to the "game" from him or so they stated it. Rodman back in the day was an easy target for that type of humor.

 

I'm with Pan, the seer size of the universe dictates that there MUST be life "as we know it" somewhere. However, the human race simply isn't ready for first contact, our society would crumble one way or another. Like a kid finding his dad's loaded gun, nothing good could possibly come out of it. With any luck, we would be coddled and eased into the galactic community like in "Contact." But it could just as easily be an extermination scenario like in all the other alien invasion movies. Peace is one thing that ultra-advanced civilizations may embrace, but do you consider it war when you put out ant & roach baits?

Even if we found proof of life elsewhere, the ramifications would run pretty deep. Plenty of our earthly beliefs revolve around humanity being alone and created in "god's" image.

 

Of course we are using our own definition of intelligence. It may be something other than what we perceive.

 

I can see us killing out of fear or governments hiding the truth for fear of what the economies and religions would do, but I have a hard time believing they would destroy us unless they truly saw us as an immediate threat. I could see them isolating us making us a quarantined area of space, but destroying us? I just don't see it.
--- merged: Dec 6, 2011 4:20 PM ---

I don't know if that is a good thing for you to admit or not.....lol

 

I tend to agree with the pessimist view of humanity and discovery of a new species/planet will follow the Avatar model of "how can we exploit this?"

 

Oh, I think they have the same outcome: the natives/residents get decimated in various ways from outright murder to disease; the resources get plundered and sent back to the home world/old country.

As Spike said, "The history of the world isn't people making friends; you had better weapons and you massacred them. End of story."

 

That's assuming that being 100's of years ahead of us, they still have the same hatreds and prejudices that we have today towards our own people. I would tend to believe a planet that makes it that far has come to be peaceful and would not engage us unless we were a threat to them. We'd be more like a race they may hope gets through where we are. The difference between the New World (I'm assuming you mean the Americas and the colonization) is that we came from a Europe that was seemingly always at war, so we did take it out on the peaceful Indians, unfortunately. I just don't see a race that can make intergalactic or intersolar system travel possible, still carry that with them. A huge difference between an ocean and travelling years across space to get somewhere. I hope.

 

Never saw Avatar. Probably should.

 

Spike speaks the truth.
I hope the Solenoid Robots visit us.
Superman too. I would welcome him.

Evaderum, thanks for the link in post #11

 

Islam states nothing in contradiction with the existence of alien life.

 

uh, the 'peaceful Indians'? There were some serious warfare ongoing between various tribes, not to mention slavery of captives taken in war. It's easy to think of the indigenous tribes as one homogeneous unit that was colonized, but the facts don't support that.

 

............. because theres bugger all here of it on Earth!

 

We all know the aliens aren't from Switzerland, but are from France, and they consume mass quantities.