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Comment by bdamm | Hacker News Reader

The assumption that people's lives would change requires scrutiny. For most I think it would be a promotion of Enquirer headlines to premiere news, but little else. SpaceX would soon become a public company. But what else? Life goes on, unaffected. People still would need to pay their taxes.

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Certainly, the rationale for spending $21Trillion on military superiority instead of investing it in a healthy society, would be minimised.

If it turns out that aliens are on the planet and have advanced technology that could ruin us all, maybe the Pentagon and the Kremlin would find a reason to stop starving their own people for the sake of assumed dominance over the planet, and instead unite to either befriend, or defeat, the common alien friend/foe.

One can imagine the reason all of these events are couched in such secrecy might be, indeed, militaristic hubris. Or, in other words, FOMO at a grand scale ..

You can just as easily argue the opposite. If the aliens are so much more advanced, maybe we need to spend even more in order to catch up.

I'm not saying I think these things, I'm just trying to point out that your conclusion is not a given.

If intelligent aliens get to our planet and have any kind of aggressive intentions no amount of spending would save us. It means they already have capabilities far beyond what we could achieve in a generation and proved them by just getting to us.

> It means they already have capabilities far beyond what we could achieve

It certainly means that they have those capabilities as pertains to travel, but it is not a given that they would have those capabilities in a military sense. Of course the argument can be made that you can convert that kind of power into a weapon, but I'd hazard to say that a haphazard conversion does not in fact impart upon you a godlike ability to ignore everything we could possibly do.

I'm definitely not arguing that this means we should increase military spending. I think that is fundamentally not a great idea for us in the first place. Instead, I am arguing that while the things you are talking about are widely used as sci-fi tropes and held as beliefs by a lot of people, I do not think they stand on their own merits.

The most deadly terrorist attack on the US used civilian passenger planes. A UFO doesn't need weapons to be massively destructive. E = 0.5 * m * v^2, and UFOs reportedly go a lot faster than a 767. And if they're too agile to shoot down, and never need to land or refuel, that's "a godlike ability to ignore everything we could possibly do".

If you can project an object to another planet in any reasonable span of time, you already have vast military capabilities against that planet. All you have to do is not decelerate.

No reason to believe the UFOs reached the Earth in a "reasonable" amount of time, though. There are many other interesting possibilities.

Logistics.

A well equipped squad of marines would still eventually succumb to a gird of barbarians unless they could resupply.

I think the magnitude of the difference between the opposing parties is a lot greater when it comes to comparing humans to an alien civilization capable of projecting some force light years away from their home in a reasonable amount of time.

It's more like neolithic man meets nuclear submarine... but worse. We have 0 tools at our disposal to fight anything that's farther away than the edge of the atmosphere. "They" can take a few decades to accelerate a really massive "civilization ending" object and slam it into us. It's not like we can go anywhere to avoid it.

Why do you assume these UFOs reached the Earth in a "reasonable" amount of time? The possibility that they were roaming the space for hundreds or even thousands of years before reaching our planet is as reasonable as any other.

Even if an alien civilization finds our planet, I don't see why that would imply we are inside their logistic operational range.

The need to “defend from aliens” would become the rationale to spend $60T. Oh, and after the money is gone it would turn out there are no aliens after all. Similar to what happened in Iraq.

I am amused by the idea of "infidels" from space.

Poul Anderson's The Word to Space is a 1960 novelette about missionarism from an alien planet.

If they're real, and if they have their claimed technology level, why do they only reveal themselves in such a bizarre way? The argument that it's to gradually condition humanity into accepting extraterrestrial life is implausible, because there has been no significant change in their alleged activities for many decades. Why wouldn't they instead plant microbes on Mars, or something like that? They could gradually increase the surprise level until they can reveal themselves openly.

Assuming they are real, the aliens do not act in a way consistent with a goal-directed intelligence, which means they are not the product of evolution, which means they are something so strange that the idea of befriending or defeating them makes no sense. They're something more like this story: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-th...

You make valid points. For a long time I was looking for such answers. Unfortunately, there aren't many clever arguments like yours anywhere outside of HN.

>> Assuming they are real, the aliens do not act in a way consistent with a goal-directed intelligence, which means they are not the product of evolution, which means they are something so strange that the idea of befriending or defeating them makes no sense.

This. If - and that's a big if - we assume previous bizarre aerial activities observed by humans were in fact of ET origin, then it's only natural to think of those ETs more like AI (robots) that don't necessarily share our goal-oriented intelligence, but rather possess higher levels of intelligence and their own agenda. As a result, you're right; we wouldn't even begin to understand their purpose cause theirs just has no counterpart in humans.

Even humans don't always behave in clearly goal-oriented activities. Consider how hard it is to explain practical jokes, religious ritual, or modern performance art. ET intelligence would presumably have equally inscrutable motivations.

Given the distances and ages required for interstellar travel, these things are more likely unmanned probes than busses filled with tourists.

> It has been theorized that a self-replicating starship utilizing relatively conventional theoretical methods of interstellar travel (i.e., no exotic faster-than-light propulsion, and speeds limited to an "average cruising speed" of 0.1c.) could spread throughout a galaxy the size of the Milky Way in as little as half a million years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft

If they're real, and if they have their claimed technology level, why do they only reveal themselves in such a bizarre way?

They only have a tiny poorly manned outpost?

They could just be making observations and taking measurements. Maybe they don't want to interfere and are more interested in studying our development.

Or maybe they are scouts that were sent all over the cosmos for the purpose of exploration and they will report back their findings to their home eventually.

There are plenty of rational explanations for their behavior, especially if we are extremely far behind them in our technological development.

> Assuming they are real, the aliens do not act in a way consistent with a goal-directed intelligence

Are you sure you know what their goals would be?

I don't know if faster-than-light travel would necessarily accompany other technologies indistinguishable from magic.

The Romans were arguably a flash of insight away from the hot air balloon, they had good uses for it and all the prerequisite techs. Analogously, we might be one really good flash of insight away from technology we'll just actually get a thousand years from now. So the aliens could be otherwise on our tech level, but they just figured out warp drive.

Very interesting thought. Imagine optical telegraph relay stations, or scouting with moored hot air balloons. Nothing could probably shoot them down, either.

Who says that warp drive even requires most of the things in our tech tree? I'm reminded of Turtledove's "The Road Not Taken" here: https://eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf

+1, what a brilliant piece of fiction, thanks!

So we're using an imaginary alien threat to justify massive military spending while literally destroying billions of dollars by just eliminating it from the economy through stock buybacks.

Fictional times indeed. Just don't think too hard about the money.

You're assuming that an alien race isn't partisan. Any intelligent alien species intent on harming humans would probably seek to exploit existing weaknesses and increase division. Who's to say they wouldn't ally with the worst humans imaginable in order to prevent humanity coming together in the first place?

I think it would change a lot of people's belief systems in a major way.

E.g. how would the major organised religions cope with the revelation (pun intended) that there was life that originated off of Earth/outside of the garden of eden?

For a lot of people who take religion seriously, I feel like this could be a major upset. It might not affect "day to day life" in terms of the lights staying on and there being food on the shelves, but there could be a significant personal impact on a lot of people which may lead to a lot of things like depression/substance-abuse/suicides/general-"fuck it, its the end end of world, I am going to <x>"-sentiment/etc that will have knock-on effects (e.g. not turning up for work, abandoning family/responsibilities, running away to live as a hermit in the woods, gun hoarding etc)

> how would the major organised religions cope with the revelation (pun intended) that there was life that originated off of Earth/outside of the garden of eden?

Like they've dealt with every other scientific advancement that killed their beliefs. They will deny it as much and as long as they can until they will be forced to admit it, at which point "god" will shrink to an even meaningful pocket of scientific ignorance. Some of them will keep denying it forever

The Catholics address the question every so often.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/shortcuts/2014/may/14/po...

Not just us Catholics; I think the real big takeaway from that article is this: “Three years ago, a paper for the Royal Society found that roughly 90% of believers did not think they would suffer a crisis of faith should intelligent extraterrestrial life be discovered, though two-thirds of them believed other religions would have a crisis.”

Nearly everyone is fine with this idea, but most everyone also thinks people with religious views different than their own will have trouble with it.

Easy. No need to claim the Garden of Eden is on Earth.

Except the Genesis account pretty clearly establishes that it is.

The garden of Eden story isn't even consistent with the other creation story in Genesis, though; if a literalist can accept it as true on faith despite that, they can do so despite any inconsistency with mere sense data, which unlike the conflicting text in the Bible they don't hold to be infallibly accurate as a matter of religious doctrine.

"organised Abhrahamic religion"

Non-abrahamic religions like Hinduism,Jainism, Buddhism, believes in existence of world systems other than current one.

Buddhism is especially is accommodative in terms of acceptance, of evidences that refutes Buddhist world view[0].

[0]http://www.openculture.com/2016/09/carl-sagan-the-dalai-lama...

Not quite. At the very beginning of the first chapter in the Quran: https://quran.com/1/2

> how would the major organised religions cope with the revelation (pun intended) that there was life that originated off of Earth/outside of the garden of eden?

The major religions have already shown how they deal with evidence of outside of the garden of Eden. Several don't care, because the garden isn't part of their belief system to start with, and most of the rest have no problem with it (because they don't view the garden as literal), and the remainder just dismiss the evidence and distrust the entire field of science associated with it.

I don't think expanding that to off Earth is likely to change a thing about those responses, though the details of exactly which groups have each response might be a little different (though I suspect not much.)

Expanding on this idea, it is unlikely that another inconsistency between a belief system and reality is going to change a believers mind when there are so many inconsistencies (in every belief system) explained away already. This is the nature of belief - it persists despite all evidence to the contrary, because it is belief, not reason. E.g. belief in flat earth persists, despite all evidence to the contrary.

I know most people on hackernews think this but how do you categorize the following

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fqQrT84kjc4

> For a lot of people who take religion seriously, I feel like this could be a major upset.

I doubt it.

If the last few years have taught me anything, it's that no amount of evidence can dissuade someone from believing something they want to believe in.

> For a lot of people who take religion seriously, I feel like this could be a major upset.

I don't think it would change anything for them. We're living in a golden age of science, and that did not change anything for them. The existence of aliens would just be one more thing to either reject or literally bedevil.

Or, accept in a greater sense. Like, "God is so great, he created all these planets, and the Garden of Eden is representative of that creation everywhere." That's what I would hope for, anyway. Certainly in the event that the aliens turn out to be ones that do sexual reproduction.

The same God that created life on Earth could have done so on any number of other planets for the same effort.

Humans began in the Garden of Eden, but that's only one species, albeit an important one.

It is easier to square religion with life on other planets than it is to square the odds of evolution happening in a similar way on multiple planets.

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