How do you think first contact will be?

[Pierce Graham]

If scientists are to be believed, the universe is huge. And it's expanding. So, even if there is only a one in a million chance of a planet having life, that still leaves billions of inhabited planets out there. Odds are, eventually, aliens will happen by our planet. Maybe they have, who knows. Maybe they flew by, looked at our world, found us boring, and went on their merry way. But what do you believe our first contact with aliens will be like? Do you think that they'll want to abduct and study us? Exterminate us? Trade with us?
Personally, I believe that it will be a peaceful first contact. Maybe an alien ship will appear over a major city and attempt to communicate with us. What do you believe will happen?
PS: Conspiracy theorists, please don't post any crackpot ideas on this thread. I want to hear what you believe WILL happen, not what you believe MIGHT have happened.

 

[Total LOLige]

Extermination shall ensue. But earth shall kick ass because it's the greatest planet in the universe.

 

[JochemDude]

Probably some kind of long wave comm center we happen to get into contact with.

 

[Dags90]

Likely scenario: They're not fully sentient beings, Hell, might not even be multicellular.

First thing everyone is gonna think when we meet equally sentient or more advanced life: Can we fuck it?

 

[chaosyoshimage]

PS: Conspiracy theorists, please don't post any crackpot ideas on this thread. I want to hear what you believe WILL happen, not what you believe MIGHT have happened.

Well, if you don't want to know the truth, fine, whatever, you can be just as unprepared as the rest of them when "first contact" begins. Fools! I have my tin-foil hat, unlabeled canned foot, AND a blanket. My body is ready.

 

[Pierce Graham]

Do you also have coat-hangers hanging from your ceiling to deflect the satellites? XD

 

[Rofl Harris]

If they haven't found us yet, we'll probably be extinct by the time they drop by. It's the often forgotten factor in the Drake Equation.

If we're being observed however, the shit we've been beaming out should do enough to keep aliens away for a few millennia yet. Have you seen "My Super Sweet 16"?

 

[inFAMOUSCowZ]

One thing I never understand why do we always assume aliens will visit us? Why not us visit them? Who knows maybe are the most advanced race out there, if there are indeed aliens which I hope there are, it'd be sad if it was just us.

 

[Redlin5_v1legacy]

First contact? Giant space amoebas. That's how I always played it out in my head. The first man to find it will be sucked in and digested, causing them to crave human flesh. Then they come en masse.

 

[Stall]

Peaceful, most certainly. I imagine they'll be discrete at first; I can't imagine a super-intelligent race revealing themselves suddenly. They'll most likely be more interested in talking to our greatest physicists and mathematicians beyond anyone else. Men (or women) of science will probably be the only people they really care to talk to, beyond diplomatic gestures.

 

[trollax]

I don't think they would like to talk to stupid apes.

 

[Dimitriov]

I am pretty sure our first contact with other life will be us finding bacteria or something, and maybe some multi-celled wild life indigenous to another planet someday.

If we ever do find other sapient life though I personally assume it will go down like the movie Avatar. Seriously at the rate we are advancing odds are pretty good we'll make contact with another race before another race comes to us, assuming there are some out there. Oh yeah, and our history shows very clearly what we do when we find new people and places.

That being said, I think that's kind of awesome. We can be the bad-ass dicks of the galaxy ;D

Also why didn't Avatar mention the obvious second part of that story? Where we returned and nuked the whole planet from orbit because what we mostly wanted was to strip mine it anyway.

 

[xdom125x]

If they are sentient, I have 2 guesses on how it would go and neither of them are very good:
Guess a) Our first contact with them will be completely on their terms. When they decide to make contact, we will (probably) try to be as diplomatic as possible... but some jackass will screw that up by attacking them because of their (the attacker's) literal xenophobia, possibly while shouting something in the ballpark of "It's a cookbook!". (Although it would be interesting if the jackass that screws up the alien/human diplomacy was an alien, I really think it would be a human that would do such a thing.) Best case scenario here is that the aliens just cut off all contact wth us, worst case scenario is they wipe out humanity as retaliation.

Guess b) A series of misunderstandings between us and the alien will lead to a war that will wipe out most humans (I figure aliens that can build ships that can reach Earth from where-ever they are from would have us easily outgunned).

If they aren't sentient, it means we found them. Which in my opinion would be on a nearby planet or meteor. In this situation, they will be stuck in labs for chemical analysis and other scientific shenanigans. (I think this is the way more likely "first contact". Less glamorous, but it seems more likely.)


There, I overthought this a little bit.

 

[Dags90]

First contact? Giant space amoebas. That's how I always played it out in my head. The first man to find it will be sucked in and digested, causing them to crave human flesh. Then they come en masse.

So RL would be a The Thing ripoff?

I can't wait to see the "current events aren't original anymore, it's all remakes and reboots" forum posts as I am slowly assimilated.

Creepy captcha:

 

[Berethond]

It'll probably be a sort of Branwell Probe that contains all of their knowledge and culture. So IRL first contact would more likely be with an AI representing the aliens than the aliens themselves.

 

[infohippie]

I think first contact with alien intelligence will be in the form of a radio beacon we discover through targetted listening of one star system after another. The civilisation that built it would most likely be somewhat more advanced than ours simply because it takes a lot more energy to broadcast a signal over interstellar distances than it does to listen for one.

Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute in California believes we will discover such a beacon in the next few decades, according to current and estimated future rates of listening to stars, as well as the implications of the Drake Equation for the likely density of civilisations in the galaxy.

 

[Grottnikk]

In a word, weird. They will be totally unlike us in mind and body, with motivations and goals completely alien to us. We, likewise, will be unintelligible to them. We'll probably try to communicate first, but then we'll end up killing each other.

 

[Vern5]

I can't imagine any creature with the ability to traverse the grand distance between star systems that might have any interest in our backwards little planet.

That would be something akin to having a roadtrip and stopping to greet a colony of ants in the middle of the trip. We would be of the smallest interest for anything traveling the stars.

 

[IkeGreil29]

What Stephen Hawking said: if there really are aliens out there who contact us and come to Earth, they will come to enslave us, for they will be widely superior, and their only goal by then would be to find more planets to bleed dry for its resources.

 

[Mudze]

Unless we come into contact with a warrior species (in which case we'll likely exterminate them. And the planet they reside on), both sides will be too cautious to do anything violent.