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What do we do if SETI is successful?

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174 points leephillips | 3 comments | 20 Oct 25 17:13 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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gmuslera ◴[21 Oct 25 19:54 UTC] No.45660850[source]▶
Time is a factor here. How close in time and space would be them?

If we get something coming from more than 100 light years away we might not have the technology to respond, and if we do it may not matter anyway if we are at risk of not having a technological civilization anymore 100-200 years forward. So the meaningful actions on those cases may not include answering back.

Then it will be the actual use of that message. Lets assume that we will decide that is a signal from a civilization that is out there. It will be a signal meant for us and for any other civilization that doesn't have the knowledge/culture level as them, meant for giving us a common ground for communicating back, or it will be something that just will tell us that someone intelligent is out there, but no mean to understand it?

So the options are that we find apparently benevolent aliens willing to contact us, or that we find out that someone is out there but no way to communicate/reach them. I think the second scenario is the most probable one, and how our civilization will react if widely enough will change with time, novelty at first and indifference a few years later.

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kulahan ◴[21 Oct 25 20:04 UTC] No.45660980[source]▶
I cannot imagine any scenario where we're just 100-200 years away from "no more tech" that isn't purely total nuclear destruction. Even then, we'd probably be so close to getting back to a technological civilization that it'd be a blip in the radar at best if we're talking about a society that far away.

We lost 150 years of progress? That's okay, we had 800 more years to advance before the aliens showed up or whatever.

It's such a weird thing I see so many people assuming. We were down to like 16,000 humans on Earth at one point, and that was before we'd developed things that you could theoretically scavenge and jumpstart your tech.

People need to stop doomscrolling; I'm certain this is depression projected.

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wat10000 ◴[21 Oct 25 20:18 UTC] No.45661134[source]▶
It was also before we'd burned all the easily accessible fossil fuels.
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1. jandrese ◴[21 Oct 25 20:45 UTC] No.45661475{3}[source]▶
Electrification of transportation is already well underway. Obviously ships and planes will lag behind, and may even be forced to use biofuels if we run out of fossil fuels, but the idea that the world will stop when we run out is outdated.

Green power generation is also making huge strides forward, and battery technology is improving enough to make fully green grids a reality. We already see articles about how some countries are managing to go entire days without burning any fossil fuels for power generation. This will increase over time despite what the doomsayers predict. We aren't there yet, but the progress is almost inevitable.

The bigger problem is that we've already burned so much fossil fuel that we are noticeably altering the climate. This is going to cause a lot of stresses in the future, especially in a post-collapse scenario.

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2. wat10000 ◴[21 Oct 25 22:33 UTC] No.45662576[source]▶
They’re going days without burning fossil fuels by using high tech solar panels and windmills and such. What happens when they stop being made and they eventually break down? You’ll have to bootstrap tech again but without low-tech sources of concentrated energy. Electrified transport is great today, useless two hundred years ago.
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3. jandrese ◴[22 Oct 25 18:43 UTC] No.45673404[source]▶
Solar panels are somewhat high tech, but wind turbines are 17th century technology. The electric motor you need to attach to turn it into a generator is also pretty low tech. You can even use lead acid batteries to even out the power delivery, and those can be incredibly low tech and also highly recyclable.

Obviously you're not going to get to 100% in a week if you're rebuilding civilization from the ground up, but if you can retain some of the knowledge you can get a big step up and hopefully avoid some of the pitfalls that caused the downfall of society in the first place.