What will do you will happen to our culture and our thinking if we discover that there are life in outer-space?
Let’s quantify the question a bit. Here are some cases that come to me:
a) That “life” we discover are on planets inhospitable to us, and are on a very primitive level. I think this will just be just a dot on the radar for the media for a while, and we’ll move on to more pressing and interesting things. For the scientific community it may redouble their effort to find other kind of life.
b) We found intelligent life, but perhaps in a distant galaxy, or a distant part of our galaxy.
c) We found intelligent life, and they are like “next door”, perhaps within 4 to 10 LY within our system. I got a feeling that suddenly space exploration and warfare is right back on the menu if this is such the case.
I think the biggest impact will be sociological.
Every religion on Earth is going to go absolutely bonkers.
I can only imagine what Vatican Cthulu is going to say. O.o
I seriously doubt the religions of the world will just roll over and die, no more likely you would see a mass migration of missionaries to try and “spread the word” to our new neighbors.
Little do they know…religious conversion on their world involves eating the messenger.
<where is the knife and fork smiley when you need it>
How much did other allegedly profound milestones affect us? The moon landing was supposed to be a pivotal point in history, now it’s a just another Wikipedia page.
I think that the discovery of life on extrasolar planets, or the discovery of non-intelligent life on solar planets, will be a big fuss at the time, and then will shortly be less important than the moon landing. The Apollo missions did give us our current theory of lunar formation, so a few scientists in esoteric areas care. The rest of us - “meh”! Extra-terrestrial life will probably have the same impact.
As long as the life form is primitive or very distant, nothing more than rejiggering the religious philosophy will take place.
Any hint of alien forms showing up here on earth or demonstrating the potential will cause riots and anarchy. The “War of the Worlds” was an indication. That was very short lived. Had the believe gone on for days and been reinforced, all hell would break loose. Of course there will always be primitive societies that proceed to harvest the cow dung without losing a beat.
I welcome an alien landing just so I can experience it.
(a) would be a major, major scientific discovery. After the initial splash, I think the effects would continue to shift our culture gently in countless ways for generations to come. A second data point for that fourth term of the Drake Equation goes a fair ways to establishing that we are not alone in the universe. Maybe it’s only bacteria and algae (or the equivalent) on Planet X, but that makes the supposition of the Andromeda Federation (or equivalent) much more plausible, I think.
(b) seems unlikely. I don’t know how we’d identify a distant civilization, unless they happen to have deliberately broadcast their presence in a way we can recognize. Which seems pretty unlikely.
(c) also seems unlikely just because “next door” for us represents such a tiny fraction of the universe. But it would constitute the most important event in human history, bar none. It would cause a dramatic reassessment of all our most traditional (nations, “races,” religions) structures and ways of thinking about ourselves. The changes I imagine taking generations after (a) in this case would take place largely within one.
Apart from the scientific implications, I suspect that unless actual contact ensues it will not cause any more social upheaval than the discovery of extrasolar planets did.
I just hope that whichever side has the better technology exercises more restraint than the Western world did upon discovering the Americas.
I agree that every religion on earth will go crazy, especially if there is an intelligent species we can talk to.
There will be a whole new boatload of conspiracy theories, either that we planted the life to gin up more funding for science, or that they planted life on earth and plan to make us their slaves.
I don’t see how it would affect world religons at all. They already operate on the basis of actively ignoring real facts in favor of magical ideas made up by folks we’d view as little more than primitive tribesmen were we to meet them.
The OP’s mooted discoveries would just be more real facts to be ignored because they don’t fit the received wisdom magical worldview. Now the Scientologists might actively incorporate these discoveries into their next version, but the others will simply pretend something somewhere between *it doesn’t exist *and it doesn’t matter.
Why will they go crazy? Are there religions that say that the only beings that exist are on this planet? I would have thought it would be more power to their god’s elbow: more (potential) worshippers.
This. Religions are very good at protecting their beliefs, no matter how they fly in the face of facts. They will find a way to make this discovery “proof” that their beliefs are correct. And oh yes, there will be claims that Nostradamus predicted this, and the Mayans knew the exact date.
More or less, or at least implicitly, yes. Earth and humanity, and perhaps a subset thereof, are the centerpiece of creation for most theists.
No doubt there will be spin, but that doesn’t mean they can be unscathed. A worldview that admits of an entirely separate and different intelligent race on an entirely different planet will just have a profoundly different feel for a lot of people. There can’t be a centerpiece of creation in this universe.
Any life (even “non intelligent”) will be huge. The question of whether earth contains the only lifeforms in the universe will finally be answered.
Sales of “Andromeda Strain” will go through the ceiling.
Erik Van Daniken (sp ?) and the like will (re) rise to superstardom.
SETI will receive more government money than the space program.
Intelligent life will be huge but will cause mass panic.
The para-military types (Cheney, et al) will stir up huge debate with the scientific community as to whether we should attempt to contact back.
Sales of “War of the Worlds”, “Independence Day”, “District 9”, “Contact”, “Alien” trilogy (except #3 ;-), and all variations of the “Star Trek” series will go through the ceiling.
SETI will receive more money from all nations of the world than it will know what to do with (and all donors will expect results !).
The same amounts of money will be spent toward developing new, lightyear distance, long range weaponry to defend against an attack as well as RF emission “containment” so as not to inadvertently “broadcast” our existence (until the debate is settled).
Why not? The church was pretty worried when Galileo started spouting some facts for the earth moving around the sun. I didn’t see the rewriting of Genesis along with that apology for the whole house arrest thing they issued to him in 1976.
I imagine alien life will just be seen as the other. It won’t be long before godhatesthegrays.com will be launched.
Which isn’t to say that it won’t change the minds of some religious people. I just can imagine religious doctrine shifting all that much.
If we discover lifeforms that aren’t intelligent enough for us to communicate with, I suspect some will try to find a way to use them to our advantage. Research them, dissect them, experiment on them, maybe attempt to colonize their planet as a bonus, if it’s feasible. I’m sure opposition would also exist. It would be another issue for people to violently disagree over.
This one would have to be something like primitive lifeforms on one of Saturn’s moons, or elsewhere in the solar system, or on a comet, or something (anything else is too far away to be able to detect in any useful way)
This wouldn’t be just a dot on the radar, it would be the scientific discovery of the century, or more, and would kick off a significant research effort. One of the outcomes would be insight into the origins of life on Earth (if the lifeforms are not related to us, it means life could be a very common phenomenon in the universe - if they are related, it means life could have originated elsewhere). Either way, it’s going to be very interesting and stimulating to the scientific community, and public.
This would have to be in the form of some artifact (‘artifact’ to include received transmissions), which will be highly interesting, but probably tantalising, as it will be limited by the content of whatever we find or receive (the distances are too great for two-way communication, or for us to go there).
I don’t think exploration will be on the cards. Even 4LY is a very, very long way, beyond our capability now, and probably ever, to traverse (I realise this sounds pessimistic, but optimism about how this could be achieved is usually either pure fantasy, or ignores some vital detail).
Governments will probably get paranoid about the possibility of warfare, despite that it’s an incredibly unlikely outcome.
Dialogue is possible with our new-found neighbours (assuming they’re interested, which I think is likely). Governments may try hard to maintain control of this dialogue.
Lots of interesting potential for a broad range of different research disciplines - basically, it should at the very least double the amount of information in any currently-published domain.
Some religions will react badly, some will say they always knew it would happen. If the aliens have something similar to religion(s) themselves, there will be endless debate and discussion about whether they are similar, compatible, right, wrong, etc.
This could be a fairly rich field of inquiry for anthropologists and sociologists outside of religious membership - because of the possibility to investigate what aspects of consciousness might be able to be generalised, and which might be unique.
