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What if the aliens were just polite but didn't bother about us?

Tetragrammaton Invictus said:
I didn't know where to post this so putting it here. If it has to move kind mod people you can move this.

What if aliens were in our solar system studying the other planets and then they meet our planet and find us. They don't come with any motive or any kind of agenda they just are there and are practical in their nature.

They are here to study the solar system and they find Earth but they don't make any demands of us, they don't even try to go out of their way to make friends but they do visit. Instead they act in a very practical way say hello then fly off back to wherever they are going to go next.

Would that be a different kind of encounter to have and would that impact on us much? They don't even bother to land or stake out a place here. They say hi and leave.
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Any proof of alien life would impact us massively. Simply knowing they exist forces people to re-evaluate their entire worldview. And many, many would be fully obsessed with pushing that newfound frontier further, establishing direct contact, learning who they are, where they're from, what they can do, what they can teach us. This quest would very suddenly take up a huge portion of human enterprise and an even larger portion of human imagination/philosophy/pop culture.

The aliens may barely notice us, but we'd never be the same.
 
We'd make damn sure they regretted it! There's much resistance to this concept, but I'm personally convinced that Humanity is the oldest -- and, perhaps ONLY -- civilisation in the Galaxy. Maybe even the entire Universe. Our sun, in fact, is amongst the first generation of stars whose solar systems could support life. Previous generations of stars hadn't had time to cook all of the necessary ingredients for it. And for most of the best years Earth and the Sun have had to offer, dinosaurs ruled ... not Humanity. Anatomically modern people first appeared around 200,000 years ago and civilisation is only around 50,000 years, or so.

Humanity's always dreamed of colonising the planets, since we first became aware of what they actually are ... only to find out that low gravity is probably going to be very detrimental to us, in the long run, should we try. "Humans are Explorers." Yeah, well ... by that reckoning, so are insects. I don't see how that proves anything about us belonging in outerspace. And if there were aliens capable of spaceflight, even if it was a long time before us, they would've likely faced the same realisation, as well ...
 
main issue for venus terraforming is the length of the day
but you don't NEED to terraform Venus to live there. in some ways it might be easier to live there, but that would require building essentially cloud city. There's a fairly benigin (pressure and temperature wise) area of the atmosphere that could be settled with platforms supported by large balloons.
 
A Real-Life Cloud City! Wouldn't that be cool. I'd have to let other people try it out first and if it works fine, then I might be tempted to chance it. If not? Well ... I'll, at least, live to see another day.
 
2takesfrakes said:
A Real-Life Cloud City! Wouldn't that be cool. I'd have to let other people try it out first and if it works fine, then I might be tempted to chance it. If not? Well ... I'll, at least, live to see another day.
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An Aerostat basically, a floating platform which is a city depending on size.

As long as we don't find blue glowy particles in the solar system we're good :D

They caused so many problems in The Expanse
 
If aliens were to come to Earth, tourism wouldn't be much of an option in the current state. Even assuming they can safely breathe our atmosphere. No immunity to any infections. Not to mention, risk of violence against them or imprisonment and study.

We should also probably assume that there is no way to travel faster than light, so any aliens that came to Earth traveled at relativistic speeds, and by the time they got here, thousands or millions of years passed on their homeworld, so they have nothing to go back to. If they came here, they NEEDED to come here. It wasn't just a vacation, and they probably intend to settle somewhere. Whether they could set something up in a cave on Titan to avoid the conflicts involved in trying to settle on an inhabited world. I dunno.

If we assume the aliens do have some way to break time dilation and the warp barrier, and they do have the resources to come just for tourism, it would set off nothing short of a global hysteria. Governments racing to make agreements for preferential access to their technology. Waves of people heralding them as the first step to the era of science fiction utopia countered by waves of fear and hysteria, propaganda battles that make 2016 look tame.
 
Time is not an absolute, we're discovering. Satellites we've sent into space are travelling at incredible velocities. The kind where one could fly from LA to Philly in something like 4 minutes. And what NASA's been noticing is that these sattelites are recording time differently ... for them, it's slowing, just a little bit. If time's flexible then, flying faster than light's probably doable. UFOlogists have theorised for quite some time now, that aliens visiting Earth might just be Human Time Travellers. Perhaps, altering the course of History. I am beginning to wonder ...
 
2takesfrakes said:
Time is not an absolute, we're discovering. Satellites we've sent into space are travelling at incredible velocities. The kind where one could fly from LA to Philly in something like 4 minutes. And what NASA's been noticing is that these sattelites are recording time differently ... for them, it's slowing, just a little bit. If time's flexible then, flying faster than light's probably doable. UFOlogists have theorised for quite some time now, that aliens visiting Earth might just be Human Time Travellers. Perhaps, altering the course of History. I am beginning to wonder ...
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That's just called relativity........ You can see it at work right here on Earth.

Planes look so slow from the ground yet they are moving at 100s of miles per hour and that is a very wee form of relativity. Time is slightly different on the ISS to Earth that's also time dilation.
 
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Yeah, time dilation due to relative motion and position in the Earth's gravity field comes into play with GPS systems. It's completely consistent with Einstein's theories of special and general relativity to a very high degree of precision.
 
Like much of modern physics, time dilation is not intuitively obvious. However, it has been experimentally verified many times. Time dilation arises as a consequence of the speed of light in vacuo being independent of one's state of motion (special relativity) and also the equivalence of inertial mass and gravitational mass (general relativity).
 
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images
 
Asbo Zaprudder said:
The discrepancies are tiny (of the order of cm/s) but intriguing. I suspect systematic error but it's worth investigating in case there is some new physics hiding in there.
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It's very tiny but if whatever is generating that propellentless acceleration could be understood and utilized, I know that is far fetched, but constant, even miniscule acceleration over long periods of time, and you have a star drive.

Brings up some interesting ideas. If, for instance, Earth, and presumably other planets, have a dark matter halo, or dark matter ring system, as it were, and the craft that all exhibited the flyby anomaly demonstrated this, it becomes an interesting idea to find a means to detect those halos so they can be utilized in grav-assist maneuvers.
 
XCV330 said:
It's very tiny but if whatever is generating that propellentless acceleration could be understood and utilized, I know that is far fetched, but constant, even miniscule acceleration over long periods of time, and you have a star drive.

Brings up some interesting ideas. If, for instance, Earth, and presumably other planets, have a dark matter halo, or dark matter ring system, as it were, and the craft that all exhibited the flyby anomaly demonstrated this, it becomes an interesting idea to find a means to detect those halos so they can be utilized in grav-assist maneuvers.
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Maybe - the effect, if any, is still tiny though and I believe conservation of momentum and energy will likely remain unbroken. We have basically zero knowledge of the true nature of either dark matter or dark energy - if they really exist at all. We're also not yet very proficient at space travel. Maybe we'll get to grips with exploiting exotic physics in a few hundred years time. Small steps...
 
Well, Dark Matter should exist under standard model, and so far the standard model is holding up. That being the case, dark matter can only exhibit itself so far AS seen by having gravity. Right now it's very difficult to discern gravity waves. It's only just started. We're not even up to where Marconi was with radio waves, more like where Hertz was.

Using a gravitational assist does not violate conservation of momentum of energy, and this would simply be expanded on that a little.
 
Nope. The standard model says nothing definite about the nature of dark matter nor does it predict its existence. Dark matter might be composed of axions; then again it might not. We just don't know.

Comparing gravitational radiation with EM radiation is not terrifically useful - it's unlikely we'll ever be able to throw enough mass around to generate detectable gravitational waves.
 
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