What Should We Do If Extraterrestrials Show Up?

Re:What Should We Do If Extraterrestrials Show Up? by King-Aaron on Sunday April 18, 2021 @08:55PM (#26858139)

We'd ignore them, and a bunch of people on HN would militantly deny that they couldn't possibly have navigated the vast distances across space to get here.

Then we die from their space smallpox.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What Should We Do If Extraterrestrials Show Up? by dang on Sunday April 18, 2021 @09:56PM (#26858462)

Could you please follow the site guidelines when posting here? They include:

"Don't be snarky."

"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What Should We Do If Extraterrestrials Show Up? by King-Aaron on Sunday April 18, 2021 @10:20PM (#26858578)

Oh, okay :)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What Should We Do If Extraterrestrials Show Up? by kiba on Sunday April 18, 2021 @09:04PM (#26858180)

Then we die from their space smallpox.

Unlikely we will die from their version of smallpox, because they aren't likely to share human DNA.

Remember, we are literally surrounded by viruses. We eat them all the time. The vast majority are completely harmless anyway. They have their specific targets.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What Should We Do If Extraterrestrials Show Up? by cgriswald on Sunday April 18, 2021 @09:50PM (#26858431)

I don’t share your confidence. We’d be exposed to multitudes of new viruses any one of which could potentially find a host in us. We’d have no specific defenses and they may have novel (to Earth life) means of infecting hosts.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What Should We Do If Extraterrestrials Show Up? by koolba on Sunday April 18, 2021 @09:04PM (#26858183)

Don’t forget the part where instead of trying to create something useful from the vast technological advances that they’d provide, we instead use it to compute cryptographic hashes slightly faster than the week prior.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What Should We Do If Extraterrestrials Show Up? by gruez on Sunday April 18, 2021 @09:03PM (#26858178)

>and a bunch of people on HN would militantly deny that they couldn't possibly have navigated the vast distances across space to get here.

This is a mischaracterization of their position. What those people probably meant is that given an unexplained phenomena, the chances that an alien involved is small, therefore we should look for more benign and more likely explanations. It doesn't mean that if an unambiguously alien ship showed up on earth that they'll deny its existence.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What Should We Do If Extraterrestrials Show Up? by platz on Sunday April 18, 2021 @09:34PM (#26858354)

What if they are like a space fungus.

[ Parent | on HN ]