Astronomers discovered 1M new galaxies in 300 hours

Or made from what was learned

Many bright young minds would be lured into PhD programs.

We’ll be studying what they did a long time ago, as it takes many years for their light to reach us. We’ll be studying their history.

It's most likely to be dust getting in the way. Who knows?

Maybe it's a dyson sphere, maybe not. Any stellar engineering project will /probably/ be ambiguous enough that discovery of other industrial life will be a slow gradual process like most scientific discoveries. With fractionally more of the populace accepting the premise with each piece of accumulated evidence.

What would that change for religious people? There’s already tons of contradictions uncovered by science that conflict with religions in many ways (such as the earth being older than 5,000 years), the believers won’t ever budge.

"Sweet, somewhere new to send missionaries!"

"Omg, God is amazing!"

"If exotic matter with the correct properties cannot exist, then the drive cannot be constructed" seems like a fairly hefty obstacle at this point.

"no question of it physically coming here" was a premise of the question, not a consequence. Viability of Alcubierre drives would invalidate the whole scenario.

I’ve thought about the idea of exporting political dissent to a fake alien threat. “We’ve always been at war with South East Alpha Centauri.” People who find out its fake would be incentivized to keep the charade going those who do not would be labeled cranks. Though I can’t help but think that without political dissent we’d quickly end up with feudalism.

Why not both?

The worst part about how awful the Warhammer 40k universe is IMO is how very human the Imperium is. They hate the xenos. They hate the heretics. They hate themselves, each other, and everything else.

Hate! Hate! Hate! An emotion as pure as it is deep! Hate! Hate! Hate! Let it flow, let it run free!

—Inspirational Verse, Imperial Hymnal Vol. IV

Humans rarely stop hating one another because of a foreign threat, instead we just add more hate to the pile. Quite depressing.

I wonder how such a proof would look like lol. God coming here to tell us?

That would indeed be suprising from a logistical standpoint. How would we manage it?

There's debate over whether viruses qualify, and trillions of planets to check for microscopic stuff.

I disagree.

Religions would face a huge obstacle in bridging their creation myths, more people would become atheist and non-religious.

Knowing something is possible is a hugely motivating factor. The department of defense and every international analog would want bigger and bolder weapons, money would pour into science. We'd fund astronomy and space exploration orders of magnitude more. There would be a renewed push for humans on Mars and beyond.

We'd want to know if alien life was biological or an AGI. We'd push harder on our own advances, but also become more aware of how this acceleration affects us.

We'd keep looking for life in our backyard. We'd be worried about it. Popular science and science fiction would communicate that risk and would lead to new cultural overtones. Zombies and superhero movies get replaced with alien invasion films.

I think we'd accelerate everything.

Edit: my post is proving controversial because of my statement on religion, which totally flies over my main point. With regard to religion: (1) I haven't made any value judgments, (2) the impact of science, technology, and modern culture has deceased religiously in the West measurably. I should think incontrovertible proof of alien life would only contribute to this trend.

I think you're underestimating the effect of evolution. But at the same time, evolution already did most of the work that discovering aliens might have done, so I think you're right in your conclusions.

It would accelerate technology a bit by giving conclusive proof that some things — fusion drives, megastructures — are not only possible but seen as desirable by another civilization. So they at least aren’t total dead ends, therefore worth investing in.

> And there would be denialists and conspiracy theorists, people who would blame it on some group as an effort to change their deeply held beliefs and views.

Given recent experience with other incontrovertible things like climate change and COVID, and the public's plummeting trust of science, technology, experts, and institutions, I'd guess the denialists would be more than a handful, probably more than 50%. Right off the bat, most devout Christians will deny it as a hoax since it calls into question more of their holy book's version of history. If the announcement is made by anyone associated with the government, like NASA, an additional 40% or so of the population will deny it because it was announced by the government of "the other" political party. Beyond that, you have the growing band of professional contrarians who will deny it simply because an expert discovered it--the more incontrovertible the evidence is, the stronger they will deny it and be convinced they're right. There will be many calls to "do your own research [on YouTube]".

I fear the world would just keep on chugging along, with the majority in denial, ridiculing "those silly ivory tower elites thinking they know everything with their telescopes and education".

The qualificatiom I made in my question was to ask what the effect eould be on us if there was no two way exchange of information. We see them, they're far away, they are unaware of us or don't care.

I see this as the most likely alien discovery scenario, because so far we haven't seen any, so they are probably pretty far away.

Does the current location of the earth affect that coordinate system at all, or i is negligible due to distances?

JWST has unmatched sensitivity for galaxy searches but a fairly narrow field of view. To cover the same area as this survey (whole southern sky) would take about 15 million JWST frames.

My current science obsession is "how much iron is in the sun?" This is an especially fun rabbit hole to explore because the theorys range from "fractional percentages" to "the sun is the stellar remnant of an exploded star and most of it is iron".

The fractional percentage camp is based off the observed spectrum. the most of it camp is based off observed material composition in the solar system.

Here is the stellar remnant theory. I found it a bit extreme, but fun to think about.

https://arxiv.org/ftp/astro-ph/papers/0410/0410569.pdf

Personally I would bet on the sun(as it is a second generation star)having a more substantial iron core than first thought, probably a quarter of the mass, too much iron, there would be no fusion, but it does not make any sense to me that as full of iron as the inner solar system is there would be negligible amounts in the center of the sun. Perhaps there is an unknown mechanism that prevents the iron from creating photons to sus out with spectrography(my guess is the thousands of kilometers of hydrogen around the core).

I could imagine that climate change is a filter for all technological civilizations. (I'm convinced that all life must be based on carbon, so that's my base assumption for the sake of this comment.) Civilizations that exist before fossil fuels had the time to form won't become technological, and all technological civilizations must keep the window from the beginning of industrialization to the ability of producing sufficient clean energy small enough to keep their planet habitable. Clean energy meaning either using only solar and wind while keeping consumption low or inventing fusion quickly enough. (Not sure about fission.)

I think that's one scenario of the Fermi paradox.

I don’t think I’m a dumb person. There’s some complex stuff I can understand, but whenever this comes up, I just can’t wrap my head around the shape of the universe and why is it exactly that the universe started somewhere and now I can look far enough in any direction and see not only that place, but also in the time it happened. Mind boggling.

Indeed it doesn’t even need to be that small — even a 10^-28 chance makes it unlikely to have arisen anywhere else in the observable universe.

Newer observations suggest 200 billion with an average of 100 million stars per galaxy and 3-10 planets per star. 60,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets on the low end? Yeesh.

The time aspect is important.

Life on Earth took 10 billion years from the Big Bang to emerge. No evidence indicates any other planet did it before us.

I think most galaxies we see are younger than that.

Our single example of life has already shown that getting objects to other planets is possible. There shouldn't be any fundamental barriers beyond what we've already accomplished. It's a matter of engineering and resources at this point.

Unless you mean something very different by "properly", it's pretty clear that there will be multiplanetary life out there if it exists at all.