Given the immense amount of money spent on space exploration.?

Question

One wonders if life forms were to be found elsewhere would such be accepted or nuked? Nobody expresses what happens next. Would we accept such life form as threat or friend?
Is this a good idea or should it be ceased?

Answer 1

Depends on the life form.... If they're intelligent, I bet the mere discovery would unite Earth. If we could be friends with them, (a preferrable road), I would bet both species would benefit - medically, technologically, and socially.

Answer 2

Since the human race is so far from being able to step outside our local system, we would assume the such contact would be via radio waves, or another race approaching us.
Either way, the optimist in me hopes that humanity would realize that we need to work together more. Perhaps move towards a more global government.
However, that is currently a dream, fed to us by writers like Gene Roddenberry of Star Trek.
Reality says that we have a long way to go, and unless we meet some "little green men" we won't be solving world problems anytime soon.

Answer 3

If only primitive life forms (i.e., martian microorganisms, europan jellyfish, etc) were found, it would cause a lot of stir in the scientific community and greatly boost the rate of space exploration by both governments and private corporations, but it would not affect our daily lives that much (aside from perhaps those of a few religious fundamentalists).

On the other hand, if we discovered intelligent technological beings, that's a whole different issue. Chances are they would be more advanced and intelligent than us, in which case attacking them would be suicide, and the leaders of every nation on Earth would realize this (although not all of them are necessarily averse to suicide). Eventually we would accept them and they would probably share their knowledge with us so that we can progress beyond primitive ideas of greed and violence and become a productive and peaceful civilization. On the other hand, if they are more primitive than us, they would probably not be considered a threat because we would be able to beat them in a war, and eventually we would either accidentally kill them or they would develop into an advanced civilization in their own right and join up with us into one large empire.

Answer 4

I think there are a few misconceptions in your question.

1. The amount of money spent on space exploration is not really "immense." It is a tiny fraction of the money we spend on, for example, war.

2. Only a small portion of the space exploration effort is focused on finding life forms.

I think there are two scenarios in which we may discover alien life forms.

Scenario 1: We discover microscopic, non-sentient life. This is likely not to be a threat to us even if we eat it; because microorganisms tend to have to co-evolve with their hosts in order to be a danger to them. I can't imagine anybody thinking it's a good idea to nuke that.

Scenario 2: We discover sentient life. Since they will certainly be many light years away from us, I don't see HOW we could nuke them even if we felt threatened.

Answer 5

This would depend on whether our next forays into space come from the private sector (business) or military. as it is now. There is a big push to have competition and to try to make it into a self-sustaining business, instead of the enormous money pit it is today.

If the military were to come across an alien life form, they would seek to be friends with them (if they were more powerful than us) or to dominate, enslave and use them against our enemies if they are not.

If a large corporation came across life out there, they would set up trade agreements if they had something we needed and were more powerful than us, or to addict them to Taco Bell if they were not.

Bottom line, the only way I think the aliens would survive would be if they were more powerful than us. And actually if that were the case, we should get ready to get addicted to fried Flrktid wraps.

Answer 6

I believe that with the increasing ecological awareness that we have of life forms indigenous to this world that to "nuke" a life form on another world has become less likely. It is seemingly clear that there are no life forms with anything approaching our level of technology within our solar system.

Given that our percieved constraints on interstellar travel (the speed of light) would mean that even travelling at that speed (not getting into a discussion about the other problems raised by that) It would take us more than 4 years to get to the nearest star and applying that to aliensmeans that they must have massively superior technology if they are to visit us. If they have visited us then we must assume they are largely benevolent (We haven't been invaded) and we should accord the same benevolance to them.

Answer 7

devoid of exclaiming gay stuff like area exploration quenches our trouble-free thirst for wisdom, there are sensible explanation why area exp. is powerful. As stated in the previous, different our cutting-edge technologies is thoroughly and immediately derived from technologies created and used for area exploration. this might properly be a definate financial equipment improve. additionally, NASA's budget is so freakin small while in comparison with the rest on the country's nutrition table. people can say it wastes money and even have faith that yet whether it did it wastes so little money.

Answer 8

If they were small and harmless we'd study them. If the ALFs are like us there would be a big war. Hopefully they'd be from an environment that's very different to ours, so we won't be scrapping over the same planets. The religious people would just say 'they are all demons!' and claim the Apocalypse is nigh.

Personally, I don't think we should be advertising our presence on Earth until we can teleport and have ray guns.

Answer 9

If your only concern is the danger associated with actually contacting alien life, then stopping our space program would not help. Even if we stop all space exploration, the aliens could continue exploring space and they could find us just as easily as we could find them.

Answer 10

Hopefully they will be giant-sized mutant shrimp-like creatures and very tasty to eat...