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Comment by 7thaccount | Hacker News Reader

Yeah. It's hard to downplay how big actually having intelligent alien life pop up would be.

If they're very similar to us (probably not, but let's just assume they have the same vocal and auditory capabilities) then everyone would want to learn their language. We'd want to know EVERYTHING about their history and that of any species they'd visited. Not to mention the technology, philosophy, literature, art, science, math, music (maybe)...etc.

A dozen new academic fields in the blink of an eye. Possibly interstellar commerce. More international co-operation than ever before (hopefully). What if they're religious and have similar or contradictory religions to us, or what if they're not. How do earth folk react?

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Part of it's also just that the very fact they somehow managed to master physics to the point that they could visit us means they could potentially offer us like a 100k or 1 million year speed-up in technological advancement.

It's one thing if in a million years we manage to discover some non-intelligent or intelligent life somewhere.

If they come to us out of the blue in the next few years, that's a very different thing, since it implies not just intelligence but an intelligence far, far beyond our own.

It would likely imply they found a way to relatively cheaply attain faster-than-light travel, for example, perhaps by some kind of spacetime-manipulating mechanism like wormholes or Alcubierre/warp drives. (Which some scientists believe could maybe be theoretically plausible one day, given enough scarce resources.) And if they can do that, then they could probably teach and give us more than we could ever dream of, if they wanted to.

Yeah, it tells us that we're wronger than we thought. If FTL is possible, just knowing that will push research in that direction.

> It would likely imply they found a way to relatively cheaply attain faster-than-light travel, for example, perhaps by some kind of spacetime-manipulating mechanism like wormholes or Alcubierre/warp drives. (Which some scientists believe could maybe be theoretically plausible one day, given enough scarce resources.)

Not necessarily though. It could be a generational ship with mundane propulsion technology.

I think it makes much less sense for aliens arriving by conventional means to not contact us. If they did then they’re being extremely generous by not attempting to colonize Earth or any of the other planets. It’d be like European explorers discovering the New World is inhabited and deciding to stay off shore. It also wouldn’t explain the anomalous, physics defying video and accounts of UFOs. On the other hand, if interstellar travel is trivial then there is much more leeway for taking a hands off approach. In that case we’re just the North Sentinelese and they’re the yachts and airplanes staying out of bow and arrow range.

It could be, but my blind guess is that if there are any intelligent lifeforms out there, they're so far away that conventional propulsion craft would have to fan out and run for so long that it's unlikely they'd happen to run into us at all, or if they do, not at a time when any of us exist. And if they were already doing that within a reasonable distance from us, I think we'd probably have already seen evidence of some of the swarms somewhere.

And it'd also probably have to be immortal autonomous machines rather than anything biological, which wouldn't necessarily be as useful, unless they fully merged with them or created ones that were much smarter than they are. (Which I suppose is pretty possible, given we might do the same within a century or two.)

My guess is we may unfortunately possibly be the only intelligent life throughout all of reality up until now (extremely speculative, I know), or that the few civilizations that do exist or have existed are so spaced apart from each other that it's very unlikely any will ever run into or observe any of the others without some kind of major FTL breakthrough.

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