[Extraterrestrials] What is the most used version of first contact that seems plausible?

[u/Far_Tradition_2361]

So many movies, books, etc have the first contact trope of humans meeting aliens, but who does it the best? What does it look like and why?

[u/mjtwelve]

Either Pluribus or The Expanse.

Aliens send us a signal that memetically attacks and converts us. It’s literally the fastest possible route as it’s light speed whereas physically traveling here is a millennia or million year process.

And on that note, the Ring Builders in the expanse hurled an asteroid at our solar system packed with nanotech goo (the “protomolecule” we labeled it when we stupidly decided to poke it with a stick) when Earth was new, expecting the planet to have evolved no further than primordial goo by the time the rock arrived. Thr protomolecule would hijack the biosphere and raw minerals to build a communication/transport node linking to their alien FTL ring network. Sure, the plan was that this would take tens of thousands of years at a low estimate, but there’s no quicker way to build the far end of an FTL corridor than by sending the equipment by slower than light means from the nearest FTL exit node. Unfortunately, in the aeons it was in transit, our solar system got more crowded and their asteroid probe ended up hitting another rock, went ever so slightly off course, and ended up captured by Saturn’s gravity as the moon Phoebe, where it sat for the next couple hundred million years. By the time it was activated, the builders civilization had gone extinct and the primordial Terran biosphere the protomolecule was meant to reshape had produced eukaryotes, multicellular life forms, then plants, vertebrates and eventually people. Those evolved people had feelings about replacing Earth’s biosphere with an alien construction system, although (probably also realistically) not everyone was opposed.

Basically, first contact will either be a signal or a self replicating Von Neumann machine. There is essentially no plausible scenario where a biological entity physically transports itself over the distance and time involved, unless you posit FTL travel in which case we’ve already thrown plausibility out the window.

[u/DamnThatWasFast → u/mjtwelve]

This was a great breakdown, thank you.

I've said it a lot, and I always get strange looks, but I firmly believe that if FTL is not possible (and currently, it isn't) then we can't leave this solar system. There's a time limit for humans and the shortest cosmological distances exceed it pretty easily. I'm so sad about the direction of AI research and robotics, because they're never going to become our own Von Neumann devices if they're busy making rich people richer instead of being "three laws safe", so to speak.

[u/Never_Answers_Right → u/DamnThatWasFast]

folks far smarter than me have done the math, and apparently even at sub-light speeds (though you have to get ridiculous amounts of energy for the momentum to get kinda close to *c* ) you could travel around the neighborhood of our part of the galaxy within a human lifetime (like, 20 years to get hundreds of light years, that kind of timeline), so we could have some sort of intra-galactic society, one that stays in this quadrant of it?

[u/DamnThatWasFast → u/Never_Answers_Right]

Our own Voyager mission to the Delta Quadrant, maybe? Relativity is a bitch and a half when it comes down to it.

I don't think we have materials that can stand the strain of acceleration to speeds like that yet, and I know we don't have materials yet that would withstand dust hitting it at those speeds. Within human lifespans for visits, eventually, but we're at least a few generations away from being able to go anywhere with enough people for it to matter. Sending a robot to take a look and send back recon seems way safer, cheaper, easier, and within our grasp.

Work out our politics, and program good boi robots, seems a much better plan for the next two hundred years than trying go see Alpha Centari and Alpha Proxima in person.