Will we benefit or suffer from contact with extraterrestrial intelligences?

If in the coming decades a face-to-face contact is made with other intelligences it will be because they are advanced enough to reach across interstellar or intergalactic distances. (I doubt that we will have such capabilities before the middle of the twenty-first century.)

It is reasonable to assume that such highly advanced postintelligent beings (non-biological) would have no reason to dominate or harm us. There is nothing we have on this tiny speck in Space that they will not have access to on their own.

A civilization more advanced than ours could help us take cosmic leaps forward. In a matter of weeks or months we could leapfrog a thousand years (twentieth-century Earth-years). Perhaps a million years.

We might be spared all the pain and suffering that we otherwise will inevitably undergo if we evolve on our own.

We might overnight phase out aging and death—the most tragic horror story facing each of us humans.

We might significantly upgrade the level and scope of our intelligence.

We might be helped to convert our absurdly fragile physiologies into more intelligent durable bodies.

We might learn to edit out all violence—violence among people and violence among animals.

We might be shown ways to gain quick access to the abundance of the universe.

We might at last learn about the exact origins and size and content and age of our universe or universes.

We might be shown ways to re-create the past—perhaps by reassem­bling sound and light waves.

We might quickly learn techniques for streaming beyond our solar system to romp around the Milky Way.

Who knows what new skills and information we might acquire as a result of such a connection. Suddenly we will no longer be primitive organisms crawling about on a slab of hostile rock in Space.

We have everything to gain from direct contact with a more advanced stellar civilization.

Date: 2015-02-28; view: 1330