Is Humanity Ready for First Contact?

[AFTT47]

I see 3 possibilities:

1. Star Trek - style warp drive is possible and practical. Furthermore, it is doable within a relatively very short time from our current state of development - say 200 years or less.

2. Star Trek - style warp drive is possible and practical but not anytime soon. Starting from our current state of development, it is many hundreds or even thousands of years away.

3. Star Trek - style warp drive is either flat-out impossible or impracticable within several thousand years of our current development.

I don't see how we would be remotely ready for First Contact in any situation other than Possibility #1. Even in that case, I doubt it very much. Technology is moving so fast. I'm 57 years old. When I was a child and young adult, everything I learned had to come from personal contacts or books. Now, I have the entire sum of human knowledge available at my fingertips via the internet. That is an enormous advance. What about 50 years hence? We are on the verge of being able to mix man and machine. If I could survive for another 50 years, I might be able to merge my mind with a planetary computer network and seamlessly take advantage of massive calculative ability and limitless knowledge. I might be a superior being, able to draw upon resources not available to anyone who lives now.

The ages of stars are typically hundreds of millions of years apart! Can you imagine that? Just over 100 years ago, Orville Wright flew the first heavier than air craft for a few hundred feet. Now, we routinely launch craft into orbit. All that advance in just 100 years. Can you imagine how much advance there will be in a thousand years? But the ages of stars are hundreds of millions of years apart!!!

If you collect any two intelligent races at random, they are likely to be so far apart that one would view the other as insects while the other would view their more advanced neighbors as nothing less than gods. They will have nothing in common at all.

I love the fictional universes of Star Trek, Babylon 5 and Star Wars but they are pure folly. In the most optimistic assumptions, races close to the same level of development will be thousands of light years apart. And even then, the lesser race is not likely to benefit much from the more advanced race. This is something Star Trek probably got right. Interfering of the development of a lesser species will probably only hurt them.

[Kernel Sohcahtoa]

The ages of stars are typically hundreds of millions of years apart! Can you imagine that? Just over 100 years ago, Orville Wright flew the first heavier than air craft for a few hundred feet. Now, we routinely launch craft into orbit. All that advance in just 100 years. Can you imagine how much advance there will be in a thousand years? But the ages of stars are hundreds of millions of years apart!!!

If you collect any two intelligent races at random, they are likely to be so far apart that one would view the other as insects while the other would view their more advanced neighbors as nothing less than gods. They will have nothing in common at all.

I absolutely loved your post.  Your reference to the age of stars being millions of years apart made me analogize human development with the concept of an integral: on a universal scale, our current development is like one extremely thin sheet of the total volume of an object.  As time passes,  we can fill in our developmental object with millions of sheets, and what a marvel this level of development would be (and this would still be far from the finished product!).  Hence, the more sheets we stack into our object, the closer we get to truly uncovering and appreciating the genius and beauty of its totality.  Perhaps, if humanity stops holding themselves back with self-constructed barriers of our perceived limitations and puts their insatiable curiosity to pursue and understand the unknown into full, unimpeded action and motion, then we just might be able to complete our development and possibly advance beyond it (whatever that may be).

[Edwardo Piet]

Suppose there is a broader community of sentient life-forms who are remarkably advanced (socially and technologically). Do you think they would be interested in learning about humanity?  

Yes. I think curiosity and intelligence go hand in hand. Even if our intelligence is like an amoeba by comparison to theirs they would be interested for the same reason we would be interested in an amoeba civilization.

[Homeless Nutter]

I don't understand why people seem to assume, that "First Contact" would be face-to-face, or perhaps even probe-to-anus. I'm pretty sure any civilization capable of advanced space-flight, would have radio-technology, or some similar means of long-range communications. If the aliens showed up on our doorstep unannounced - that could only mean nefarious purposes. And quite frankly - I don't think there's much on Earth worth traveling millions of light-years for.

But no - I don't think humans are ready for aliens, be it friendly, or malicious ones. Look at all the upset about people of slightly different skin-tone moving into neighborhoods. If earthly bigots and religious morons found out there was another race in outer space, that might potentially come over here - they would collectively lose their sh*t. I'd give anything to see that...

[Edwardo Piet]

Humanity is definitely definitely definitely definitely not ready.

But even if we're not ready... if a nuclear world war 3 was about to start and there are benevolent super powerful aliens out there watching from a distance... I would certainly think their intervention would be welcomed.

Their contact in that case can't be worse than fucking WW3.

[LastPoet]

We are not ready. Any civilization that can visit us, either would outright enslave us or stay away and let us mature.

When we contemplate the size and age of the Universe, how many have come and gone. How many will come and gone after our end? How many are there but at galactic distances they don't know we are here?

It is a real big place, this universe. I am just glad to begin to understand a little bit of it.

[brewer]

Bark, bark, wooooof, arf, ruff! (translate = take me to your leader)

[bennyboy]

It seems to me unlikely that there'd be a community. It's very possible that we would be the ONLY other lifeform they were aware of. And yes, they'd be pretty damned interested in us, I'd guess.

[I_am_not_mafia]

We could be visited by the remains of a civilisation that died out many hundreds of millions of year ago.

Think about the current state of our own development. We're fast reaching the limits of what this planet can sustain and using up all its natural resources, so we're already looking to harvest the abundant resources found in space.

Space is a hostile environment for biological organisms, but it needn't be so hostile to robots. There's enough energy in space from the sun, and enough materials in asteroid that you could set up a system where robots mine and send resources back down to Earth. Escaping Earth's gravity well is expensive so it's better to have robots mend themselves in space, and if you can do that, also eventually replicate new robots.

You now have a system which grows exponentially over time, like life does on Earth. And then it will start to spread out to the further edges of the solar system. Robots would have to have the ability to shut down for prolonged periods of time and then boot up again once they reach a new power source. So given trillions of robots, you could expect some of them to spread to other solar systems and start a new population that grows there.

For all we know, the whole galaxy might be in the process of being eaten up and we wouldn't even know until they reached here.

No fancy Physics, just time and probability. We might even be the race that ends up destroying the galaxy.

[Cyberman]

Bark, bark, wooooof, arf, ruff! (translate = take me to your leader)

Take me to your dealer.