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What do we do if SETI is successful?

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174 points leephillips | 1 comments | 20 Oct 25 17:13 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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theletterf ◴[21 Oct 25 20:50 UTC] No.45661520[source]▶
For a somber, deeply intellectual view of what could happen, I can't recommend enough Stanislaw Lem's His Master's Voice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_%28novel%...

"Given that our civilization is unable to assimilate well even those concepts that originate in human heads when they appear outside its main current, although the creators of those concepts are, after all, children of the same age—how could we have assumed that we would be capable of understanding a civilization totally unlike ours, if it addressed us across the cosmic gulf?"

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themafia ◴[21 Oct 25 22:34 UTC] No.45662589[source]▶
Me and my dog cannot talk.

I understand my dog and he understands me.

If they experience death then we have massive common ground already.

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LargoLasskhyfv ◴[22 Oct 25 03:31 UTC] No.45664653[source]▶
What if they are telepathic hive minds, able to regrow lost minds like some species on earth regrow limbs, thus having no concept of individual death as such?

Or something like the Cylon resurrection technology, which downloads your memories into the latest fast cloned avatar/physical body?

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1. anonzzzies ◴[22 Oct 25 08:50 UTC] No.45666401[source]▶
Maybe they are 100k-millions years ahead of us and are basically immortal AI's with iqs of 200k+ (so we won't understand anything they do or say and they find us literally less interesting than grains of sand) which are clustered via an higher dimension quantum entangled connection to the home world and the backup world? For sure if we manage to create AGI (no timelines; let's say we have it in 10k years from now and better than human body robots to match), we will surely shoot that into space to be 'forever' by the millions to explore. I would assume that every advanced race would do exactly that and if they are millions of years ahead of us, I cannot phantom them still being close to the barbaric mortal animals that we are, or they wouldn't have survived that long.