Was just watching Jack Ryan Season 3 and seeing the display of force and their movements causes some interesting dissonance given what we know now.
Was just watching Jack Ryan Season 3 and seeing the display of force and their movements causes some interesting dissonance given what we know now.
Rewatching Stargate and international cooperation feels so strange and bereft somehow. A kinder path.
I often times wonder if an extraterrestrial threat would be a unifying factor or if people would still be selfish unless it affected them. The pandemic was the closest we’ve seen to a world level threat recently and it just increased selfishness IMO (at least in the US)
I thought Marvel’s Secret Invasion had an interesting quote on this that I’ll paraphrase: nothing makes humans stronger than uniting against a common enemy, but as soon as that enemy is gone, they always devolve into tribal bickering again. It’ll be a miracle if we ever reach Star Trek levels of global unification and peace.
Don’t forget that Star Trek universe went through an apocalyptic phase before reaching their post scarcity society. I’m quite optimistic that we’ll reach Star Trek levels of peace, but reaching that state without having 90% of the population annihilated in some kind of a World War or some other catastrophe? That’s what I’m kinda pessimistic about.
Never mind Star Trek, at the rate we’re going we’ll be lucky to get The Expanse.
IMO I don’t think humanity would unite. Some people would force their families to surrender to the aliens because they fear for their own lives, others would try to bargain with them for technology. Others would help the aliens simply because they hate humanity. We really can’t count on anything to unite us, and I don’t even think uniting the species should be our common goal. People are too individualistic and diverse for that, and unity would take away what it means to be human.
If aliens can reach us, they aren’t a threat. They either kill us without any issue or they don’t want to. There is no fighting back against it.
I do think it’d be interesting to see what happens if we do discovery alien life, particularly of the intelligent variety. So many religions are based on the assumption humans are the only intelligent life, and that earth is that place that can support it. Do they mostly all collapse, or do they evolve? Do people finally recognize the stupidity? It’d be fun to see.
That’s not necessarily true. If aliens do visit us, they might not be able to wipe us out at all. There’s really no way to say that other races would be capable of wiping us out, because they might not understand the concept of war in the first place.