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Brian Swartz · 01-09-2022, 02:01 PM

The thing about all that historical precedent is that it only tells us what intelligent life similar to humans would be likely to do. Alien advanced life could be far worse or far better than our example, and we have no way of knowing which as we have exactly zero sample size there.

What's going to be interesting to me is what happens if James Webb finds an atmosphere suitable for life - i.e significant amounts of oxygen, etc - on one of the exoplanets. It's one of those 'that would be really cool' moments, but we're unlikely in the extreme to know whether there actually is life there, and it will probably be far enough away that even if there *was* life there it may not still be there anymore, and there's certainly nothing we'd be able to do about it in any relevant timeframe vis a vis contacting them.

My guess is if that happens the internet goes crazy for a while in certain circles but it all amounts to a fat lot of nothing. Even if we found artificial lights on Proxima B which is probably the best case scenario for the 'we want to find aliens' crowd, we aren't close to the point where it's feasible to send a probe there, establish contact, etc. So what exactly do we do about it?

01-09-2022, 02:01 PM	#212
Brian Swartz Grizzled Veteran Join Date: May 2006	The thing about all that historical precedent is that it only tells us what intelligent life similar to humans would be likely to do. Alien advanced life could be far worse or far better than our example, and we have no way of knowing which as we have exactly zero sample size there. What's going to be interesting to me is what happens if James Webb finds an atmosphere suitable for life - i.e significant amounts of oxygen, etc - on one of the exoplanets. It's one of those 'that would be really cool' moments, but we're unlikely in the extreme to know whether there actually is life there, and it will probably be far enough away that even if there was life there it may not still be there anymore, and there's certainly nothing we'd be able to do about it in any relevant timeframe vis a vis contacting them. My guess is if that happens the internet goes crazy for a while in certain circles but it all amounts to a fat lot of nothing. Even if we found artificial lights on Proxima B which is probably the best case scenario for the 'we want to find aliens' crowd, we aren't close to the point where it's feasible to send a probe there, establish contact, etc. So what exactly do we do about it? Last edited by Brian Swartz : 01-09-2022 at 02:02 PM.