What really would happen if aliens came to this planet

I'm not sure it is always safe to assume that aliens arriving on Earth would be more advanced.
"The Road Not Taken" by Harry Turtledove is a short story that suggested that interstellar travel was surprisingly easy and that some pre-industrial civilisations had stumbled upon the concept whereas on Earth we had somehow missed the whole concept.
So when the aliens arrive to conquer the Earth they burst out of their ship with flintlocks and swords and are immediately cut down by automatic weapons fire. This gives us the space travel technology and the human race is unleashed upon a mainly pre-industrial universe !
 
:cool: From the way the "gun rights" people like the NRA leaders behave.... PANIC and KILLING anything that looks different!
Personally, I think they are ALREADY HERE, and most are humanoid and peaceful.
:D:cool::cool:
 
:cool: They have always been amongst us. There are paintings of ETs on the walls in the pyramids of ancient Egypt. There are pictures of ETs on the walls of caves. There are the "LINES OF NASCA", made to be seen from the air. They have, at times, stepped in to guide humans. They see our wars and hatred of each other, and they won't let us stay in space unless we "shape up". We are the spoilers of the cosmic neighborhood. Sort of a real-life "THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL", without Michael Rennie and Keanu Reeves.
:cool::cool:
 
<first post> (for information only)

This is an interesting question for me. The concept of extra-terrestrial civilisations -- including space-faring ones -- is not one to be ignored. Exactly how likely is the possible existence of such aliens is mostly immaterial. Any possibility, however remote, is valid and worthy of consideration.

The more interesting questions devolve on questions which are -- arguably -- less difficult to answer.

Firstly, a civilisation capable of interstellar travel would (should?) have a serious regard for the ecological integrity of its own world. If we stipulate that point -- and further stipulate that they might be unlikely to possess Star-Trekkian decontamination technology -- then it becomes clear that any interstellar voyages of exploration must be one-way trips.

Secondly, if one accepts the above, it also becomes clear that our response to the arrival of aliens might well be moot. They will have come to stay. It would be unlikely that they would have arrived blindly, and ignorant of the fighting capabilities of the indigenous fauna; rather they would arrive "packing heat".

All things considered, I am glad the possibility of ET paying us a visit is rather small.
 
I'm open to the possibility that they've already visited us, on and off, over the last several thousand years, to check our progress toward maturity. I think it's both fun and instructive to compare the whole of human civilization with an individual human in terms of lifetime and maturity. In my opinion, the human civilization is about like a 9 or 10 year old. Not really babies, just starting to get a sense of independence, and just starting to think we know it all and "own the place". So I can see aliens checking to see every century or so how we've matured, waiting til we get to be adults to make contact.

(I apologize for schlepping my own wares, but on my website in the signature below, you can read a short story I just finished shortly before joining this forum, about first contact called The Day They Canceled Physics Class. The link is on the home page, under Short Stories NEW)
 
I think it's both fun and instructive to compare the whole of human civilization with an individual human in terms of lifetime and maturity.

I agree. But there's another great comparison which can make one's eyes water.

The universe is generally thought to be a little over 14 billion years old.

Now you can do the maths yourself, but if you made a movie which ran for exactly 18 years (and which runs at 25 frames per second) that movie would have 14.2 billion frames ... one per year ... geddit?

You'll have to wait until the last three minutes before you see humans throwing up Stonehenge and the pyramids ... and Neil Armstrong doesn't step out on the Moon until 2 seconds before the end.

Aliens are great for science fiction, but as scientifically minded person who rejects religious creationism and the need for a god or gods, I view the preoccupation some people have with the idea of super-intelligent aliens "watching over us" (for whatever imagined purpose) to be a surrogate replacement for a deity.

I have a great fascination and interest in scientific research into interstellar travel. So far our greatest minds have failed to find good reason to believe that faster than light travel is ever likely to be possible. The only sound theoretical idea is the Alcubierre drive (which is the Star Trekian warp drive and Alcubierre acknowledged as his inspiration for his theory). However that remains a pipe-dream, due to a large number of theoretical stumbling blocks ... not least the improbable energy requirements. Even so NASA has been operating a warp-field detector so we may yet detect a passing Vulcan starship ... and let's hope it ain't the Klingons ... or the Ferengi. :P

On the other hand the technology for sub-light travel is entirely feasible and, at high percentages of light speed, time dilation means that ships' crews could travel quite vast distances without the need for cryogenics. Hell at 99% light speed you can get to the galactic core well inside a human life span. Of course more than 30,000 years will have passed back on Earth ... and another 30,000 years for the return journey. Sub-light travel will always be one-way, because who'd want to return to an unknown future; perhaps one where you would be outclassed mentally, physically, ethically, sociologically.

It is unreasonable to reject completely out of hand the possibility that ETs have visited us, but it is also unreasonable to suggest the possibility is anything other than extremely remote. Any sentient species which develops space travel would have to possess certain intellectual and sociological characteristics which we could recognise or surmise. I find it endlessly difficult to imagine a single logical reason why ET would ply all the way here just to study us from afar. We have so much RF pollution that they could make a perfectly good study from the Moon. If they had even a trace of something we might recognise as as ethics they would most certainly not to wish risk contaminating our ecosystems with alien organisms clinging to the shiny hulls of their flying saucers ... which begs the question: if they don't have that ethic it would suggest they come to conquer. If that was the case the "evidence" provided by UFOlogists is decidedly weird ... a race capable of doing what they are alleged to be able to do would surely have a better method of conquering than appearing to small groups of un-influential people in isolated places. On the other hand there are those who allege that our leaders are aliens in disguise. Poo! The world's leaders are such a useless bunch of twerps they simply have to be human!
 
:D When I was a kid, I wrote a short story about the first ET to arrive on Earth. He was bluish-green, like a peacock, and a Humanoid Reptilian. He was handsome and fell in love with a human woman. They got married. There was no legal reason why they couldn't, but they had many problems. His doctor was a vet. Even when he died, she couldn't bury him in a cemetery, because that was for humans.
Of course, I never got it published. I was only about 12 years old at the time. :D:cool:
 
...Aliens are great for science fiction, but as scientifically minded person who rejects religious creationism and the need for a god or gods, I view the preoccupation some people have with the idea of super-intelligent aliens "watching over us" (for whatever imagined purpose) to be a surrogate replacement for a deity.

I have a great fascination and interest in scientific research into interstellar travel. So far our greatest minds have failed to find good reason to believe that faster than light travel is ever likely to be possible. The only sound theoretical idea is the Alcubierre drive (which is the Star Trekian warp drive and Alcubierre acknowledged as his inspiration for his theory). However that remains a pipe-dream, due to a large number of theoretical stumbling blocks ... not least the improbable energy requirements. Even so NASA has been operating a warp-field detector so we may yet detect a passing Vulcan starship ... and let's hope it ain't the Klingons ... or the Ferengi. :P

On the other hand the technology for sub-light travel is entirely feasible...
Interesting, I never thought of advanced aliens as looking out for us like a mommy/daddy figure as you imply. I've viewed them as just that, advanced beings keeping tabs on us either for their own protection or to assist us in ushering in more advanced eras of our own.

As for modes of travel, I take it you didn't read my short story about first contact. I'd say the preoccupation with what our own scientists can determine is feasible is pretty anthro-centric. Who's to say there aren't means of travel that make our current speculations seem like an effort to create a faster horse.
 
Yes I did read your story, First Contact. I read all your stories, and enjoyed them all very much. I enjoyed them because they were not only well-written, they were good science fiction. But fiction is the operative word. Fiction has to be believable, but when it comes to SF, we allow ourselves to suspend our disbelief in the area of the infamous laws of physics.

I personally do not have a completely closed mind and I conceded that the possibility of a technological "giant leap forward" which might make the impossible possible.

However if there are civilisations out there in the universe, I find it impossible to believe they would go to the trouble of actually flitting back and forth just to study us. They could, for example, make all the observations they could ever need from a Moon-based observatory ... or even by sticking nanoprobes on our communications satellites. They would be acting in a very dumb manner if they cavorted about in our atmosphere.

Have you ever looked at the theories abounding in relation to exobiology. I'm an adherent of the Rare Earth Hypothesis. I do feel that it is highly likely that we will find other planets which are enough Earth-like that we can use our adaptability and resourcefulness to colonise. However if we find life already there it is not very likely to be particularly complex. Complex life is extremely fragile (ask T. Rex!) so it requires a nice stable planet which does not suffer too many extinction events. Evolution, moreover, needs challenges otherwise it has no impetus to push changes forward. So life needs a nicely variable climate, plate tectonics to rattle the environment, a short enough day so that sunlight can be harnessed for energy.

Many theorists argue quite convincingly that multi-cellular life is a rather unlikely outcome for evolution. I go a little further and argue that intelligent life (which uses technological artificiality) is extremely unlikely. The dinosaurs reigned here for 100 million years without -- apparently -- bothering to evolve large brains and start using tools. The ecological and environmental conditions in the African Rift valley just happened to occur at the right time. It was lucky (for us) that the great apes were an Afro-Asian branch of the animal kingdom. If the great apes had evolved in the Brazilian jungle instead there may never have been a set of circumstances which would have led to a different version of H. Sapiens.

I'm not skeptical out of cussedness ... I've thought about it a lot. All the same my opinions don't alter my enjoyment of SF, nor does it stop me from writing SF.

It's good swapping opinions with you. :D
 
I don't necissarily agree on time of evolution. As far as we know dinos roamed for 100 million years without becoming sentient, that could be "not completely true". Besides evolution (if true) can make huge leaps very quickly...as evidenced by our own species.
It's plausible that had the dinos survived whatever killed them, the yma yhave evolved into a sentient race within an additional 1-20 million years. If still no extinction event by then...look at the time the ywould have had between then and now to evolve. We went from Lucy to walking on the moon in what? slightly over 3 million years...

On a planet that is ~4.5 bln years old...in a universe over 14bln and considering evolution here, I'd say it's plausible there could be races a few bln years older than us and easily capable of interstellar travel. In fact I would think it far more likely than not.

What would happen if they came here? I don't know, either it would be really good, really bad or have no affect, lol. I'd say it depends on their personal development, if they are more or less immortal, they likely are geared towards creation, experimentation, etc...as any sentient being with a long life span is going to ultimately either go mad...or seek something to occupy their attention. Creating worlds might well be a high data pastime...

What would we do if we sent people to explore (if we had the means)? They would likely be a high ratio of scientists. Now imagine if they encountered a planet in the goldilocks zone of a star that had resources we could exploit...we would take what we wanted and experiment with what was left out of curiosity. Assume we have already populated other planets...and are now focusing on gaining materials and scentific discovery. Any hostile, nonsentient life forms would be erradicated to start with via engineered virus.

That scenario just about covers all possibilities, it just depends on the stage of the aliens. If we are a genetic experiment, a global test tube if you will...then who knows when the experiment ends, if ever. No matter what you believe, creationism, evolution, alien creationism....we are a genetic experiment.
 
:alien::alien: There was a TV show called "ALIEN NATION" which showed what MIGHT happen if ETs came here. They were the new people to be DISCRIMINATED AGAINST! :mad::mad::mad:
 
:alien::alien: There was a TV show called "ALIEN NATION" which showed what MIGHT happen if ETs came here. They were the new people to be DISCRIMINATED AGAINST! :mad::mad::mad:
... along with District 9. BTW, if you liked the Alien Nation TV series, be sure to check out the original movie that the series was based on.
 
:eek::eek: District 9 was a NASTY MOVIE! I'm having a hard time even watching Spielberg's "FALLING SKIES". I suppose aliens have to be made nasty and ugly for the average audience to be interested in them.
I saw a rerun of "K-PAX" last night. It was so well-done, with "Prot" as a walk-in ET into Robert's body.
I saw the original "ALIEN NATION" and followed the TV show as well.
"Walk-in" ETs DO HAPPEN. It is as if the body was a car, the original driver moved over and another driver got in to move the body. I have explained that to several people who did not understand what happened to Robert. That is how Prot kept Robert from worrying about the murders. :alien::alien::cool:
 
I think of Independence Day. One group of people was loading their guns and prepping for Interplanetar War I, one group was partying ('I hope they brought Elvis!'), and a bunch of people just went to work as normal.
I think a lot depends on the approach. a single craft with an ambassador might not stir up too much; the younger generation(s), I think, view alien presences as a given, contact inevitable. A boatload of saucers zapping us would of course stir things up considerably.
I think the least-intrusive would be alien traders offering to buy some resources ('People of Earth! We Want Your Ammonia!') and negotiating a deal. 'Yeah, the saucers are all up in Canada working the zinc mines, no biggee.'
 
I think the least-intrusive would be alien traders offering to buy some resources ('People of Earth! We Want Your Ammonia!') and negotiating a deal. 'Yeah, the saucers are all up in Canada working the zinc mines, no biggee.'
Maybe we could get lucky and the aliens have a major need for carbon monoxide. :D
 
that would be a win-win.
I'm increasingly convinced that there are no aliens. besides, we have that fence down on the Rio Grande.
 
We would attempt to kill them because they're different than us, meaning we should fear them...and as a self-defense measure, they'd wipe out all life on this planet. Game over.

Although that's assuming they're a peace-loving species...and don't need our bodies for either slave labor, food and/or spaceship fuel.
 
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