What if aliens found us?

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Food For Thought: What if we found aliens in an alien ocean? Would they be extraterrestrial life forms ... or would we call them extramarine life forms? Really makes you think ...

I dunno. I'm running out of political messages to post on this site and so I'm devoting my time to aliens instead.

Oh, I didn't realize this was a spec thread, thought it was about actual things NASA and the ESA are looking at/for and how that could play out. My bad. Shoulda read the fine print.

Vivent les organismes silicieuses, methane gas intelligences half the size of our galaxy, etc. etc.

I've got the people-eater trope stuck in my head after reading reviews of "A Quiet Place" online yesterday. I will never be able to watch that movie after reading about it. Reviews are excellent, I'm just too squeamish. Urgggkk.

Carry on...

(Edit in: couldn't resist. My two favorite aliens, courtesy of YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkbWF-kDK8Y

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7piG2V17cH8 ).

Last edited by Esmerelda Weatherwax on 12 Apr 2018, 6:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Even if we did somehow meet with aliens, other barriers would make interaction challenging. Perhaps they would have difficulty handling earth's gravity. Perhaps they would have difficulty handling the earth's temperature. Perhaps they'd be much larger or much smaller than human beings. In any case, they would have difficulty using human tools, which are generally designed for the human body. Communication would also be a challenge. They may see an entirely different type of radiation, instead of what we call visible light. Their ears may not even hear our voices, just as we have difficulty hearing many of the noises that bats make. They would certainly have tremendous difficulty speaking our languages.

Many sci-fi shows treat an alien encounter as if it were just like an encounter between two human civilisations ... but that's not how it would work at all.

The "extra" in this sense means "outside of", or "beyond". "Extraterrestrial life forms" are critters that live "outside of, or beyond Earth" (Terra means "earth").

WE are "extramarine lifeforms" ourselves because we "live outside of sea water" on land.

If we traveled to Alpha Centauri and found a watery planet with fishlike creatures those creatures would simply be "extraterrestrial marine creatures".

Some sci-fi stories even feature creatures from alternate universes ... though they would be even weirder.

Life forms from an alternate universe would scarcely even resemble life. We likely wouldn't even recognize them as life ... assuming we could even see them. They also may not even be affected by gravity. After all, they may not contain the Higgs Boson or a similar particle with the same function.

Perhaps creatures from another universe would have more than four spacial dimensions. For example, they might have four-dimensional jewels shaped like tesseracts. They could potentially warp the space around them with their mere presence.

What if we got visitors from a universe that was actually created by a God? What would that be like?

These critters from another universe might already invading and populating earth, evading detection, defying gravity, and could be what are commonly known as.....FAIRIES!! !! !

So by your own logic fairies might well be real!! !!

Gotcha!

If extra-terrestrial life finds us (before we humans ever discover alien life), then extra-terrestrials are probably more socially/technically advanced than earthlings. That being said, they'd probably keep their distance, and not bother visiting us e.g., an extra-terrestrial sentiment, "we don't have time for those 'backwards' harmful earthlings!"

It's reasonable to assume that intelligent extra-terrestrial beings are not necessarily primates and will not behave as such. Moreover, there is probably thousands of light years between each intelligent civilization, meaning that they wil never come in contact with each other, save for time capsules similar to Voyager.

If there are human-like extra-terrestrials "nearby", they might not want to interfere with our history and future development.

Anybody familiar with The 'Drake Equation?' The equation is a formula for estimating the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial civilizations.

LINK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

Oh yes. One of the mainstays of the search for ET is the Drake Equation. Read about it in a book in Jr. High only a few years after Drake published the equation for the first meeting of SETI in Greenbank in 1961.

Taking what is known and trying to extrapolate into the unknown. Take the number of stars in the galaxy and winnow it down to the number likely that might sapient beings with radio and TV communication that we could evesdrop on.

The values for many of the variables then, and still are, highly conjectural. Drake himself came up with a low value of 40 (just forty), and a high value of 60 million. The number of radio using civilizations in the galaxy could be as low the number of kids in a classroom, or as high as the entire population of the UK.

Back then in 1961 they hadn't discovered any exoplanets yet. But since 1994 they have discovered hundreds. So we do know that there are other solar systems with planets out there.

I thought of something else. What if we found intelligent aliens, but they were microscopic?

Imagine this. You are a space explorer and you go to another planet. You look around and you don't see much life. Then, you look at the ground and you see a very tiny city. You examine this city with a microscope and you discover that this tiny city contains tiny little intelligent aliens.

Then, you accidentally kill their emperor by inhaling him. In retaliation, they shoot tiny little missiles at you.

Would it even be possible to properly communicate with intelligent aliens if there were a massive size difference between them and us? Would they even perceive us as living beings? Perhaps they would instead see us as forces of nature.

This raises further questions. Perhaps some planets and stars are alive, but we just don't recognize them as living beings, because the size difference renders effective communication impossible.