Article: What Should Humanity Do on the Day After an Interstellar Object is Recognized as Technological?

[Mendel]

However, because feats of interplanetary, interstellar, or intergalactic travel are incomparably more impressive than anyone from another continent is capable of, so I cannot share your notion of equivalence. I'll perhaps re-evaluate that stance if we discover another continent where they've been running on fusion power for a few centuries.

Why would a technically advanced civilisation make you "rethink your place in the universe"?

 

[FatPhil]

Why would a technically advanced civilisation make you "rethink your place in the universe"?

Because I had considered the environment within which I live to be the most advanced that I would ever encounter and have knowledge and experience of in the universe, and can see no direct path from where we are to the quite literally fantastic things that this other civilisation appears to have. That is pretty much definitionally a change in worldview.

 

[Eburacum]

It would make me rethink my place in the universe, but if this hypothetical alien civilisation was found to be 1000 light years away, we could not have any interaction with them in real time - any message and its reply would take 2000 years to get there and back.

So most people would probably ignore such a revelation. In the short term, anyway.

 

[Scaramanga]

Is was going to skip this as a "trying to stay relevant" post by Avi Loeb, but for a rhetorical choice of wording he made that bumps this from an OpEd about doing science to a appeal directly into the paranoid wing of the UFOlogy movement.

Without justification, Loeb conflates "alien technology" with "threat", presumably to get more shares/likes/redistribution.

Currently, there is no international organization tasked with coordinating a response across the globe. We only discuss existential threats from artificial intelligence (AI), climate change or impact by near-Earth asteroids or comets. How should we tackle the threat to Earth from alien technology?

Full article as published on Medium -
Source: https://avi-loeb.medium.com/what-should-humanity-do-on-the-day-after-an-interstellar-object-is-recognized-as-technological-ff26c6fec04d

Humanity wont do anything the day after recognising a technological interstellar object. I suspect we'll all just go 'Oh...OK' and the next day Prince Harry will be back on the front page.

 

[Ann K]

This kind of discovery would raise enormous questions - not just scientific, but existential, cultural, and philosophical. We'd need to process it carefully, communicate honestly with the public, and avoid jumping to conclusions about intent.

Whether it's abandoned tech, a probe, or something else entirely, the fact of its existence would change everything - not through panic, but by forcing us to rethink our place in the universe. How we handle that moment will say as much about us as it does about whatever made it.

I think it's more likely that we would have some knowledge of life on other planets seeping into public knowledge bit by bit for some years or for decades before it's confirmed. In other words, no sudden revelation, but rather a growing interest in the subject as new data points are added. Thus it may cause the same kind of foot-in-the-anthill upset that has previously occurred (especially among some religious sects) as the invention of the internal combustion engine, the publication of On the Origin of Species, manned flight, and the discovery of DNA. There have always been groups crying "The sky is falling!" Most of them have survived the shock.

 

[Dad_SB_83]

Humanity wont do anything the day after recognising a technological interstellar object. I suspect we'll all just go 'Oh...OK' and the next day Prince Harry will be back on the front page.

There's a meme floating around with an alien stepped out of a UFO looking at a human and it says, "Are you not shocked?"

The human replies, "Man I just got a lot going on lately."

I doubt most would care. Though it makes me think of "Rendezvous with Rama" by Arthur C. Clarke.