Reaction to alien encounter?

The evidence is pretty overwhelming that it’s something more mundane than an alien megastructure, though. That hypothesis was evaluated and found wanting.

Our "radio shell" extends a max of about 100 ly from Earth, and our TV broadcasts only about 80 ly. Those aliens would have to have been pretty close already to be stealing our cable. There are also physics laws that govern how easy to read those transmissions would be at that distance. The answer is: not very.

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 19th 2018 at 3:25:07 PM

Double Post: Per Wikipedia, fast radio bursts (FRBs) are currently believed to be of extragalactic origin, and anything capable of reaching us over those distances would be putting out so much power that they could only be generated by pulsars or some artificial equivalent. If there really are alien civilizations communicating across galaxies using stellar remnants as the transmission source, they're playing an awfully long game, and they are probably Type 3.

Anyway, if there are ten thousand of then per day across the sky as indicated by the article, then either there are more aliens out there than we can imagine, never mind count, or it's a natural phenomenon. And if these aliens are coming for us, they've got billions of light years to cross to get here. We're either completely safe or so outclassed that we might as well not bother.

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 19th 2018 at 3:34:56 PM

That being said, irrefutable proof of intelligent alien life would shell shock humanity. To the point where it’s extremely likely that our calendars would be separated into pre contact and post contact

Thats the gamechanger, alright. Even evidence of native microbial life on Mars would shatter our perception of our own place in the universe. And the scientist who finds it can write his or her own ticket for the rest of their life, so that should tell you where the incentives are.

And if they claim aliens and are wrong, they're in for a lifetime of ridicule. So there's a lot of natural incentives to get it right.

I find the idea of dismissing alien life becuase we aren't detecting it to be somewhat foolish, unless aliens are regularly building starships larger than stars I don't think we'd see their spacecrafts (it'd be like trying to use a telescope to spot a gnat that's kilometres away) and our radio signals are pretty much worthless once they get outside the solar system assuming aliens would even use radio signals.

I don't think anyone's dismissing alien life as a whole, it's pretty much a given there's something out there.

Signs of alien life are a different story.

The distinction is between alien life "out there" somewhere among the trillions of stars in our observable universe, which is all but certain, and alien life "right here", buzzing around us in funny looking flying saucers and abducting people for weird medical experiments. The latter is highly dubious and as of yet completely uncorroborated.

Given what we know of physics, the kind of effort it would take to journey among the stars on the regular implies a Type 1 civilization at the very minimum, and more likely a Type 2. A Type 2 civilization — one that harnesses a significant fraction of its sun's output, would be detectable by us at ranges of a few thousand light years.

If a civilization manages to develop FTL travel where on the Kardashev Scale would they be? I'm pretty sure the scale only really specifies where they get their energy from rather than their interstellar capabilities.

Correct. FTL is impossible as far as we know, so it's less about the Kardashev scale than it is about discovering some heretofore unknown aspect of reality.

The ideas we have about FTL (Alcubierre drives, wormholes, etc.) all rely on being able to break known laws of physics in certain specific ways.

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 19th 2018 at 11:44:25 AM

It would be some shit though, if somehow the laws of physics were different in other parts of the universe and we're stuck with shitty STL travel while these aliens have FTL.

Extremely unlikely, of course, but man wouldn't that be like some deity being petty.

Are you sure? I'd think it was cool and interesting, but it wouldn't really affect my day-to-day life all that much. (People around me might be annoyed by all the "Called it!" comments during the first few weeks though.) Actual contact with intelligent aliens is a very different matter, of course.

And I imagine that most people for whom it would be a worldview-shattering thing would just ignore the evidence anyway.

If that's somehow actually the case, aliens would never come into our neck of the universe anyway. Too much risk of getting caught "in the slow lane" and end up dying of old age before being able to get out of it.

There's no reason to believe that we've discovered everything about the universe. However, at a macroscopic level, we've seen enough of it and verified enough experimentally to have a very strong belief that the laws are basically the same everywhere we can see.

One very strong argument against FTL, time travel, and many other sci-fi ideas, is that if they were possible at all, they'd be occurring all over the universe, and we've seen no evidence of that happening. That is not in and of itself proof, of course, but it's a very strong indication.

The universe is a vast place, with phenomena continually occurring at much higher energies, in stranger physical states, and over much longer time scales than we can reproduce here on Earth. The idea is that if anything can happen, it has happened somewhere, and therefore that if we've never seen it, either we aren't able to observe it with our current instrumentation, or it probably can't happen.

The only exceptions are some of the super-high-energy phenomena that can only occur in particle accelerators, since the conditions for them to exist were only found in the Big Bang. It's possible that they happen in the cores of dead stars and that sort of thing as well, but those are forever beyond our direct observation, and would probably be beyond observation by any sapient species.

And there's the thing. If FTL exists in reality of some form, can we detect it? Some phenomena such as Fast Radio Bursts, we were only able to detect recently. (Another one is gravitational waves.)

Point being, our instrumentation is getting better at detecting things, but there are still so many things about the Universe we're not catching yet.

What if we did detect a signature from an FTL drive? Our physics textbooks would then need a fundamental rewrite.

What if aliens land on the White House lawn? What if a rogue black hole impacts our sun? Obviously, we'd deal with that as it arises. I'm not sure how we'd be able to prove that some observed phenomenon corresponds with FTL travel, though.

Call in an airstrike, they're obviously up to no good.

Technically given the gravity values, wouldn't it be the other way around?

The same way we prove everything. The Scientific Method. Put it to test and see if we can replicate it and discard hypotheses as we go until we exhaust all others. Then (or during) see if we can detect the signal again.

We don't just go "It's gotta be some spurious artifact in the data, after all it only occurred once!" or some other pooh-poohing of it. We keep trying until we figure it out and replicate it, detect it again and predict how it would behave.

Except that hinges on one of two things: we have recorded data of confirmed FTL travel to compare against, or we can reproduce it in laboratory conditions, meaning we have achieved FTL rendering the whole discussion moot. So even if we do somehow catch some sort of signal from some spaceship going FTL, there's no way to make the assumption that that is indeed what the signal was.

Right. It's like hearing a bump in your garage and jumping to the conclusion that there's an invisible dragon inside.

Or like saying that every bump in the garage should be investigated for the possibility of invisible dragons before considering something like a bucket falling over.

Now you’re making me sad that dragons don’t exist.

😭

And when we haven't developed any experiment that would detect invisible dragons, nor even a theory of how one might design such an experiment.

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 20th 2018 at 2:14:43 PM

And you have a garage full of buckets.

It’s best to start with a simple hypothesis and add complexity as you find out more. You don’t want to start with a super complex one and work your way down from there.

I wonder tho, if we did discover FTL, would our daily life change much? I mean physicists would freak the fuck out of course, but until we get a working ship how would it affect your average joe?