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Comment by throwaway66666 | Hacker News Reader

Thought experiment. If we assume that "alien intelligence is here" in some form like UFO sightings, why not also assume they are on the internet? I believe someone would learn so much more about us from reading wikipedia, than flying a UFO above north carolina at 90k feet. No?

And if they mastered long-distance space flight and life discovery, what stops them from reverse-engineering how to connect to an unprotected starbucks guest wifi. Or even posting here like you and me sometimes do.

Do you think they would be more perplexed by the stuff we do to each other in real life (micro; prisons, crime, violence. and macro; governments, military, borders). Or with the way we treat each other on line? (scams, trolls, harassment, narcissism, mistreating privacy data)

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"Any sufficiently advanced alien invasion is indistinguishable from local politics."

This is the best thing I've read in a while. Thanks.

Given our propensity to dehumanize political opponents, perhaps the converse is true as well.

> why not also assume they are on the internet?

Not many people assume they're "here" to begin with, but yes, if anyone is here it makes sense to scour the internet. Evaluating the data might be more difficult for them than we think though. Physically connecting to the net may be the easiest problem to overcome. Depending on how they perceive time, and how fast their cognition and data mining is, distilling meaningful information could be a long and arduous process.

How perplexing of an experience it is would depend on their own history and value systems. If they think we're nice, we're in trouble.

> Thought experiment. If we assume that "alien intelligence is here" in some form like UFO sightings, why not also assume they are on the internet?

Bingo. AMA.

Per UFOlogy, they also have telepathy. Internet connection would pale in comparison, they can just scoop an understanding of us en-masse straight out of our heads. Technology wouldn't take long to interpret. Secrets and motivations would be an open book. Figuring how to do anything useful with the resulting mess would probably be the biggest problem.

> Internet connection would pale in comparison

Eh, my thoughts are immeasurably boring most of the time.

Is that the same attitude that people would hold about telepathically connecting with people from Ancient Egypt or the Dark Ages?

No, it's the thought most people have about having all of their email scanned whether that's a govt or a corp, "nothing interesting here, so feel free wasting your time".

I'm actually sort of interested in what it's like to be a human in entirely different circumstances and culture, such that one's mindset is dictated every minute by considerations completely foreign to me.

But realistically, once the novelty wears off, it's probably back to ‘how do get through this day.’ History and old art tend to illustrate that people's everyday nature wasn't much strange to ours.

They watched Independence Day and know they'd be infected by malware.

Our memes would conquer them even faster.

If we were ever to intercept an alien television signal (or some version of that), I wonder if we would be able to discern what's entertainment and what's a news broadcast/documentary on their world? Perhaps they may mistake some of our SciFi films as reality on Earth?

That's the premise of the movie "Galaxy Quest" [1]. It's a great film.

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0177789/

The real purpose of all these adtech trackers, which are actually useless for ads targeting, is to supply human behavior data to aliens.

That way, when they finally invade, their ads will have insane conversion rates.

"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos"

Well the thing with flying overhead is that you see reality without interpretation, mindset filters or other kinds of viral intellectual memes that could jump from Earth cognitive Sphere to alien cognitive space.

Now when you talk to humans or worse connect to the internet, you get directly dirty with high bandwidth meme transfers. That's really really dangerous for aliens.

My 2 ubicents.

Are you one of those online (unclear)?

"I believe someone would learn so much more about us from reading wikipedia, than flying a UFO above north carolina at 90k feet. No?"

- NO if I wanted real-time aerial data on population and movements and see how Jimmy is doing.

They probably don't care at all about any of that

what if you are an alien whistle-blower?

Aliens can crack WPA PSK :D ?

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