Every fictionalized scenario where intelligent alien life is discovered that I’m familiar with (and I admit I’m not a big expert in this field) has us humans interacting with those aliens in some way.
But what do you think would happen if we discovered indications that there is intelligent alien life, but it’s far away. Really far. Not only too far to travel, but too far to communicate with in our lifetimes. Let’s say it would take 10,000 years or more.
How do you think that knowledge would impact human civilization and thought? Would it be at first a fascinating discovery and then just kind of wear off, like a novelty? (And in this scenario, no additional efforts have discovered any signs of anything closer.)
Wouldn’t the indications be that intelligent alien life existed 10,000 years ago?
BTW, what kind of knowledge do we have about this alien life form(and how was it determined that they were intelligent)?
Yes, it would mean that they existed 10,000 years ago. I don’t know if that changes the question, but I guess at least in human history, 10,000 years isn’t such a massive amount of time that we can’t reasonably assume that there is still life there (as compared to billions of years, let’s say).
I’ll leave the type of knowledge answer to those more versed in science and science fiction, but let’s say we found some kind of communication signals that were clearly not random, but indicated that they were created by someone with intent. As to whether or not those signals could be deciphered as language, I’ll leave that up to you. Would it make a difference?
Sounds like a colossal triumph for whatever search technique was used to detect the signature, and invaluable information concerning the abundance, or lack thereof, and conditions for intelligent life (all those stars and planets within 10000 ly and only 1 positive-- that must mean something to astronomers, geologists, biologists, et al.)
As for how it would impact poets, theologians, futurists, etc., we can say it would be a fruitful source of inspiration that would raise people’s eyes towards the heavens.
Outside of the media generated notoriety surrounding the initial event, nothing would really happen in terms of social change because it would take ten thousand years to acknowledge that we received a transmission from them and another ten thousand years to receive the next one back.
{Bzzzzz}…11.0010010000111111011010101…{crackle} might get a different reaction than {buzz}…to serve man…{crackle}
I imagine the religious discussions would be wild and wooly, and that various religious passages would suddenly be retranslated to show that of course there are intelligent aliens out there. There would be mass panic from the ignorant, and craploads of fake news about secret threatening messages from the aliens.
We’d know that the aliens today would be either very advanced or dead, since 10,000 years is a lot of time for a civilized society.
But I don’t know it would make that big a difference. SF on TV and in the movies has probably convinced the common person that aliens exist, so it wouldn’t be a shock. Religion has been good at explaining away facts that get in the way of dogma, so they’d probably find some random passage in their holy books that they now claim predicted the aliens.
The Fundamentalists would deny everything. Or say it’s a signal from the devil.
The sequence will be as follows: we send a shout out into the universe, basically saying “here!”
20,000 years later, there’s a response: “where?”
The earth is alive with excitement- finally, a response! The best minds on earth are cooperating on the best possible response, and finally, it goes out. While more detailed than the first transmission, though, it still basically says “here!” In anticipation of the response, religious orders are restructuring themselves so they will be extant when the reply finally arrives. Civilizations rise and fall. In the millennium before the earliest response date, scientists and religious leaders curse the accident of the timing of their birth, as they will not last until the answer is received. Finally, as wars rage over the different expectations of the wisdom that will soon be imparted on our world, the reply is decoded: “oh, there”
I think that Carl Sagan got it mostly right in Contact, if you skip the wormhole part. Since it seems almost certain that the only way in which we could become aware of alien life is through radio transmissions, it also seems quite likely that the “message” would include a great deal of information about themselves. Therefore, it seems probable that we would learn much more than just “that there’s life out there.” Exactly how much more, who knows?
Actually that’s an interesting point: verfiication.
We Dopers would certainly demand to see a lot of evidence. Carl Sagan popularized the saying that “extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence”.
So a lot of people would be skeptical . Especially now that fake news has become a regular part of our lives.
Forty years ago, the famous WOW signal was totally believable, after being reported at a single location.
But today, we would suspect that it’s clickbait.
If we want proof of a real civilization out there, we would need a lot more evidence, and from many,many sources, in several different countries.
If we are going to respond to them I suggest we gild the lily a little bit. “Oh yeah, we saw you guys already, we were going to shout out but we were already busy creating a new star system to house the sentient pets we created. Check you in the 5D dark matter some time!”
Well, I already firmly believe this to be true. I think that the earth is an unremarkable planet surrounding a typical star in a galaxy that is similar to billions of others. Which is to say that the universe is teeming with civilizations similar to our own.
It fills me with a combination of awe, inspiration, frustration, and angst. But I still go to work on Mondays.
Yes, I believe the universe is teeming with life. But I wonder how many of our sci-fi movies and tv shows they’re getting… and thinking they’re factual newscasts. Are they arming to engage us in battle to the death, or warning others to stay the hell out of our quadrant?
None. I can’t conceive of a technology that would allow even the nearest stars to reconstruct our television broadcasts with enough fidelity to watch them, much less 10K LY out (and 10K years from now).
And that, in my estimation, is the most incredible element of the whole thing.
I mean, statistically, in the face of 100s of billions of opportunities, there’s a pretty good chance that there’s a bunch of other planets replete with their own complicated legacies, yet the universe is so incredibly, mind bogglingly big (cue Douglas Adams) that it’s functionally impossible to ever traverse between civilized worlds.
If we know that they’re intelligent, then that means that we’ve intercepted some sort of communication from them (which may or may not have been directed to us, but it’s from them). So we’d be working very hard to understand that communication. And most circumstances that would lead to us intercepting one communication would lead to us intercepting many. So we’d have have lots of communications to interpret (which would both make the interpretation easier, and mean more once we had interpreted them).
Isosleepy, why would either civilization send only one message at a time before waiting for the reply? If we were deliberately sending a message to a civilization millennia away, we’d say as much as we could think of saying, and as new things to say came up, we’d say them, too. What you propose would be like sending a postal letter to someone saying just “Hi, how are you?”, and then waiting for their reply. That makes sense for low-latency communications like a phone call, but not for high-latency like even mail, and certainly not for 10,000 years of latency.
