I’m calling it now. Compared to Hollywood fair, our first alien contact IRL is going to be underwhelming.
The likelihood of anything we would consider 'intelligent' being first contact is likely fairly low.
As much as saying that does make me sad, evidence of alien life is honestly the one big thing that I am sad about living when I am living since I would love that to be a reality before I die.
Society hasn't processed something we have no evidence of (yet), that doesn't make much sense. Ask "society" at large if they believe there are other species out there and most of them will say "I don't know" or "Probably not". In many places, religion is likely to be more believable to people than multi-cell life somewhere else than Earth.
I can't figure out what you're referring to. Can you post a link?
>> In 1996, a group of scientists found features in the likeness of microscopic fossils of bacteria in the meteorite, suggesting that these organisms also originated on Mars. The claims immediately made headlines worldwide, culminating in U.S. president Bill Clinton giving a speech about the potential discovery.
Finding life on Europa, or anywhere other than Earth, would be foundational. The most likely scenario is that it would be carbon-RNA based, which could imply a panspermia theory rooted in the early stages of the solar system’s formation.
The off chance that we find something non carbon, non RNA, or some combination thereof -based (non carbon RNA would be wild) would obviously have some pretty large implications as well.
Though unfortunately the most likely scenario is that we don’t find any life forms, as is the historical trend, and our search continues.
Sure, finding actual living organisms would create new opportunities for study in xeno-biology, but it likely wouldn't change anything significant in our lives unless it is contact with complex multi-cellular and preferably intelligent beings.
Even for science, the most likely possibility (life on Europa, if it exists, would use the same basic chemistry, but not the exact same things as life on Earth) would not have any major impacts in reality: it would end various kinds of speculation, it would give us some new avenues for looking for extra-solar life, and it would create new carriers in studying this new branch of biology. But it would likely not change anything major in existing fields, it wouldn't give us some new perspective on life on Earth, and it would not change much about how we study biology. Just like finding out that not all protozoa are bacteria (some are archaea), or before that finding that fungi are a completely separate kingdom of life from plants and animals, didn't fundamentally change anything even in the day to day lives and study of even the vast majority of biologists.
Life on the level of bacteria is interesting, but as you say still uses our chemistry. We put something in a text book and move on. Maybe a few study it and science learns a lot but nothing that affects our life.
If the life is intelligent though they may have solved some problems we have. Maybe they have a quantum theory of gravity that we don't (my understanding of physics is we think this should exist but we don't have one - but I'm not a physicist).
Of course the life may be intelligent but at a level equivalent to us 3000 years ago - just learning the basics of geometry. There is now the moral issue of how much should we tell them that we know.
This is like saying the normal people in the Marvel Universe are basically no different than people in ours, which I guess is true but only in the most superficial anti-imaginative way
But if we found out that there are bacteria-like micro-organisms on Europa, or even "fish" in the oceans there, I don't agree that this would change anything in the outlook of the vast majority of people on Earth, even subtly.
It’s weak, I believe, to operate on a platform of talking for strangers so confidently.
Ghosts, on the other hand, are pretty far out there. We have no evidence or even any working thesis of how the consciousness of individuals could persist in some ethereal form after death.