I fully expect that our first alien life will likely be microscopic life on a nearby planet. Followed by some simple organisms and/or plant life.
The likelihood of anything we would consider 'intelligent' being first contact is likely fairly low.
As much as saying that does make me sad, evidence of alien life is honestly the one big thing that I am sad about living when I am living since I would love that to be a reality before I die.
If bacterial/some prokaryotic life is found in our solar system I’d see that as terrifying. That means it’s much more likely that the Great Filter is ahead of us.
Our first "contact" with alien life has already happened. Once upon a time people thought that Mars was covered in canals, that a civilization lived there. Society did not collapse. People just accepted it and not much changed. Then there was the meteorite with the Mars bacteria. Not much changed then either. Authoritative proof of life on Europa will not have a dissimilar impact. Until there is a critter in a video, a discernable radio message, or a saucer on the white house lawn, the general population will just shrug it off.
That's what it says today. Had Wikipedia been around in the 1800s it would have said that canals on Mars indicated an agricultural civilization. The point is that society has already processed the concept of alien life. We know how people will react because we can look to how they reacted in the past when scientists told them about alien life.
Finding something that "indicated" something is very different than "We went digging in Europa and found these alive creatures that look like Dolphins under the surface that live on Ammonia"
Society hasn't processed something we have no evidence of (yet), that doesn't make much sense. Ask "society" at large if they believe there are other species out there and most of them will say "I don't know" or "Probably not". In many places, religion is likely to be more believable to people than multi-cell life somewhere else than Earth.
That's an interesting take, but I'm not sold. It sounds a bit like claiming to be a family of firefighters because your grandpa participated in a drill once, passing along empty buckets.
A healthy chunk of the population believed, enough to impact national policies. Some of the first efforts at what we now call radio astronomy were attempts to listen for Mars signals. Just over a century ago "the big listen" saw large parts of the planet, including the military, turn off their transmitters in order to listen for Martians.
There is no conclusive evidence that life has existed on Mars. In fact Mars is one of the lesser candidates for life due to its weak atmosphere and lack of tectonic activity/magnetic field. (Though Mars was much more fertile directly after its formation, it seemed to have been a rather violent time for life to develop).
Finding life on Europa, or anywhere other than Earth, would be foundational. The most likely scenario is that it would be carbon-RNA based, which could imply a panspermia theory rooted in the early stages of the solar system’s formation.
The off chance that we find something non carbon, non RNA, or some combination thereof -based (non carbon RNA would be wild) would obviously have some pretty large implications as well.
Though unfortunately the most likely scenario is that we don’t find any life forms, as is the historical trend, and our search continues.
The point the poster above was making is that we have already seen how society changes when we believe we've found basic proof of life, because we really believed we did a few times in the past: nothing changes.
Sure, finding actual living organisms would create new opportunities for study in xeno-biology, but it likely wouldn't change anything significant in our lives unless it is contact with complex multi-cellular and preferably intelligent beings.
Even for science, the most likely possibility (life on Europa, if it exists, would use the same basic chemistry, but not the exact same things as life on Earth) would not have any major impacts in reality: it would end various kinds of speculation, it would give us some new avenues for looking for extra-solar life, and it would create new carriers in studying this new branch of biology. But it would likely not change anything major in existing fields, it wouldn't give us some new perspective on life on Earth, and it would not change much about how we study biology. Just like finding out that not all protozoa are bacteria (some are archaea), or before that finding that fungi are a completely separate kingdom of life from plants and animals, didn't fundamentally change anything even in the day to day lives and study of even the vast majority of biologists.
The only way life changes anything on earth (a few crack pots worshiping this new life as god doesn't count even if they get following) is if the life is intelligent enough to change something.
Life on the level of bacteria is interesting, but as you say still uses our chemistry. We put something in a text book and move on. Maybe a few study it and science learns a lot but nothing that affects our life.
If the life is intelligent though they may have solved some problems we have. Maybe they have a quantum theory of gravity that we don't (my understanding of physics is we think this should exist but we don't have one - but I'm not a physicist).
Of course the life may be intelligent but at a level equivalent to us 3000 years ago - just learning the basics of geometry. There is now the moral issue of how much should we tell them that we know.
I think the general vibe most people have would change if aliens were actually real
This is like saying the normal people in the Marvel Universe are basically no different than people in ours, which I guess is true but only in the most superficial anti-imaginative way
If we knew for a fact there was an alien society living lives similar to ours on some planet, sure, I agree.
But if we found out that there are bacteria-like micro-organisms on Europa, or even "fish" in the oceans there, I don't agree that this would change anything in the outlook of the vast majority of people on Earth, even subtly.
>> In 1996, a group of scientists found features in the likeness of microscopic fossils of bacteria in the meteorite, suggesting that these organisms also originated on Mars. The claims immediately made headlines worldwide, culminating in U.S. president Bill Clinton giving a speech about the potential discovery.
Minor alien-encounter film trivia: That Bill Clinton speech is what Robert Zemeckis ripped off to create a news footage facsimile of a more dramatic discovery in Contact.
Most people believe in ghosts, if you get them to be honest. Aliens probably aren't far from that. We're just kind of hard-wired to believe that the further you get from our day-to-day life, the more likely monsters are there.
It's scientifically rational to believe in "aliens". There is plenty of evidence supporting a theory of abiogenesis. Even though we have not actually observed the process entirely, we are reasonably confident on some mechanisms by which it may occur.
Ghosts, on the other hand, are pretty far out there. We have no evidence or even any working thesis of how the consciousness of individuals could persist in some ethereal form after death.
Ghosts as a phenomenon aren't really falsifiable, so there's not much point trying to make unequivocal scientific statements about them, if they exist. If there's something we can measure or some phenomenon that multiple people could elicit reliably then it would be an answerable question. But they're supernatural precisely because there is nothing to study scientifically. It's just some qualia that people interpret to be ghosts.
You don’t know how many people believe in ghosts, and you don’t know what they’re thinking when they listen to a ghost story. I ‘believe in’ ghosts as a non-supernatural construct we use in literature. A technique to embody and externalize voices in people’s heads.
It’s weak, I believe, to operate on a platform of talking for strangers so confidently.
Aliens are not woo. Life is a natural phenomenon that is very clearly possible within the known laws of physics. We know life can naturally occur in the universe, because it happened here. Why not somewhere else, too?
