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Comment by JoeDaDude | Hacker News Reader

IMHO, not very much. Scientists would be all over it, trying to measure and study what they found. The public at large would speculate wildly on what the aliens would look like, what their society or philosophy would be like, etc. But in the absence of any new information, interest would die out and it would be just another bit of knowledge that humans adapt to, sort of like when heliocentrism took over or when evolution was discovered.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

> Religions would face a huge obstacle in bridging their creation myths

Religions have faced and easily overcome that obstacle countless times.

They don't have to follow logic, which makes them pretty resilient.

I trust you don’t know many Jesuits…

Have I got some reading that's going to knock your socks off. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aquinas/

Example, in modern concise English: https://open.library.okstate.edu/introphilosophy/chapter/aqu...

Original excerpt: https://homepages.uc.edu/~martinj/The%20Infinite/Aquinas%20-...

As an atheist and a scientist, Aquinas' works are still amazing to me.

Given how much religiosity has declined I don’t think that’s true at all.

Religions have survived declines before; the Catholic Church counts 1.3 billion adherents despite the Reformation. New ones crop up, too; perhaps a thousand years from now Scientology will be the world's largest.

There's plenty of evidence that religions can survive doctrinal challenges; Catholics largely decided evolution was God's mechanism for creation, while some Protestants decided it was a Satanic trick.

The real challenge evolution puts to the Judeo-Christian creation story is not the physical creation of the universe (which most denominations do not take to be literal), but that man’s knowledge of good and evil sets us apart from the rest of creation. Evolution would say a human beings moral sense is simply an evolutionary response to the environment rather than “good” and “evil” being real things.

You don't need much imagination to come up with some sort of apologetic for that concept; "oh, God set evolution in motion, and didn't instill souls until we got to a certain point". It's very doable.

Look at things like Sabbath elevators and the 18 miles of fishing line that rings Manhattan (https://www.npr.org/2019/05/13/721551785/a-fishing-line-enci...). Religion is ever-flexible; humans are clever when motivated to come up with a solution.

i think religion that we are created by alien exists.

> Religions would face a huge obstacle in bridging their creation myths

Counter point. Religions with a very rigid view of highly sentient life being unique to earth and humans would have a hard time. Others would say that the universe produces sentience wherever it can and it is fundamental to the universe. You see this sort of idea, of sentience permeating the cosmos, in pantheistic and / or less antropocentric religions. It would be seen by some as a validation.

Religious worldviews are very diverse.

Whenever someone says 'religions' in the western hemisphere, it usually means Christianity. E.g. Islam fundamentally will not have a crisis even if alien life is discovered because it doesn't disprove the existence and oneness of a Creator which is Islam's strict monotheism denotes.

I'd assume Islam would have a pretty tough time too, as the centuries of accreted dogma needed to be updated from a human-centric to intelligent-life-centric perspective.

The stronger the dogma, the more heretical change is. And there are a lot of very dogmatic Islamic branches.

The problem isn't that theology cannot be harmonized with intelligent alien life, it's that such an expansion of the universe would highlight the hyper-provincialism of an already highly provincial religion.

Most religious creation myths are already disproven by evolution, age of earth and many other things.

If religiosity was based on rational weighing of evidence, it would already be gone. But that's the wrong model. There is not enough room to describe the right model in this margin :)

Also, new religions arise all the time, which can incorporate the latest data.

Religiosity is based on a rational weighing of evidence... according to the person's individual understanding of the world.

That's why I tend to agree with echelon.

There's a big difference in the ability to ignore genetic statistics and measurements strongly proving evolution... and "Aliens exist."

The latter would more deeply penetrate the average person's understanding, and hence couldn't be ignored and would have to be incorporated into religious worldviews. It'd look a lot like the geocentric to heliocentric conversion, except bigger.

And like heliocentricity, an extraterrestrial civilization existing would only accumulate further alternate evidence over time, which would crowd dogmatic denialists into tighter and tighter corners.

> Religiosity is based on a rational weighing of evidence... according to the person's individual understanding of the world.

We think that's how our brains work, but in reality unconscious processes decide what would be an advantageous belief to have, and another part (sometimes called "the press secretary") comes up with a rationalization that we believe is really why.

It's not that black and white, because there's also socialization and societal drift.

One can not simply opt to not believe what everyone around them accepts.

Agreed. That's part of what I meant.

Some part of you realizes that it's better to fit in with the society you're part of than to take a stand for the truth of atheism. And so you become a believer.

I think most religions would have a harder time if no life was found elsewhere in the universe. I am religious and my religions teaches that ours is only one of an innumerable number of worlds that God has created and populated. We expect to find intelligent life everywhere in the universe.

> 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".

> professional contrarians who will deny it simply because an expert discovered it

I don't think that's why professional contrarians deny things: they do so because it makes them $$$.

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