Re: What has, and would happen, realistically, at first contact?
I've been asked to visit this thread, and I've glanced through the 5 pages that have sprung up overnight, and unfortunately I don't really have a lot to add.
It's like asking what would probably happen if water were put into contact with something. Kind of depends on the what it's put into contact with. A piece of wood is likely to give a very different reaction than, say...a handful of sodium powder. We can probably make good guesses how
we'll react. And the reaction is likely to be varied. The militaries of the world are likely to react differently than your average baby boomer who grew up watching ET.
In any case, if you want a personal guess...I think it likely that a lot of the speculation, the "let's say you're the first human to make alien contact" info sheet, and a lot of the rest probably won't be very relevant. For the simple reason some have mentioned:
Space Is Really Big. Any species able to
get to us stands a pretty good chance of being a
Sufficiently Advanced Race.
If anyone has been following the
old people technophobes thread, you'll see the obvious connection. There are people who don't believe that we ever landed on the moon. There are people who find it a little bit scary to realize that their kids are playing computer games with people on other continents. And even over the course of that discussion, there have been a few instances of a technology being mentioned...and one of our very own bay12ers (who are generally, I would say, above average in terms of science and technology awareness than the average person) not believing that such things existed.
So what happens when the "alien" shows up wearing a human body, without ever having bothered with a ship, because he simply materialized the body on the planet he wanted to visit without bothering to cross the distance? And he speaks every human language on the entire planet, is capable of "hearing" radio and television transmissions just as easily as speech, can communicate telepathically with anyone on the planet just by directing his focus to them. And might be doing it with thousands of people simultaneously independently of what his body is doing. Or maybe he materialized a hundred bodies and operates them all simultaneously. And some of them are operating a hundred years ago, and in the future, and he perceives time as a singular whole rather than a sequence of events?
How are people going to react to that? It doesn't fit with the classic first contact scenario, but any of that might be on the table. There's nothing "magical" of "fantastic" about any of this. Just imagine what might happen if, just as an example, a modern air force carrier were to be transported to, say...1000 AD. Would the aircraft be perceived as anything other than dragons, or chariots of the gods? Would marines in combat uniforms be recognized as human, or merely "humanlike" creatures? When a man can speak into a headpiece that far all the natives know if just an antenna like a bug has, and then two minutes later
missles fire descends from the heavens...what would they think?
Are they going to think "oh, yeah...just humans from the future with some better chariots and stuff." Or are they going to think these creatures to be gods? That's a thousand year difference in technology. How might modern humans perceive aliens with technology a thousand years ahead of ours? The difference might be about the same.
Many humans may have difficulty adapting. And...from their point of view, it's possible they may be hesitant to get involved because they
know how difficult it could be.
It may well be that we're not talking about a "first" contact scenario at all, but rather...a second or third or fourth contact scenario. And they're holding back because they learned to be cautious after unintentionally starting the egyptian, hindu and other religions.
Author
Topic: What has, and would happen, realistically, at first contact? (Read 38997 times)