So…let’s say that Mars had been just like earth – teeming with life, millions of species. And in fact, it has a sentient species, whose technological progress closely mirrors that of Homo sapiens. The wealth distribution and resources of their world also happen to be very similar to ours*.
Humans win the space race and are the first to land a manned mission on the other planet. But the martians were not far behind.
So, what I was thinking about was:
When would we become aware that Mars was inhabited? At the point where they started using radio?
Leading on from 1, what effect would it have had on human history?
How would we handle things going forward? Presumably communication would be very simple, but transporting anything would still be a big undertaking.
I’ll throw down my own 2c but I stumbled straight away on 1, so I’ll let some other people respond first
Obviously this is extremely unlikely. But for the purpose of the hypothetical, assume that no-one notices how unlikely a scenario this is.
I wouldn’t count on that. We’ve been studying cetaceans of various sorts for decades now, and are no closer to decoding their communications than we ever were (yes I know a lot of people argue against their utterances as constituting language as we humans define it, but they still serve as an illustrative example). It’s more likely that our values and priorities would be mostly if not completely incomprehensible to each other even assuming that progress could be made on the language front.
There’s a possibility we would have learned about Mars’s residents as early as the 17th or 18th century depending on the structures they built and the strength of our telescopes. From there, history would be radically different from what it is now. I envision that our technological output would have sped up as the need was there to do so. It’s possible we could start attempting to communicate with them with the advent of radio. Could that have happened in the 19th century?
Could we have manned flight by the turn of the 20th century? Could we have visited them by the 1960s? All possible. But even if technology hadn’t sped up, our priorities would have. Certainly by now we’d have had one manned visit.
Contact would’ve devastated one or both worlds with disease. Invasive species would be a problem too. Even something as innocuous as an alien mold could be really bad news.
Between this and significant language and culture gap, I predict war. It might not be so bad though. Lots of sci-fi authors have foreseen a world-unifying peace born out of a unified fear and hatred of a truly external enemy.
Timeline:
[ul]
[li]early 1900s we tune into their radio broadcasts[/li][li]both World Wars are smaller regional conflicts as the rest of the world is distracted by Martian phenomenon [/li][li]space race/tech is at least a decade ahead of our timeline, and the impetus for funding those great German rocket scientists (and Robert Goddard, et al) is much more from the existence of Martians than terrestrial war. In the real world, we already got caught up in Martian fever just from the canals mistake.[/li][li]moon landing by 1959 - temporary base by the mid 60s[/li][li]man on Mars by 1969 (we decide to bet on refueling there)[/li][li]Martian plague in the 1970s, and paranoia ratchets up (ditto for mars)[/li][li]AIDS gets blamed on Martians[/li][li]Cold War writ large over the vacuum of space[/li][li]After the first hot conflict - say astronauts shot down in space - Earth nukes the cities of Mars[/li][li]?[/li][/ul]
Of course it’s all speculation, but I’d see it like this: If two individuals can anticipate future events and learn, then they can communicate in some way. That communication need not be in either individual’s preferred language, or even a formal language in any sense.
Now you might say that animals can anticipate future events and learn. That’s true; and indeed we can communicate with animals. But our “conversations” never rise beyond the conceptual level the animal can understand (e.g. bell ringing = feeding time).
In the case of a species that has made radio and spacecraft, the dialogue would advance a lot further.
(actually my hunch is that we’d be fluent in each others languages in virtually no time, but I’m just arguing here against the position that we wouldn’t be able to communicate at all)
