Honey, There's an Alien on the Phone... What Should I Tell Him?
Sky and Telescope covers a recent conference at Hahvahd regarding the SETI program.
For the non-dorks among you...if there are any...SETI is the nifty-sounding acronym for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, a decades-long research program devoted to finding evidence of an alien civilization. In a nutshell, the plan is to search the skies with ridiculously oversized dishes listening for signals of certain type and strength to conclude they originated from an alien world. Conversely, an extraterrestrial society may one day be conducting similar experiments, and hear, say, Double Live Gonzo through the ether, and conclude that not only is there "alien" life out there, but it's gonna kick your ass.
So this conference was held to discuss where the project is, what they've found (not much), what they've not found (everything else), how they'll improve the search process, and the like. One interesting twist was the faction that asks whether alien civilizations have been trying to reach us for centuries, but we are too ignorant to understand the means of communication. I'm not talking crop circles here- kinda hard to believe that a civilization that can build interstellar conveyances would choose to express itself in corn- but subtle consistent signals that exist in frequencies or energies we're only beginning to comprehend.
What none of these people ask though, and which I find extremely unsettling, is what the holy hell we're supposed to do the morning after we get a telegram from ET. How about some conferences discussing the repercussions on our country, indeed our world, in that event? What happens to our livelihoods, our foreign policy, our belief systems, our self perception, the day after Kang and Kodos get a listing in the phonebook?
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Simple - spend years trying
Simple - spend years trying to figure out their language, and then nuke each other into oblivion after one side or another makes some hideous faux pas. What did you think?
Seriously, I think just about every soft science in existance is going to need a complete remake now that we've got a second data point for them to play with, and after that it'll depend on how much different their technology base is from ours - if they progressed to about the same point by using very different methods, we get to have a bi-species field day trading all of each other's cool shit. Well, after we figure out how to ship things interstellar, of course(I expect it to be something like the scotch business where you need to plan shipments decades in advance - the ships to do a good amount of trade will come into being as soon as somebody gets dollar signs in their eyes).
Well, at least that's the optimist in me talking. More realistically, we're either going to play on local religious myths and enslave them all(if that'd work) or we're going to get scared shitless and try to figure out how to blow them up(or they'll do one of those to us). It's certainly possible to avoid nastiness, but it's quite possible not to. I dunno.
On the basis of present
On the basis of present knowledge and the most likely explanation of the extraterrestrial hypothesis, we have been and are being visited by intelligent life forms who appear self disguising in and out of the narrow band of human perception. These continuous direct and indirect multifaceted alien manifestations demonstrate we are connected beyond the universe as we know it and are part of a much more profound cosmic process, the connecting of two species.
The web site below is devoted to human beings open to a sober examination and response to the big questions phenomenon that has occurred since the inception of the Internet.
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