Or would any dramatic change to our ‘world-view’, completely damage our collective psyche(Assuming we have one!), and social framework?
For a hypothetical scenario, say obviously alien craft appeared simultaneously over all our capital cities, or maybe substitute the alien craft for an image of the Holy Mother admonishing us all, or a rather displeased looking Zeus.
In this age of rapid information technology, it would be difficult preventing news of such events reaching the masses,and even more difficult to deny.
Would our 21st century minds be able to deal with such revelatory experiences, and transform correspondingly, or would these incidents precipitate panic and anarchy?
Our 21st century minds are exactly the same minds that we’ve always possessed as homo sapiens. Humans would adapt to circumstances as they always have done, notwithstanding any initial panics, etc.
Without a doubt. People will use any excuse to lose control and go nuts.
Most people seem to have extremely rigid views of what IS, what is possible, what the Universe is like, how things should be. A major “kick over the apple cart” moment is going to cause many of these people to lose their balance and act inappropriately.
Even if it was as simple a First Contact with an Alien Civilization, I would bet you good money that this board would be flooded with people asking “Well if Aliens exist, why can’t superpowers/angels/fairies/ghosts/whatever exist too?”. Why? Because their fixed view of the world has been proven wrong, and now they need to go back out and explore the boundaries in order to create a new view of the world.
Then there’s FEAR. Fear drives hatred, racism, xenophobia. It drives the mobs in African burning “witches”, it drives human society. Having an alien (read: Unknown) race show up at our doorstep unannounced is the biggest fear inducing event possible. Even bigger that “The entire world is going to End”. Why? Because if an asteroid were coming to destroy the world, we all know what is going to happen, we’re all going to die. But when the aliens show up, we have no idea what is going to happen. They could eat us, they could enslave us, they could do anything. And they’re not like us.
I’m not too sure I buy that. If you could show a cinema audience watching a Buster Keaton movie, Independence Day or The Evil Dead, I reckon there would be chaos.
It wasn’t a criticism. I saw the “guest” tag, and thought maybe you weren’t familiar with the different forums here. This one is for questions with factual answers. You might get some more interesting input in another forum.
I’d guess that with a dramatic scenario like that, it would be chaotic, and all abuzz with our network of communications trying to make sense of it all.
Yet, here is a recent article about the Arctic ice cap melting for the first time in recorded history:
This, for the past week, has been troubling to my mind, a huge news story. But, I’m not seeing it at all as a front page headline. In day to day life, no one is talking about it around the water cooler, yet it is very important. Not as dramatic as a spaceship landing, but important as to what’s happening to this planet.
And, ya know, if their are intellegent beings outside these parts, who’s to say they haven’t observed us, and are shaking their outsized brainiac heads: “Well, they don’t seem to care that their planet is changing like that, even posted up on their communication systems… Piece a cake for a landing.”
No, not really, but I see it the other way around.
Foolish Humans, assuming that there is no long term climate change. Their science is obviously sufficiently advanced to tell them this. They can see that their planet has been through Ice Ages, has had wildly fluctuating ocean levels, and even in the recent past, has had periods of alternating cooling and warming lasting several hundred years at a crack. Why are they so mystified and terrified at the idea that their world is not always as they see it right now?
A (small) big one that might happen soon enough is that the current Martian lander will detect some type of life on Mars. The early indication will be interesting but it might take a while to prove for certainty. It could could have an interesting impact on some religions including Christian creationism. The chances are decent enough and it would be interesting enough to watch people try to segregate life on Mars with everything that has happened on the Earth.
Personally, I wouldn’t be all that surprised–I’d figure that there’s a good possibility that any life on Mars probably originated from Earth (or possibly vice-versa).
nah…that’s not such a big one. We’ve done bigger ones already.
Observing a microbe on Mars would be less traumatic than Gallileo and Copernicus observing the solar system. Most people today expect to eventually find life out there somewhere…but nobody back then expected to find that the earth isn’t the center of things.
