In lots of sci-fi movies, once Earth comes in contact with another intelligent race from outerspace, people seem to just give up all their conflicts, realize that humanity is one amongst many in the universe, and with that, becomes unified as one sole race.
With everything that’s going on in the world, I’m pretty sure that even if we did discover intelligent life out in the universe, and a lot of it, humanity would still be split amongst its varying sects. I’m sure even an interstellar war wouldn’t be enough to make us forget the feelings of black vs. white, Christian vs. Jews, America vs. everyone.
It’s a pretty weak start to a debate, I admit, but does anyone feel differently? Is there hope that eventually humanity will become equal, or is there always going to be conflict amogst our own race?
Anything advanced enough to cross trillions of miles of space just to come here would be advanced enough to make us all mandatorily sing kum-buy-ya three times a day if it wished.
More likely it would just see us as a stupid nuisance and wipe us out. 2 small space probes moving 99.9% of the speed of light spaced 12 hours apart would do the trick, and we would never even see them comming.
IMHO humanity will never become ‘equal’. We will likely divide into different species based upon what modifications we put in ourselves and our descendants or not. There are so many different possibilities for change that I doubt that any one will dominate.
As humanity gets smarter on average though, the useless conflicts of the world will decline, hopefully before it is too late, and some sort of peace may yet emerge. The lengthening of lifespans will add to this. ONce people become effectively immortal, they would become far less willing to lose their lives in a war. The people who want wars fought will have to fight them themselves.
if an alien civilization wanted to wipe us out, they wouldn’t do it all stupid like pretty much every fictional account does it. They’d just hit us with a weapon that we couldn’t do anything about, and wouldn’t see comming. I’m not sure what part you don’t get. A small space probe moving more than 99.9% of the speed of light would have enough kinetic energy to wipe out civilization and most living things on half the planet. Send another one 12 hours later for the other half of the planet. Due to relativistic effects, we wouldn’t be able to see it ( if at all) before it was already here.
Sure, it wouldn’t make a good hollywood movie, but that’s not the point.
Humanity is not that smart. Emotion will still rule logic. Adding one rung higher than us on the food chain would only stir up conflict among us even more, while we settle who is Number Two.
Who says the aliens are united among themselves? When science-fiction writers describe an ET culture, they usually tacitly assume that the whole species has the same culture. But that’s not logically necessary. Suppose the planet Bem is, like Earth, divided into a multitude of independent states, with different languages, cultures, traditions, religions, and political systems? Sometimes they go to war against each other for reasons that seem, to their rulers or leaders, to be good ones. And several different Bemite states or coalitions of states are sending their own expeditions to Earth, simultaneously. In that case, instead of uniting against the aliens, human states might start forming strategic alliances with some alien states against others. Like North American Indian nations in the 17th and 18th Centuries, allying themselves with the French or the British, according to what seemed to be the advantage of the moment. And possibly with the same long-term results.
Well if they came under the aegis of a trade mission ,then every other nation would be jumping through hoops , just to gain most favoured trading partner. Once the victualling , and resupply of the ET mission is complete ,then its a matter of what we can trade thats going to make sense back in ETland and what we can use here.
Of course what we want , in no uncertain order is an FTL drive if they are using it , any sort of cold sleep , if it can be adapted to humans , a stellar map , if they are stupid enough , or arrogant enough to actually give it to us.
I think that beatific aliens would sell us some kind of immortality at first. Most likely they would have a way to give us that, whether it be biological and/or cybernetic. Or if human minds could be uploaded into virtual worlds kept in electronic or quantum storage, we might be able to make several copies of ourselves along with a cloning technology. That might be fun.
I’d suspect that space travel by large vessels at close to the speed of light could require far too much energy to make it worthwhile, even if possible. Moving a vehicle half of C would be damned impressive; we’ve been spoiled by Star Trek.
Thus it would be likely that they would have ways of greatly extending life, or living a fugue of lives, even if they have cold sleep as well. If they can conquer most forms of disease and disability in doing so, most people would opt for that, be it a wise move or not. Most people would probably prefer a Manhattan project right now for extending life than finding a way to zip through space at half the speed of light.
It could be more interesting for the aliens if they had a planet full of immortality junkies, if nothing else providing an endless source of amusement. Or at least they’d have a race they’d most likely be able to keep under their thumb if simply killing us off is uncouth and they prefer interactive study.
In fact, perhaps we’d grudgingly to learn to live together if death were made something of a moot point, forcing us to work out issues that can no longer be resolved by getting rid of the other guy.
In any case, I doubt they’d give us the goods on their method of travel very readily. Who wants a barbaric race of pesky human tourists roaming the galaxy?
So advanced space travel involves mind altering technology? I am confused. How does it follow that a race with faster than light space travel can manipulate billions of minds at will just because they are “advanced enough to cross trillions of miles of space.”
So the neighborhood ETs (just a few million miles) have no interest in us while the reall out-worlders (trillions of miles) deliberately took a left turn just to see us, eh?
