This is just a short, easy-to-read paper I keep in my bookmarks and go back to occasionally. It explores, qualitatively, the various outcomes that contact with alien intelligence might have. I think it's a really cool 25-page exploration of possibilities that are fun to think about. Some choice quotes:
ETI (extraterrestrial intelligence) might attack us not out of selfishness but instead out of a universalist desire to make the galaxy a better place.
perhaps ETI make contact with Earth to welcome us into the Galactic Club but only after we complete a set of required bureaucratic tasks
They may be interested in incorporating us into their civilization so they can sell us their products, keep us as pets, or have us mine raw materials for them.
if ETI place intrinsic value on lives, then perhaps they could bring about more lives by destroying us and using our resources more efficiently for other lives
My favourite section is the "unintentional harm" outcomes, which suggests the possibility that they just might squish us by accident.
One non-biological physical hazard that we could face from direct contact with ETI is unintentional mechanical harm. For example, ETI might accidentally crush us while attempting an unrelated maneuver.
Can't for the life of me find where I first heard of this, but I just wanted to share it for being fun and fairly silly yet still officially worked on by NASA.
pretty sure we are living in a zoo. it's the only scenario that logically makes sense.
They do explore the Zoo hypothesis in the paper. I don't personally think it's very likely, but it's possible.
Earth is a laboratory. Every few million years the galactic powers that be accept a new grant proposal from an alien postdoc. That lucky researcher then gets exclusive rights to transform the planet for their experiment. The first such experiment was the Cambrian Explosion. The dinosaurs were another. Extinction events are when they wipe the planet for the next researcher.
The latest experiment got a little out of hand when the apes invented nuclear weapons and risked irradiating the whole laboratory.
Or maybe we are just one tiny well in an a virtually infinite multiwell assay, each containing a planet with slightly different experimental conditions and they are trying to synthesize a conscious lifeform that doesn't destroy itself eventually. Maybe they are restarting humanity over and over again to see if we'll finally figure it out. We are experiment ᜁଡ଼👋ޑଋ🏰ᆅᐏᅝᐊெᇜᒈ😝Nj̸๐♄🎉כჿ😊ᗀඦĘ๓🏭ۼ out of ℵ1 experiments.
You just wrinkled my brain.
There's still some weird implications and assumptions though. Either galactic civilization must not be highly developed b/c we'd notice all the megastructures, or they put a planetarium around our solar system (paper mentions this). But how the hell would that work? The answer is just
indistinguishable from magic. Same thing with hiding infrared emissions.