"You want to... leave the planet? With aliens you just met?"
Listen, the bar is pretty low. I'll take my chances and will be cool with pretty much anything that isn't prolonged neglect/indifference or intentional torture. If you make contact after interstellar travel and I'm just gonna assume you're cool and got things covered. And if nothing else you could probably put my brain in a roomba so I can weld in space or something.
TL;DR it don't matter, none of this matters.
I was having that thought on the way to work. I don't get paid enough. I'm stressed. The stress makes me anxious and now I'm eating bad and can't sleep. People have to be encouraged to join unions? Wtf. We could totally Bugs Life this shit and everything would be so much better...
Or would it? I guess not. We'd mess it up. We would only find more creative and terrible ways to subject, destroy, and hurt. Just to be happy - which isn't really something you CAN be. You can have happy moments and memories and encounters, but happiness is something you do. Not a magical state you reach.
Listen I may be high as Fuck, but if I can pretend slash delude myself into moments of happiness while my species pillages the planet and canibalizes itself alive - then yeah. I think any alien would be better than every one of us.
I'd rather be killed by an Alien then to rot in a pine box
Yeah, like if they actually take the bother to talk to me and lead with "we come in peace" unless it's a front for a "To Serve Man" situation, they're likely already better than 99% of people I interact with on a daily basis.
I'm pretty sure they could do the "To Serve Man" situation openly with a sign-up sheet. Giving humans good final days would be easy for them. Fixing medical issues, enrichment, no stress, get to see space etc.
It could even go along with the brain roomba thing I mentioned (or something else like a VR network of brains) as I assume they probably wouldn't want to eat brains anyways.
Well, that is until the gov't stepped in for one reason or another. Give people a choice like that and it'd probably be noticeable for the population even if the aliens gave a wide window for people to change their mind. Society would really need to step up, probably an impossible task even if humanity was given advanced medical technology.
Y’all got any more of that…astrophage?
Until we have physical, undeniable evidence it is all just words. But, the reason I talk out load when I'm alone is for the aliens who might be watching me. I want them to hear my explanations for why I'm worth visiting personally / why I'm reading memes and not building a star gate out a 7 toasters and a mountain bike.
Honestly the scariest thing about first contact is if absolutely nothing changes.
Scary would be if they rock up, observe us for a few days, then leave hurriedly, forever.
That's... Actually probably exactly how Star Trek would handle modern Earth. Part of the prime directive is that any species that gets contacted by the Federation has to achieve a certain level of technological and societal advancement first, and we're close, but I'm pretty sure we'd get put on the "check back in a century" list.
So, if they're nice aliens and they just watch us for a while and leave, maybe our first contact just got waitlisted?
The main requirement is warp capability, right? I'd say we're still a ways off. I think we're even slower than impulse drive, still.
I think warp capability just means they're guaranteed to find other life on their own now, so there's no point in hiding.
@Int @fossilesque, scary rather the shame we experience when they ask us to bring them to our leader
“Two hundred thousand years of evolution, and for what?”
Now would be the absolute best time to announce contact with aliens, if it already exists, since it’s just par for the course at this point. It’d be just another Thursday. We’d start seeing rule42 art pop up before the day was through (granted there’s already plenty out there, but rule42 specifically for whatever the real aliens looked like.
5 dimensional secks will blow your ninth limb off.
Fermi or Drake, nobody cares. Just tell me and lemme get on with my life.
I like to think Fermi had it down and we just are really hesitant to embrace the whole conjecture of the great filter. As each day passes, I find more evidence to support that the sole purpose of intelligent life is for it to become intelligent enough to destroy itself.
I like this. We as a species avoided nuclear fire just to go the slow cooker route.
going nuclear is still an option
Maybe there's a limit, like with size. You can't have creatures that are too big, because at some point they just die under their own weight. Maybe you also can't have creatures that are too smart, because at some point they just die because of their own hubris.
My wife and I talked this exact meme this morning. If there really is aliens, life for us would just go on, so much more to worry about
I tell my partner all the time that if something can survive space for that long, they don't need us. Knowledge is the language of the universe, they'd be here to observe.
My friend and I talked about this last night. Calvin and Hobbes had it better. The surest sign of intelligent life in the universe is they haven't contacted us yet.
Why would any self respecting alien want to engage this dumpster fire?
Can you let me borrow 50 bucks? I'll pay you back next time you visit.
Up above aliens hover Making home movies for the folks back home Of all these creatures who lock up their spirits Drill holes in themselves and live for their secrets
Personally I'm hoping it's all aliens, purely because that'd disprove that they'd just instantly destroy us.