

UN to appoint Earth contact for aliens  - waterlesscloud
http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/un-to-appoint-earth-contact-for-aliens/story-e6frfku0-1225929498742

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philwelch
This is almost amusingly irrelevant--if contact is actually made with an alien
intelligence and this guy tries to step up and say "I'm in charge of this",
there's no doubt someone more powerful would try and take over.

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jerf
If contact is made by an alien intelligence, it is _very_ likely to end up
being entirely on the alien's terms. Even if the aliens pursued a hands-off
approach (or relevant-manipulator-off-approach as the case may be) and allowed
us to duke out who represented Earth, it would be solely because they _chose_
that path, not because we had any say in it. Maybe in another couple hundred
years that won't be true, but it's likely to stay true for longer than the UN
is going to still be an entity.

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sliverstorm
> If contact is made by an alien intelligence _in the near future_ , it is
> very likely to end up being entirely on the alien's terms

Simply because for the next few hundred years, they will have to have come to
us, which immediately places them in the position of power. Yet, (if) we
become highly mobile in space and find other life, we could easily be the ones
in power.

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patrickgzill
Sounds like the ultimate do-nothing job for which you get paid well.

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mahmud
Your work day will be easy, but your commute and all your private time will be
spent dodging hordes of cranks and wack-jobs trying to make "contact".

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luke_s
Well, I came here expecting snark, and here is aplenty.

It’s almost impossible that we will be contacted by little green men, stepping
out of their flying saucers in front of the white house. Instead, if the SETI
search continues at its current pace, it is possible that some time in the
next few decades we will have our first evidence of an extra-terrestrial
intelligence. This could be either in the form of received radio signals, or
an exo-planet, who's atmosphere shows telltale markers of an industrial
civilization.

What happens next is as much a political question as a scientific one. Even if
we sit on the news for years, its obvious that someone is eventually going to
try and send a signal back. The UN has a role to play in ensuring that first
contact is handled in a calm and thought out way. Unless there is somebody in
a position to co-ordinate things, every other country with a radio telescope
will be beaming up signals. Would you really want first contact to come from
the US, China, North Korea, Russia and France, all at the same time? It’s good
that the UN is thinking about these problems now, so that if, and when that
momentous day does arrive, we are prepared to speak clearly, with one unified
voice.

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btilly
I'm sure the people at <http://www.exopolitics.org/> will have a field day
with this.

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Astro9k
"they are more likely to be microbes than anything intelligent"

I'm curious what the probability is that this statement is true. Alien species
that have been around much longer than us may view humans as microbe-like in
intelligence.

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kyleslattery
Astrophysicist Neil Tyson makes a great point on this:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-uZZ7RdL5E>

Essentially: chimpanzees share ~98% of our DNA, yet we don't view them as
having anything near our intelligence. If it only takes a 2% difference for
this to happen, imagine how more advanced alien species might view us.

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endtime
What does DNA have to do with it?

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ugh
The point is that our next relatives on the tree of life are very similar to
us in many ways but we would nevertheless consider them pretty stupid. Pretty
much all impressive human achievements will be forever inaccessible to them.
DNA is just a very striking way of illustrating that similarity with the one
big difference.

It is similarly imaginable that evolution could, without breaking a sweat,
spit out intelligence that would consider us stupid the same way we consider
chimpanzees stupid. They can do some cute tricks but that’s about it.

He basically wants to open our eyes to the idea of a vast scale of
intelligence, not between village idiot and Einstein but spanning much wider.
Meeting someone that is just as intelligent as we are seems unlikely.

~~~
endtime
I understood what he meant, I just didn't understand why DNA was helpful in
illustrating it. I'm a lot smarter than a nematode, or a pebble, or a cell in
Conway's Game of Life. The number of base pairs I share with any of those
things (where applicable) is irrelevant.

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bl4k
It is things like this that make us look stupid to future generations.

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davidmurphy
<http://www.oosa.unvienna.org/>

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Eliezer
Ooh! Pick me, pick me!

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smurfpellet
articles like this make me laugh: it's like wondering if god has a mouth,
eyes, and does he shit too? anything alien will be so radically different from
these expectations i doubt it'd be recognized.

we are the aliens.

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s3graham
Sounds sort of like a "Yes Men" press release, TBH.

