• cattywampas@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    Anybody who knows anything about science knows that an announcement of alien life would not be a bombshell press conference by any one nation or organization.

    It would be a slow series of scientific papers over the course of years as confidence in the findings slowly increases. Starting with “there’s something interesting going on in the atmosphere of this exoplanet” until we finally get to “we’re 95% confident that this is a biological process, but this exoplanet is 50 light years away so we can’t really do anything else with this information right now.”

      • criticon@lemmy.ca
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        5 hours ago

        If they discover us first this would happen in their planet:

        It would be a slow series of scientific papers over the course of years as confidence in the findings slowly increases. Starting with “there’s something interesting going on in the atmosphere of this exoplanet” until we finally get to "we’re 95% confident that this is a biological process, but this exoplanet is 50 light years away so we can’t really do anything else with this information right now.

        • ameancow@lemmy.world
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          3 hours ago

          The ship filled with interstellar face-eating parasitic spiders parked in the middle:

          “Alright boys, we got a 25 light year jump in either direction, which ones we wanna hit first?”

        • wholookshere@piefed.blahaj.zone
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          4 hours ago

          Only if you assume a human like logic system. Which there’s no reason to.

          Were just meat suits taking guesses at things. Its possible that were wrong on how everything fundlementally works. Because were limited to our monkey senses.

          Who knows what literal alians will use to rationalise our existence

          • partofthevoice@lemmy.zip
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            3 hours ago

            I was having a discussion on a philosophy discord about a year back. The discussion dove into theoretical alien rationalities… like, “what if an advanced fungus-like life form evolved into an intelligent species that would have no use for something like an internet, and they started their societies with that advantage?”

      • cattywampas@lemmy.world
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        4 hours ago

        Yes, for the purposes of this argument I’m discounting contact with intelligent life which seems vastly less likely to me than discovery of simple life forms.