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What Happens If China Makes First Contact?

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Re: What Happens If China Makes First Contact?

#41

Post by bnegreve »

0xFFFE wrote: post #36

What if we are the first/only intelligent beings in the universe and it is upon us to spread to other galaxies and stars? Probabilistically unlikely for us to be the only ones, but just a thought.

> Probabilistically unlikely for us to be the only ones, but just a thought.

How do you even measure that? If the number of coincidences required for life to emerge is large enough, the probability of observing life on a planet could very well be far bellow 1 over the number of planets in the universe.

That would make us probably alone :(

Re: What Happens If China Makes First Contact?

#42

Post by yorwba »

0xBA5ED wrote: post #34

Do we really think they'll be using radio communication? We're already dabbling with quantum comm ourselves. And if they can travel the stars, they'd have been incentivized to develop something better long ago. One would think... Hell, maybe the whole galaxy has quantum wifi.

"Quantum communication" still uses a conventional communication channel to exchange data, it's only the encryption key that is determined by exchanging single quanta. That's because single quanta are very susceptible to noise, which is very useful to detect eavesdropping but undesirable when you want to exchange large amounts of data.

To reliably send a signal across large distances, it's much better to use a bright light source focused at the target. When you start with trillions of photons, it doesn't harm the signal quality very much if a few of them hit interstellar dust on the way.

Re: What Happens If China Makes First Contact?

#43

Post by Rapzid »

zamalek wrote: post #14

First contact is a species event, I really don't think it matters who makes it first. My reasoning is derived from a though experiment (happy to explain, but it should be obvious), which is all we have to go on this stuff. Long story short: it's highly probable that a species wouldn't care about our primitive political systems when engaging with us. It would most likely be a philanthropic event - which is a strong in…

Yeah, I would have to imagine they would see through the Chinese and the US like a grownup seeing through the motivations of toddlers in the sandbox.

Re: What Happens If China Makes First Contact?

#44

Post by aaavl2821 »

cryoshon wrote: post #13
i_am_nomad wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m guessing you aren’t Filipino, Indian or Vietnamese.

correct. every empire has its victims. the question posed by the OP's article was why not the chinese empire rather than the anglo-american empire as a point of first contact. in all honesty, i trust the chinese not to fuck up first contact more with a bellicose message, especially given the west's political incapacitation /fall to fascism

Just to fact-check here, as I think you are being literal, the "west" is not fascist

Re: What Happens If China Makes First Contact?

#45

Post by Udik »

jzl wrote: post #10
zeofig wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who found Arrival super irritating, I'm afraid I'm "writing off" your comment.

I actually found it really irritating too. I'm not endorsing Arrival. That said, the inter-country politics were by far the most interesting thing about it. And it's a major Hollywood film that literally addresses the question "What Happens If China Makes First Contact?"

> literally addresses the question "What Happens If China Makes First Contact?

It does. And its very deep answer is "the Chinese fuck up because they're a bit dumb, and only thanks to a very bright, young and beautiful American the world is saved, again".

Re: What Happens If China Makes First Contact?

#47

Post by zamalek »

baddox wrote: post #18
zamalek wrote: post #14

First contact is a species event, I really don't think it matters who makes it first. My reasoning is derived from a though experiment (happy to explain, but it should be obvious), which is all we have to go on this stuff. Long story short: it's highly probable that a species wouldn't care about our primitive political systems when engaging with us. It would most likely be a philanthropic event - which is a strong in…

I don’t know how to guess at how first contact would actually go, but it’s interesting that government coverups of aliens is a common theme in fiction (x files, men in Black, etc.) and in conspiracy theories (Roswell, UFOs, etc.).

Fiction is great because it's compelling. I see no reason for the actual first contact to be more sublime.

Re: What Happens If China Makes First Contact?

#48

Post by 0xBA5ED »

learc83 wrote: post #37
0xBA5ED wrote: post #34

Do we really think they'll be using radio communication? We're already dabbling with quantum comm ourselves. And if they can travel the stars, they'd have been incentivized to develop something better long ago. One would think... Hell, maybe the whole galaxy has quantum wifi.

What is quantum comm? Quantum entanglement doesn't allow for a conceivable way to transmit information. Is there something else you're thinking of other than entanglement?

No, that's what I was thinking. Guess I don't understand it like I thought. There's an overwhelming plethora of misleading articles on this and so many things. More specifically, I was thinking of the recent experiment in China with "quantum teleportation". When I looked it up and kept seeing "transfer of information over long distances" over and over, I apparently drew the wrong conclusions.

Re: What Happens If China Makes First Contact?

#49

Post by Animats »

Johnny555 wrote: post #26

If the aliens want us to know they are there, it won't be because we have a specialized radio dish to receive their transmissions -- it's unlikely that we'd be able to distinguish their regular communications from noise. In another 50-100 years, the earth will likely stop transmitting the kind of high power, trivially modulated signals that we're looking for, which leaves a very small window of opportunity to detect…

I pointed this out to some SETI people over a decade ago. They were focused on looking for "carriers", signals with a strong center frequency component. Analog TV, was AM video with 80% carrier, requiring huge transmitter power. UHF stations used to emit megawatts. Those signals are gone. More modern transmissions (DTV, cellular) look like white noise across a narrow chunk of spectrum. Those are much harder to pull out of the noise background. You can detect that a carrier is present even if you're missing most of the signal. That's not true of more modern modes.

If a civilization wanted to be detected, they could easily send out clearly understandable signals - big carriers with slow modulation. Arecibo could in theory communicate with a similarly sized dish across the galaxy. An answer would be a long time coming, though.

Re: What Happens If China Makes First Contact?

#50

Post by Animats »

A fundamental question, of course, is whether FTL is possible. Special relativity says it isn't, and worse, that it would violate causality. We're probably fundamentally limited to having very slow conversations with any civilization that's within tens of light years. If any. We might find out about some that are further away, but there's not going to be interaction.
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