Permanently Deleted
What if it turned out something we thought was a normal earth animal is an alien? Like tapeworms were aliens the whole time and we didn't realise we had aliens up our buttholes.
You’re so profound. No joke, not kidding.
Confirmed: Owls are wise as heck.
In a story I'm reading, it's known that some animals actually came from a dungeon (are basically aliens), and there's a moment where the protagonist tries to guess which ones. He guesses three-eyed birds (good call chief) and turtles.
One of Sanderson's series has a planet that was partially colonised by humans, and the more hospitible areas have earth-like fauna in a very limited and domesticated range. This has lead to the native Fauna getting names like "axe-hawk" despite the fact that cultural drift has resulted in every terrestrial avian species, including birds of Paradise, being called a "Chicken"
Sounds fun. Which series?
(My thing was This Used To Be About Dungeons, which I'd recommend.)
The Stormlight Archive Though I'd recommend another series first (probably the standalone "Warbreaker")
Most of his books are loosely set in the same universe (a small globular cluster/dwarf galaxy), so each series is completely self-contained but there's a very subtle meta-plot going on (which took the fans 4 books before we realised a star cluster was appearing very often and didn't we see that beggar before?) that only really gets started in Stormlight Archive, which is supposed to act as that meta-stories "spine" (though it's still in the background).
I think i've arrived at a point in life where i'd be more surprised if i learned i don't have aliens up my butthole.
I'd say first contact would be the bigger deal than the actual discovery. Especially if it's extraterrestrials visiting us we'll know if Posadas was right. And otherwise we'll be enslaved to do their bidding or dead.
probably a week before I turn 80 (the future retirement age), I'll die of some easily preventable disease a functioning healthcare system would have resolved promptly,
but a week before that, they'll announce that the new Thunderf00t and/or Karl Benjamin Space Teloscopes recorded new high resolution images of exoplanets, and some speculate that this single brown pixel is a village based on post processing and fuck infrared.
The Thunderf00t Space Telescope is an amazingly harrowing bit and has now definitely been Lathe of Heaven'd into reality :matt-jokerfied:
Not sure. I wonder if it had anything to do with this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4yBvvGi_2A
The much delayed James Webb Space Telescope will finally launch next month, and one of its missions is to detect alien life on exoplanets. It will do this by scanning wavelengths from the atmosphere for tell-tale signs of metabolic processes. A positive detection SHOULD be a world-changing event for every human alive as it confirms for once and for all that We Are Not Alone, but based on the anti-science shitshow we're living in right now there is gonna be a whole lot of controversy and debate over it.
like so many other disappointments in life this is probably exactly how it will go down.
Climate change sums it up as you mentioned. We know it exists, we know how to stop it, and it's an undeniable existential threat. But it's just a side story that maybe gets 5% of news coverage.
Unless it became some stupid culture war thing it would probably be brushed aside.
It would be hilarious if the aliens announced themselves by blowing up only the White House
Grays better bring about the Räelist scientific utopia or they can keep walking. :posad:
UAPs are a real phenomena. Some UAPs display properties that cannot be explained by our understanding of science. Interstellar travel is impossible in any meaningful sense. Many UAPs react to human observers and exhibit erratic behavior and movement. UAPs with consistent features and behaviors have been witnessed for millennia across human cultural lines. The most likely explanation (in my opinion) is that these entities are extra dimensional rather than extraterrestrial. Not to get too new age, but anyone with a lot of psychedelic experience has tapped into aspects of the collective unconscious or even witnessed entities separate from their own consciousness. I don’t think UAPs are here to take data or anything like that. To me, they are an inherent part of a world that we have not yet been able to detect. They are tied to us and seem to focus more on fucking with humans/coexisting with them rather than to experiment or invade.
I always think of the metaphor of the pigeon and a newspaper. A pigeon is pecking it’s way along a sidewalk when a newspaper falls to the ground in front of it. The pigeon can see the newspaper, can step on it, can recognize that it is, in fact, there, but it would never, even with thousands of years to examine the “data” from the newspaper, be able to interpret what it means. These beings are so alien and incomprehensible to us that even if they laid out all of their motivations and goals there’s a really, really, good chance that we would be the equivalent of that pigeon on the sidewalk. We see flashing lights above the desert that react to our movements or the tic tac buzzing it’s way around the water and we’re left in a state of awe and wonder. Maybe that’s all they want, but it’s more likely that their motivations will be totally incomprehensible forever.
My hunch we'll first observe an alien civilization i.e. seeing lights on another planet long before we have any contact with them. In that sense I think it will be a huge deal but if it goes down like that then I think it won't be as big a deal as it would if we made contact.
I'll be real curious to see how a lot of religious fundamentalists take the discovery.
I think it would be huge, doubly if the aliens came from like a different dimension or something rather than a far off planet. Right there it'd validate a whole bunch of scientific theories that are out there.
