ALIEN. Its discovery and what it may mean for us.

[HJ1an]

I discussed this in the other forum, but seems like people were more focused on the 'it's not aliens' part than anything else. So I'll try again here.

Firstly - I don't care if it's aliens or what they might do to us (ie invasion or whatever) since it's physcially not possible. What I'm INTERESTED in however, is that how a discovery of alien civilization may CHANGE OURSELVES, politically, racially, and whatever else-ly.

Firstly, I am hopeful that it will make people see us as one, rather than groups of people like human A vs. human B, and lead to better understanding of one another. Politically, it would be Earth vs. Aliens, rather than country vs. country. Scientifically and technologically, it would lead us to speed up tech and space fairing advancements.

Or, at least, hopefully it would lead to that. Because we all know it might not. So, discussion... if a discovery of alien civ Out There, how will the - humans, ourselves - change. Better or worse?

[KL-666]

Humans thrive on extinguishing anything that is a bit different. We have done the Neanderthalers and the natives of the Americas, Australia and New Zealand. We are doing animals at the moment. And we will do the aliens.

Kind regards, Vincent

[HJ1an]

Or the aliens will do it to us. But that's assuming physically we can reach them. Which I think would not be possible at this time. If they could reach us our tech level would be no match for them anyway, we'd be dead before we even know we're being attacked by them.

However, if we detect signs of civilizations outside of Earth, this "survival mode" our species have will kick in. The point of my post is this - when we are just us, there's you vs. me. But once we know that there's others outside of us, although they are unreachable currently, then it's us vs. them. It is this 'us vs. them' instinct that will change us for ourselves, but, for better or worse?

[jwocky]

Lets for a moment assume, we would be able to reach each other. Now what are the chances the aliens are as split up in groups and factions and nations as we are. There is some cruel logic in this kind of development dynamics. Resources are scarce, single individuals have no chance to get to them, so they form groups but then groups fight for those resources. The other direction of the same stream is, groups living in different areas develop different things. Not only goods, technology but also foods, music, traditions, in short cultures and the answer to this difference is trade in many cases. Which, at least as far as permanent fertile primates are involved, leads to mingling. Actually, as many cultures ended their existence as discrete circles by merging with others than there were cultures destroyed. And even more than both together, cultures just had reached the end of a cultural life cycle and withered. Which of course meant, the people in those cultures went elsewhere and became part of other new cultures or the land, bare of a culture and nation to defend it, was taken over without much ado, including the people. So between trade and war and sex, well what would happen if we would meet another race, alien to us, that has a similair development stream in the forming of their own cultures? I don't think the borders would be so clear defined. Can't take long till one of the extremer groups on our planet finds, they have a lot in common with an alien group and allies with them against other alien or human groups. There is no thing like race loyalty, that is only what professional racists want to make us believe. So in the end it will be a game for profit and everybody allies with any group offering the biggest profit, alien or human.

[HJ1an]

I realize that I wrote the post without knowing what had happened in Paris, and then after knowing, suddenly the outlet is different again. These are the people always pushing civilizations to go backwards, while others, like me, are looking forward for people to get out of this mess.

Profiteering, and commonality with aliens would be kind of hard. Who knows, they speak the same language - capitalism - lol. But at best it's like speaking to a dog, a worse it's like trying to communicate with an ant. Then there is that X light-years in between, etc. I would rather not think so far ahead, something along the first 20 years in a human timeline of discovery that we are not 'alone' in this universe, to see what it would do to the human civilization. The recent news just makes it look like we are going to implode before we can expand to space..

[jwocky]

Well, that would mean, we can conclude on the existence of other intelligent species out there, but we exclude the possibility of actual contact from the discussion. And since the base for a conclusion on alien life would be a mathimatical one and people are in my experience scared by math even more than by war, pandemincs, serial killers, flood, horror movies and the IRS, there is a chance, nobody want to hear the math in the first place.

[legoboyvdlp]

Run!
Math!
Just kidding. I love math. I don't know why. I hate fractions.
9X + 24 = 3X + 72 type things are so fun.
I do hate boring worksheets, however.
One is fun. A hundred is not.

[jwocky]

So, lets do this then:

The number of stars in the Milky Way is roughly 100 billion. Since there are more galaxies, we know the number of stars in the universe is higher.

For every star, we can apostulate, that the energy impact on a target is a function of the distance at any given time t.

The average time of peptide chain reactions is aboutish 3 seconds.

The number of peptide reactions happening at the same time is a function of the available number of C-atoms

So ...

number_of_stars * number_of_planets_avg_inhabitable * number_parallel_rections = number_of chain_reactions/time_unit
The only question is, how long it takes to bring these numbers beyond the probability of a working long chained molecule like DNA (I read something of 1:10^40. Since we are already at about 0.33^9/second, what do you think?

[IAHM-COL]

[HJ1an]

I'm wonder just how many dead civilizations are Out There, having imploded because they are too stupid to work out their problems





..personally, I think life is abundant in the universe. We just can't see it.

The problem is intelligent life, would be tricky. Finding one next to Earth would be like a winning Galactic jackpot. Once we find intelligent life (our tools for finding it are getting better everyday), I hope we transform ourselves for the better. That is why I am so hoping we find signs of one too, even a dead one would be fine. Let's not get into what they would look like, or if they even have DNA... that's just unimaginable currently since we only work from one data point - ourselves - as reference.

I love math.

Math is actually fun. I only found this out when I am well in my 20s. I blame my teachers for making it so horrible at school ( I used to FEAR math clsas).