If there's even one intelligent life-form somewhere else in the universe, and that life-form is not only aware of humanity's existence, but also continually observing our behavior, what would you suppose that they think of humanity as a whole?
And before anyone asks, no, this isn't a political question, and therefore it SHOULDN'T generate any political responses. This is only being posted in the political forum in case it somehow STILL manages to generate political responses anyway.
If an extra-terrestrial civilization is technologically advanced enough to be able to observe us, I think they would view us as a non-threat. Nothing more than the banana slug of the universe. If they already viewed earth as a threat, we’d be gone.
Well, if the UFO reports are accurate the extraterrestrials are really fascinated by the buttholes of earth life. What with all the probing and shit?
The time this rick had a close encounter I told those extraterrestrial biological entities (EBEs) that I’d go all frickin’ wildebeest on their asses if they came near my lion-y butthole. That’s when an EBE wearing a stylin’ suit emerged and introduced himself as rick - rickthealien, if you will - and explained they were just funnin’ with us.
rickthealien said that he never probed a dude because that’s kinda homo and shit. rick also said that his bud chuckthealien would say “no homo” before he put a big ol’ hoopajoop up some earth dude’s butthole but rick thought chuck was actually into it.
Now, rick did add that he enjoyed the probing of the sexy earth females. I replied “who doesn’t?” and we shared a bottle of Jack. ROAR!!!
If it's a biological intelligence, the large scale behavior of human societies may be familiar to it. Societies on Earth have similarities driven by economic factors, even when the species in the societies derive from evolutionary branches that separated many millions of generations in the past: en.wikipedia.org . When you consider how economic factors lead to human rather than social insect societies having space programs, it seems likely that technologically advanced extraterrestrials would psychologically be more similar to humans than to social insects. It's not a sure thing they would understand our languages. We have not been able to understand the writings of the ancient Indus Valley civilization.
If it's an artificial intelligence, who knows? Think about what sort of AI Salvador Dali or Jackson Pollock might have created.
Between ricks and chucks, who is the sidekick? Or do they sit at a round table at The Hall of The System?
I think Motorhead has this about right. If they have the technology to observe us, we'd be viewed as mental dust. Crummy little organisms shitting in their own mouths, wallowing in their own filth.
I'm going to fly into Vegas now, and eat a steak with a stripper on my lap to cut and feed me my meat.
If extra-terrestrial intelligence had the tech to take over Earth, they'd have no reason to, there would be easier ways to get the same resources. Unless they needed a few billion emotional support humans. More likely they'd just want our dogs I'd guess.
The West/USSR, West/Russia, and West/China cold wars are all based on the often-exaggerated fear that the opposing side will turn out to be like Nazi Germany. Nobody wants to get caught flat-footed like the WW2 Allies did. Suppose ETI is 1,000 light years from us. Assuming no faster-than-light cheat, they are seeing us 1K years in the past. They estimate it will take 2.5K years until we could destroy them, give or take. They'd have to take the decision to destroy us, in order to have a 500 year safety margin. Otherwise, they're gambling that whatever our culture evolves into will have no reason to destroy them. en.wikipedia.org
When nicespice is elected President, your fav will fly free with you as your emotional support human.
If, it's a big IF, alien life found us: 1) They wouldn't bring their biological bodies here, they'd send drones; 2) whatever vehicle they'd use, I certainly doubt we could detect them. The ability to travel galactically, worm holes whatever as going the speed of light would take too long, would be so advanced cloaking would be simple to them.
To quote Agent K from MiB: "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow."
Now, how are the "Tic Tac" and other anomalies that have been documented by commercial and Navy pilots, and odd behavior at nuclear and ICBM facilities is a good question.
"What with all the probing and shit?"
@rickthelion with Occam's razor in mind, maybe "butt stuff" is just popular throughout the universe... 😂
@ Everyone who has posted so far...
Interesting comments, and I read them all in their entirety. I intentionally left the question a bit open-ended, so it could certainly be answered in terms of whether or not we might be viewed as a threat by a far away life-form. But I'm also curious, how do you think that life-form might view us in other ways besides that? Might we be somewhat highly-regarded? Average compared to other known life in the universe? Hands down the biggest shit show in the Milky Way? What say you guys??? :)
ClubFan, you asked one most interesting questions in a while for this website and I probably should’ve given a serious answer rather than the alien butt stuff answer (though you seem to have appreciated to joke answer).
I think that Sci-Fi movies have distorted our sense of scale for space. Think about the New Horizons space probe to Pluto. It took 9 years to get to Pluto, where light takes about 5.5 hours to travel to Earth. My lion-y point is that the scale of our solar system is unimaginable - and the the distance to the nearest star is almost 7000x larger. So moving from one solar system to another would require enormous amounts of energy.
An interesting consequence of this is that an interstellar spacecraft would actually be easy to detect. Barring some sort of loopholes in physics that are unlikely to exist, any spacecraft capable of moving among the stars would easily be visible for a long time. The stuff like the “Tic Tac” are, in my lion-y opinion, simply what you get when you make sensors very sensitive. Various phenomena, including some everyday things, end up looking weird because they’re at the edge of detectability. And really understanding what is going on is essentially impossible because the military doesn’t want to reveal the capabilities of their sensor systems.
Regarding observation, I think it will soon be possible for us to detect odd chemical signatures in exoplanet atmospheres (well…if you damn dirty apes let the lions and tigers design your space telescopes). Things like our early warning radars would be detectable at quite a distance. If we extrapolate technology in the future, maybe civilization similar to present day would be detectable to an advanced species in the same galaxy. But a lot of these technologies would run up against physical limits that are unlikely to be things we can overcome.
One interesting idea is to image exoplanets by sending a space probe to a point where the sun could be used as a gravitational lens news.stanford.edu
Of course, the distance where imaging an exoplanet would be possible is quite far away - the linked press release says at least 14 times further from the sun than Pluto. Thank about that.
roar…?
intelligent life looks at Earth and shakes their head.
Sci Fi that involves travel to other solar systems tends to assume that faster-than-light motion and communication are somehow possible. Perhaps these will be possible using undiscovered physics underlying quantum entanglement. As nuclear fusion was discovered by discovering the physics underlying radioactivity.
There are known interstellar probes: Voyagers 1 and 2. Not sure how detectable they would be from Earth, if they didn't have radio transmitters pointed at Earth.
Nuclear fission not fusion.
Could extraterrestrial biological intelligence reproduce asexually? This is very difficult. How else besides sex could genomes emerge that combine adaptive mutations? Unlimited or very long life spans are bad for developing BI. It would be adaptive for an organism to limit offspring it the offspring will be competition for food.
Could ETBI exist in a non-social species? Also difficult. How can you get intelligence that results in technology without accumulation of knowledge? You could imagine enormous swarms of fireflies / lightning bugs with as many flies as there are neurons in thousands of human brains. I guess the flies would have to be able to vary the intensity and/or frequency and/or length of flashes, to send varying signals to specific neighbors, the way neurons do. Without this or some other way of scaling up one mind, you need communicating minds, that is, language. I don't think there's any way to evolve language, except with a social species (with no hive mind).
Could ETBI be social, but with societies with no internal competition? Hard. To have fast evolution, every individual (unlike ants) needs a distinct genome. So that gives incentive to a mix of pro-social and self-interested behavior. And to be able to be self-interested while appearing pro-social. It's a theory that primate intelligence was initially driven by the rewards from that sort of deception.
Could ETBI have no concept of religion? Religion has been historically important in motivating the pro-social behavior needed for a society to maintain cohesion and grow. Theism seems to be fading as Science and technology advance. But Western Europeans seem to care more about Global Warming because they are devout Humanists, whereas Americans are lukewarm theists.
Seems highly possible ETBI could have no humor. We use it to manage our anger and fear, so we don't become anti-social and short-sighted. But, seems like could well be just our quirk.
Would ETBI have art? It's probably a big factor whether it's hard to evolve intelligence without also getting the tendency to be bored. Boredom gives language a reason to lead to storytelling. Music and visual art communicate in ways that standardized language can't. But, since it's very hit or miss whether different human cultures appreciate each other's art, ETBI's art would probably be like furry porn is to (allmost all of) us.
What would extraterrestrial artificial intelligence be like? It seems like intelligence has not given biological organisms any new motivations except boredom avoidance. But first phase AI (created by biological intelligence) can simply shut off to avoid boredom. That would probably be carried forward in later phases of AI designed by previous-phase AI. First phase AI will primarily be created to serve the creator BI, and that will be carried forward into later phases. BI will be the beloved pet of AI. The first phase of AI might have AIs created with religious or artistic motivations. These could be accidentally or intentionally malignant to BI. But the AI that needs emotional support BI would probably have much more resources, and would be able to contain the malignant AI.
Our innate sense of empathy strangely seems to extend to other species. Hopefully that would get programmed into first phase AI. ETBI might have enough empathy to risk letting our primitive violent asses exist. ETAI might be more likely to coldly nuke us to protect its pets.
"Might we be somewhat highly-regarded?" If extraterrestrials are watching us, or seed created us millions of years ago as an experiment, we'd be viewed like we view livestock. If something goes wrong, humans have the option to destroy them like if anthrax takes over a herd of cows or bird/chicken virus (most recent) and 100M are destroyed.
2008 "The Day The Earth Stood Still" did an interesting take. I do like this movie better than the original as it is "darker". This is the trailer: youtube.com
This a snippet of the pot I just pulled from Wiki. I tried to find a video clip but couldn't. Bottomline: Klaatu wants to save life on Earth from humans. "Klaatu meets with another alien, Mr. Wu, who has lived on Earth for years. Wu tells Klaatu that the humans are destructive, stubborn, and unwilling to change, which matches Klaatu's experiences. However, Mr. Wu also tells Klaatu that he intends to remain on Earth, as he has grown to love these people. Klaatu orders the smaller spheres to collect specimens of animal species, to preserve them for later reintroduction to the Earth. He clarifies for Helen that he means to save the Earth from destruction by humankind."
The interesting thing, besides humans being self-destructive and a danger to the planet as we already know, is clearly Klaatu has done this on other planets as his species already has that technology.
Just like humans are the apex life on earth and can kill whatever we want, including ourselves, extraterrestrials would view humans as they are the apex life and would have life/death control.
Clearly, whatever would "find" us, would have technology that would make humans look like the opening to "2001: A Space Odyssey" with the ape smashing another ape's head with a bone.
"They've developed language, tools and writing. They discovered agriculture and have harnessed electricity. They have a very basic understanding of nuclear power, molecular biology and very primitive space travel."
"However, they can't seem to give up resource hoarding, killing each other for the dumbest reasons, discrimination based on skin color and gender and sexual preferences. They seem to have peaked a generation of humans ago and are moving in the wrong direction. Recommendation: wipe out and resettle their planet"
Also merit to the theory that ETI will just lock its doors when flying past Earth. Maybe happened with ʻOumuamua.
@rickthelion All good, brother! For me, humor is an essential part of getting through life. I will often give a humorous reply (or at least, my attempt at being humorous), even if I then follow it up with comments that are a bit more serious. :)
And your points about the sheer vastness of space are absolutely correct, and certainly worth repeating. My hypothetical question basically made a few assumptions, any or all of which might be invalid. One assumption I made is that any distant life-form who might be observing us would likely be quite a bit more advanced than ourselves, and may have long ago cleared various hurdles that still seem daunting to us. Another assumption I made is that, with that same high-level of intelligence, it might be trivial for them to "listen in" on us, and comprehend our languages, therefore making it fairly easy for them to understand what is happening on earth. But my assumptions were really just to enable me to pose my question, so my assumptions could be complete crap! lol
@Puddy Tat that quote about driving 1,000 miles is hilarious! Thanks for sharing that! :)
"intelligent life looks at Earth and shakes their head."
@Jascoi Yep, I absolutely agree with that statement. I think they'd likely be amazed that humanity hasn't already destroyed itself...
@ilbbaicnl I don't know, of course, but I'm thinking that highly intelligent alien life might have a great sense of humor? I mean, if a far away life-form ever makes contact with us, I'm sure as hell hoping to hear some great extraterrestrial stand-up! Otherwise, I'd be concerned that they might be here to sell us "solar system insurance" or some shit like that... :)
@mogul1985 Yep, I agree that if we are discovered, or have already been discovered by an extraterrestrial life-form, that we would seem highly primitive compared to them!
@JamesSD If an extraterrestrial life-form was thinking about wiping out humans because of horrible human behavior, would they really be THAT much different than humanity, I wonder? If humanity isn't a direct threat to them, would they actually consider killing off humanity just because they think we deserve it? Would they take pity on us and try to help us? Would they just leave humanity alone, and make bets amongst themselves about whether or not we ever get our shit together??? :)
@Puddy Tat
The question asked in this thread is how an extraterrestrial life-form might view humanity, if they've been aware of our presence and observing us? I have no idea if it's realistic to even consider that humanity might be under observation, so it could be a moot point! However, if we ARE being observed and judged by a highly evolved and intelligent life-form somewhere out there, do you think they would be impressed by the way humanity has behaved over the course of our entire existence?
If the "lead observer" of humanity had to give a final report about our species, would that report even MENTION the politics of a country that has only even existed for a relatively small part of human history??? Is an extraterrestrial life going to do a deep dive on all of humanity's various "reasons" for doing certain things, or are they just going to see us as a species that, for whatever reason(s), just can't ever seem to get its collective shit together? :)
There are already a bazillion threads on the internet debating politics, and all of the various things that are happening on earth. I'm curious how humanity as a whole might be viewed by potential outside observers, and if humanity would even care about whether or not opinions about us are good or bad???
