How Would You React If We Found Sentient Life on Another Planet?

In Star Trek Enterprise the underbelly of the Vulcan High Command was exposed. They were never "the good guys" and had been leading Earth astray. The Vulcans in power were notorious for brutally suppressing an underclass on their home worlds and broke treaty after treaty with antagonist races.

None of that was new to the lore, but it was usually swept under the rug in prior shows. It got so much pushback from fans who had swallowed the propaganda they were supposed to see through that after two seasons the Enterprise story line was diverted off into a nonsense direction.

So why did Earth ally with Vulcan rather than the coarse but egalitarian Andorea? Well, we also see the seeds of what became the elitist Federation in Deep Space Nine with the time travel episode about the Bell Riots and the story arc around the Dominion War.
 

VaughanJB said:
I used to teach a similar mantra - in the business I was in, I'd say: Change is the only constant.

I'd also say: Most problems occur at the point of change.

When things are constantly changing, it's hectic and crazy. The pressure is on.

KNOW YOUR LIMITS.

I was once offered a job with a nice pay raise in the City of London. It was working with a team that monitored transactional change in the finance industry. In my final discussion with them, I learned the nitty gritty details, and turned it down. Time there was measured, and had to maintained (or improved) in slices of a thousandth of a second. Anything less than that was catastrophic.

I knew how to do the job, and as I say, the money was great. But I decided that I just didn't want to work in an environment that highly pressurized. Where you could be hauled over the coals if you were 100th of a second out because of some issue in the system. I knew my limits, and that was too much.
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I think the best job to have is one that brings about the best you using a moral compass.
( you - plural )
 
RadishRose said:
Hey, I loved Robbie! Also, he came waaaayyyyy after art deco.
The Lost In Space bot was a loser.
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Loser! How can you say such a thing?

I must admit though, I did prefer the legs and feet of Robby The Robot over the Lost In Space one.

Gees, I've just thought. That makes me sound like some kind of leg and feet fetish type of person! I'm going to have to take time out and reflect on this post. This going to bother me for some time. I might struggle to recover from it.
 
What about the robot from Lost in Space? That was my favorite. He could be defeated by pulling out his power pack, which seems an oversight.
 
VaughanJB said:
I'd give my life to take a few steps on another planet. Like, what if we could get a man to Mars, but there was no chance of getting him back? Would you go? Me? Yes, I would. I've felt that way for some time, but at this age it's even more true. Hell, put me a capsule and launch me into deep space, aimed at some distant possibility. I'll be dead by the time I got there, but what a way to connect.
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Marvellous!..can I come wth you :unsure:
 

"How Would You React If We Found Sentient Life on Another Planet?"​


I'm not sure, I would have to think it through after it was announced.

I wonder at what level of 'sentient life' would this be. If it's correct we have around 400 billion suns (400,000,000,000 ?), most with planets, then what's the chance of there being at least one other planet with Sentient Life other than ours?

Everything, I think, has to start somewhere, a first for others to follow. If life on a planet or asteroid is so rare but exists, then we don't know if we are ahead or behind the rest of the universe in our development. If there are other civilisations out there, how many of them have already come and gone, never to be seen again? At some point there will be no planet Earth, we will be gone if we dont destroy ourselves that is, or when we are engulfed by our own sun/star.

With this in mind, there are billions of years with billions of planets for civilisation to have arrived. If other life exists, I think there is just as much chance of us being ahead and at the top of the pile, as the chance of us being at the bottom. If we are at the top of the pile, then to me our universe seems like a very lonely place.

If we are at the bottom, then our universe might be a place teeming with lifeforms beyond our comprehension. With huge possibilities of knowledge and civilizations waiting to be uncovered. That seems both exciting and humbling at the same time. Maybe even scary and vulnerable to the rest of the other life forms in the universe? We have only got to look at how we as humans treat other life forms on our own planet.

Or, could it be that the more technologically advanced a life form becomes, the more morally advanced they become too? In which case, perhaps, we have nothing to fear from what's out there. Not sure where The Borg would fit into that though. :unsure: :)

So anyway, this is just the start of how I might react if we found sentient life on another planet.

I might react differently if it's discovered the universe is full of nothing but Tribbles.



 
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Lilac said:
Maybe we just need tribbles so we know who the bad aliens are. That was a good episode.
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I remember watching a Star Trek documentary. It was said that William Shatner had difficulty keeping a straight face in parts of that episode
 
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"Sentient Life" is probably not the term (as in little green men") the OP intended because sentient includes almost all Earth animal multicellular life. To be clear, that does not include plants. As such, there is a fair probability we humans exploring our own solar system within our lifetimes may find such sentient life on moons with internal liquid oceans like Jupiter's Callisto and Ganymede. As someone that leans towards the probability of panspermia throughout our galaxy if not the Universe, I also suspect it will also be organic DNA life.

Since public news media has already been writing for decades about we finding signs of past such primitive life on Mars, it probably won't have much affect on our human world beyond a few months of speculative news articles followed by general yawns. Well one can predict late night talk shows will never stop making jokes about such alien life.

But what about "intelligent" enough alien life to visit our planet as in UFOs? Well that is a whole other question even though most on this board answering assumed that was the OP's subject. The greatest effect in the human world if that is true will be to religions and their followers that will as I often tend to blurt out making fun of our anthropocentric lens, we are just "Earth monkeys".

One needs to understand, even if there is a god or UIEs, why would in universe supposedly 13.6 billion years old, would such an entity make we homo sapiens the crown and center of its creation nearly 10 billion years later for a relatively infinitesimal short recent period if such were according to some grand creative plan? In a universe with billions of galaxies each with billions of stars and planets? Like the whole creation was just all for the recent few thousand years?
 
VaughanJB said:
Well, my partner said she wouldn't go - so there is an empty seat! ;)
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Aww...but, to each his own.
Space, time travel etc., always fascinated me.
Given that choice over the years I would have done it in a heartbeat.
Of course the Ex has long been gone so no problem for me.
 
Mizmo said:
Aww...but, to each his own.
Space, time travel etc., always fascinated me.
Given that choice over the years I would have done it in a heartbeat.
Of course the Ex has long been gone so no problem for me.
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Bring the dog! I'm bringing mine!
 
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