How do you think the 1st alien encounter would go?

XSEAN · June 16, 2018, 10:14:14 AM

Not hostile like Independence day

FatherlyNick - fuck putin · June 16, 2018, 12:06:51 PM

I'm hoping for something peaceful but something tells me it'll be like half life.

Doctor Doom · June 16, 2018, 12:12:59 PM

We'd somehow find a way to fuck them.

Spartan · June 16, 2018, 12:22:33 PM

we'd dab on 'em

Я люблю наркотики · June 16, 2018, 12:24:37 PM

Super Irish · June 16, 2018, 01:32:06 PM

I kinda doubt the government(s) announcing it, unless it was some sort of public spectacle that couldn't be hidden.

Probably pretty bad first reaction. There's no telling what their form of communication would be like, and if they arrived here by any means at all, that would put them at leagues ahead of us in intelligence and technology, considering getting anywhere outside of the local systems takes us aaaaages. We'd quickly become something to investigate and study, if we aren't edible or immediately violent towards them.

If it's something akin to discovering Bacteria or single celled organisms on the moons of Titan or Io (?), or fossilised shit on Mars there'd be some hype/buzzfeed articles in the public, massive debates in the science and religious communities, and not much else.

Ásgeirr · June 16, 2018, 02:15:59 PM

Quote from: FatherlyNick on June 16, 2018, 12:06:51 PM

I'm hoping for something peaceful but something tells me it'll be like half life.

I for one accept our new overlords

Spoiler

Verbatim · June 16, 2018, 02:20:37 PM

i'm just gonna hope that nothing else is out there

have you ever thought about why abiogenesis only happened a single time on our planet in 4 billion years

Super Irish · June 16, 2018, 02:45:57 PM

Quote from: Verbatim on June 16, 2018, 02:20:37 PM

Have you ever thought about why abiogenesis only happened a single time on our planet in 4 billion years

It's more likely that it happened several times, but only one was around long enough and evolved beyond single celled organisms/amino acid chains and just beat the rest. Geological record's a bit shit for hard evidence, and our only evidence supporting that it happened once is us... so it's not solid either way.

Iirc some tests showed that simple amino acids could be built in some primordial sea and the addition of lightning or asteroid inpacts to generate the heat to get them to combine into other things was theoretically possible (both of which were as common back then as today, if not more).

And this was before Geologists did deep-sea surveys and discovered little "islands" of life around undersea thermal vents.

Don't get me wrong here it was a fucking stroke of luck with an astronomical amount of decimal places for the statistical likelihood of life on Earth starting and then getting this far, but it's not 0.

Korra · June 16, 2018, 03:24:11 PM

Planetary glassing

MyNameIsCharlie · June 16, 2018, 04:30:01 PM

Report to the ship immediately

Jono · June 16, 2018, 04:35:29 PM

Like that scene in Mars Attacks when a dove causes a war

FatherlyNick - fuck putin · June 16, 2018, 06:38:40 PM

Someone link the SC close encounters video pls or a screen cap of it.

DAS B00T x2 · June 16, 2018, 07:22:51 PM

Just like it did in Roswell.

Batch · June 16, 2018, 07:44:13 PM

I like to think that we're the first to attain space travel.

Then we'd invade them for space oil.

BaconShelf · June 17, 2018, 04:40:30 AM

Alien contact would likely be using radio telescopes to detect high IR emissions around an extrasolar planet or star, or even the tell tale signs of a braking burn being conducted by a generation vessel. As a result, we'd have decades to communicate and/ or prepare any kind of defense if necessary.

However, with the timeline of the universe, it's more likely that any alien civilisations we encounter would be "apes or angels" compared to us - IE prehistoric civilisations that haven't even invented language, or kardashev-III civilisations that are constructing matrioshka brains powered by dyson swarms to run mass simulations. If a Type II or III civilisation existed in this galaxy, we would have the tell tale signs of Dyson Swarm construction all around us or rather, they would already be here and all the stars in our stellar neighbourhood would be exploited already just due to the sheer unlikliness that a civilisation existing within the same general period of time as ours(give or take a few million years) is roughly on par with us. I'm personally fonder of the idea that humans are in fact one of if not the first major technological civilisations in the observable universe.

Anyway so yeah. First contact would be kinda shit. You'd recieve a message that is more or less incomprehensible, then have to wait years or decades to get a response if you do manage to message back if the civilisation is around a nearby star. If the message is a ship that's already en route to Sol system and has been for hundreds of years....

Or we just get struck by an RKV one day without warning and the earth's crust is reduced to lava.

BaconShelf · June 17, 2018, 04:46:06 AM

Quote from: Doug.al on June 16, 2018, 02:45:57 PM

Quote from: Verbatim on June 16, 2018, 02:20:37 PM
Have you ever thought about why abiogenesis only happened a single time on our planet in 4 billion years

It's more likely that it happened several times, but only one was around long enough and evolved beyond single celled organisms/amino acid chains and just beat the rest. Geological record's a bit shit for hard evidence, and our only evidence supporting that it happened once is us... so it's not solid either way.

Iirc some tests showed that simple amino acids could be built in some primordial sea and the addition of lightning or asteroid inpacts to generate the heat to get them to combine into other things was theoretically possible (both of which were as common back then as today, if not more).

And this was before Geologists did deep-sea surveys and discovered little "islands" of life around undersea thermal vents.

Don't get me wrong here it was a fucking stroke of luck with an astronomical amount of decimal places for the statistical likelihood of life on Earth starting and then getting this far, but it's not 0.

There's also the idea of panspermia, which has some attractiveness. Microbial life evolved on Mars or Venus and then, due to asteroid impacts, matter with that life was ejected into space and later found its way to Earth. It's a big issue because a lot of people think that we need to stay off Mars because if life does exist underground, human contamination could wipe it out or otherwise mess with it.

Super Irish · June 17, 2018, 09:16:19 AM

Quote from: BaconShelf on June 17, 2018, 04:40:30 AM

Alien contact would likely be using radio telescopes to detect high IR emissions around an extrasolar planet or star, or even the tell tale signs of a braking burn being conducted by a generation vessel. As a result, we'd have decades to communicate and/ or prepare any kind of defense if necessary.

I've always wondered about this. Because of the distances and the "limitation" being the speed of light, there's gonna be always a massive time lag behind what we're seeing and what's actually there now over there.

E.g. Life started on Earth approx. 4Ga. Anything looking at Earth from that distance is just gonna see a rocky mass, with specrtral graphs(?) showing a primitive atmosphere. At this point, Mars or Venus would look like better candidates for intelligent life than Earth would.

Say if life takes 4.1-2Ga to get to a Type III civ where their influences are observable from the galaxy, with +/- 1Ga to account for an early turbulent and chaotic Universe, we can only look as far back as 8-10Ga back to observe something, which would already be out of date the second we see it.

The odds of life starting out anywhere elsewhere I think is pretty high, and the c constant I think explains the Fermi paradox, but then at the same time it works against us finding any during Earth's life's existence for the same reason (short of breaking the laws of physics).

Am I making sense? Any life that gets far enough to look outside its planet is only going to see things that appear dead or primordial, but at the same time another life is seeing the same thing in their scopes.

That kinda sucks.

BaconShelf · June 17, 2018, 09:57:07 AM

Quote from: Doug.al on June 17, 2018, 09:16:19 AM

Quote from: BaconShelf on June 17, 2018, 04:40:30 AM
Alien contact would likely be using radio telescopes to detect high IR emissions around an extrasolar planet or star, or even the tell tale signs of a braking burn being conducted by a generation vessel. As a result, we'd have decades to communicate and/ or prepare any kind of defense if necessary.

I've always wondered about this. Because of the distances and the "limitation" being the speed of light, there's gonna be always a massive time lag behind what we're seeing and what's actually there now over there.

E.g. Life started on Earth approx. 4Ga. Anything looking at Earth from that distance is just gonna see a rocky mass, with specrtral graphs(?) showing a primitive atmosphere. At this point, Mars or Venus would look like better candidates for intelligent life than Earth would.

Say if life takes 4.1-2Ga to get to a Type III civ where their influences are observable from the galaxy, with +/- 1Ga to account for an early turbulent and chaotic Universe, we can only look as far back as 8-10Ga back to observe something, which would already be out of date the second we see it.

The odds of life starting out anywhere elsewhere I think is pretty high, and the c constant I think explains the Fermi paradox, but then at the same time it works against us finding any during Earth's life's existence for the same reason (short of breaking the laws of physics).

Am I making sense? Any life that gets far enough to look outside its planet is only going to see things that appear dead or primordial, but at the same time another life is seeing the same thing in their scopes.

That kinda sucks.

Put it into perspective. The nearest galaxies are hundreds of thousands to a few million light years away. The Milky way is 100kly in diameter, and the observable universe is 90-ish Gly across.

Anyone who would even be looking at Sol closely enough to be able to even gain an idea as to if this planet even exists or not would have to be in our galaxy, minimum, and even then it would have to be somewhere on the near side as light passing through the Zone of Avoidance in the core is blocked by the core.

So this means that in practical terms, any aliens that would be capable of detecting us would have to be less than 100,000ly away from us. Life has been affecting our planet drastically for hundreds of millions, if not billions of years (the presence of oxygen in our atmosphere is a big giveaway) - to put this in perspective, the light from the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs passed by andromeda about 60 million years ago.

Unless a civilisation is out there building telescopes the size of galaxies, it's unlikely anyone far enough away like the timeframe you're describing is looking at us.

Or in other words, we can see andromeda as it was 2m years ago, but we can barely make out individual stars as anything more than a blur.

MarKhan · June 17, 2018, 10:33:56 AM

We already could encounter them, we just don't remember.

Super Irish · June 17, 2018, 10:52:24 AM

Quote from: BaconShelf on June 17, 2018, 09:57:07 AM

Unless a civilisation is out there building telescopes the size of galaxies, it's unlikely anyone far enough away like the timeframe you're describing is looking at us.

Or in other words, we can see andromeda as it was 2m years ago, but we can barely make out individual stars as anything more than a blur.

Right so, I wasn't really sure how far we can actually see with telescopes but hearing about exoplanets x Lightyears away had me thinking about it. We're (and virtually anyone else even close to our level of tech) is essentially blind to anything specific outside our area.

That's put a bit of a dampener on things even more that I think about it. We're blind now, and even at best cases we'd be out of date anyway. Ah well.