If it turns out that aliens are on the planet and have advanced technology that could ruin us all, maybe the Pentagon and the Kremlin would find a reason to stop starving their own people for the sake of assumed dominance over the planet, and instead unite to either befriend, or defeat, the common alien friend/foe.
One can imagine the reason all of these events are couched in such secrecy might be, indeed, militaristic hubris. Or, in other words, FOMO at a grand scale ..
The Romans were arguably a flash of insight away from the hot air balloon, they had good uses for it and all the prerequisite techs. Analogously, we might be one really good flash of insight away from technology we'll just actually get a thousand years from now. So the aliens could be otherwise on our tech level, but they just figured out warp drive.
I'm not saying I think these things, I'm just trying to point out that your conclusion is not a given.
It certainly means that they have those capabilities as pertains to travel, but it is not a given that they would have those capabilities in a military sense. Of course the argument can be made that you can convert that kind of power into a weapon, but I'd hazard to say that a haphazard conversion does not in fact impart upon you a godlike ability to ignore everything we could possibly do.
I'm definitely not arguing that this means we should increase military spending. I think that is fundamentally not a great idea for us in the first place. Instead, I am arguing that while the things you are talking about are widely used as sci-fi tropes and held as beliefs by a lot of people, I do not think they stand on their own merits.
A well equipped squad of marines would still eventually succumb to a gird of barbarians unless they could resupply.
It's more like neolithic man meets nuclear submarine... but worse. We have 0 tools at our disposal to fight anything that's farther away than the edge of the atmosphere. "They" can take a few decades to accelerate a really massive "civilization ending" object and slam it into us. It's not like we can go anywhere to avoid it.
Even if an alien civilization finds our planet, I don't see why that would imply we are inside their logistic operational range.
Assuming they are real, the aliens do not act in a way consistent with a goal-directed intelligence, which means they are not the product of evolution, which means they are something so strange that the idea of befriending or defeating them makes no sense. They're something more like this story: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-th...
Or maybe they are scouts that were sent all over the cosmos for the purpose of exploration and they will report back their findings to their home eventually.
There are plenty of rational explanations for their behavior, especially if we are extremely far behind them in our technological development.
They only have a tiny poorly manned outpost?
Are you sure you know what their goals would be?
>> Assuming they are real, the aliens do not act in a way consistent with a goal-directed intelligence, which means they are not the product of evolution, which means they are something so strange that the idea of befriending or defeating them makes no sense.
This. If - and that's a big if - we assume previous bizarre aerial activities observed by humans were in fact of ET origin, then it's only natural to think of those ETs more like AI (robots) that don't necessarily share our goal-oriented intelligence, but rather possess higher levels of intelligence and their own agenda. As a result, you're right; we wouldn't even begin to understand their purpose cause theirs just has no counterpart in humans.
Given the distances and ages required for interstellar travel, these things are more likely unmanned probes than busses filled with tourists.
> It has been theorized that a self-replicating starship utilizing relatively conventional theoretical methods of interstellar travel (i.e., no exotic faster-than-light propulsion, and speeds limited to an "average cruising speed" of 0.1c.) could spread throughout a galaxy the size of the Milky Way in as little as half a million years.
Fictional times indeed. Just don't think too hard about the money.
E.g. how would the major organised religions cope with the revelation (pun intended) that there was life that originated off of Earth/outside of the garden of eden?
For a lot of people who take religion seriously, I feel like this could be a major upset. It might not affect "day to day life" in terms of the lights staying on and there being food on the shelves, but there could be a significant personal impact on a lot of people which may lead to a lot of things like depression/substance-abuse/suicides/general-"fuck it, its the end end of world, I am going to <x>"-sentiment/etc that will have knock-on effects (e.g. not turning up for work, abandoning family/responsibilities, running away to live as a hermit in the woods, gun hoarding etc)
Non-abrahamic religions like Hinduism,Jainism, Buddhism, believes in existence of world systems other than current one.
Buddhism is especially is accommodative in terms of acceptance, of evidences that refutes Buddhist world view[0].
[0]http://www.openculture.com/2016/09/carl-sagan-the-dalai-lama...
https://www.theguardian.com/science/shortcuts/2014/may/14/po...
Nearly everyone is fine with this idea, but most everyone also thinks people with religious views different than their own will have trouble with it.
The major religions have already shown how they deal with evidence of outside of the garden of Eden. Several don't care, because the garden isn't part of their belief system to start with, and most of the rest have no problem with it (because they don't view the garden as literal), and the remainder just dismiss the evidence and distrust the entire field of science associated with it.
I don't think expanding that to off Earth is likely to change a thing about those responses, though the details of exactly which groups have each response might be a little different (though I suspect not much.)
I doubt it.
If the last few years have taught me anything, it's that no amount of evidence can dissuade someone from believing something they want to believe in.
Humans began in the Garden of Eden, but that's only one species, albeit an important one.
It is easier to square religion with life on other planets than it is to square the odds of evolution happening in a similar way on multiple planets.
I don't think it would change anything for them. We're living in a golden age of science, and that did not change anything for them. The existence of aliens would just be one more thing to either reject or literally bedevil.
Like they've dealt with every other scientific advancement that killed their beliefs. They will deny it as much and as long as they can until they will be forced to admit it, at which point "god" will shrink to an even meaningful pocket of scientific ignorance. Some of them will keep denying it forever