"If you had to give aliens one thing to represent the entirety of humanity, what would it be?"
This led to a LOT of babbling on my part. Serious geekery ahead.
The Bible - BUT FOR VERY DIFFERENT REASONS THAN THE JESUSFREAKS.
When these aliens realized that THIS was where a good chunk of the world was getting its morals AND ethics, they'd run screaming and quarantine us from the rest of the universe immediately. Any civilisation advanced enough for star travel would immediately be able to tell that a planet full of people either
a. hypocritical/deluded/egotistical enough to follow parts of it and claim that those parts are inviolate while admitting that other parts were apocryphal, archaic, and obsolete and therefore no longer infallible, or
b. dumb enough to restrict their actions to the laws of a culture that we grew out of two millenia ago
...that a planet full of either of these kinds of people are SURELY not organisms they want to hang out with or in fact allow out of the Special Ed classroom that is pre-spacetravel Earth.
On a more honest note, no, a Bible is not representative of the whole of humanity, so it would be a bad choice. I think... a dollar bill. Doesn't matter what denomination or country or anything, just the bit of money itself. The concept that we've invented something COMPLETELY, literally worthless, and that our entire world revolves around the worship/obtainment of something that truly means nothing, that we MAKE, that will be totally useless in a real survival situation. That, I think, would really drive it home. Because I have to believe that in order for a race to be capable of interstellar travel they'd be too advanced for money.
Let me shine a little science on this question, as well:
Let's assume for the sake of argument that there are beings out there advanced enough to travel from one solar system to another. Our fastest method of spacetravel INVENTED so far has been an antimatter engine that would move at approximately 1/5th the speed of light ("Warp" speed). We could make this, right now, but it would require 17% of the world's wealth and more than half of its resources. We could even build the ship it would go in, for a spaceship that could travel at 1/5th the speed of light.
In that ship, it would take us 20 years to reach the next closest star (binary/tertiary star system), Alpha Centauri. Let's say, again for the sake of the argument, that our ship is in fact capable of sustaining life for that long without so much as a tick of problem. But we know AC has no planets, so we'd have to keep going to the next star, which I BELIEVE is about 7 light years away, although in the other direction. (There's a lot that're 10-20, and a WHOLE lot that're 20-25 lightyears away.) So... just think about that. STATISTICALLY, evolved life is rare. Think about it - think about the requirements for it, how long those conditions must remain ideal in order for something as complicated as sentience to develop, and then for it to evolve into a people who manage interstellar travel, and you'll realize that if there ARE aliens... there's certainly not TONS of them, all at this super-advanced level of society. I'd say that there are doubtless millions of planets with life - on a cellular level - but far, far less that have anything as complicated as a mammal, much less a sentient, cognizant creature. So using the Fermi equation - which asks an impossible question, such as how many planets have life in the universe - you can sort of ballpark it and get a logical estimate, which for this all we need is "not a lot!" Especially when you think of the vastness of the universe, how tiny we are to our planet, how tiny our planet is to our solar system, how tiny our solar system is to our cluster, how tiny our cluster is to our galaxy, how tiny our galaxy is to our universe...
So, keeping in mind that sure, life is out there, but not a lot of it, not advanced enough to talk to, much less fly to us... how close do you think the next planet with life is? 20 light years? That's like... under our skin, it's so close! On a galactic level, anyway. But that'd still take us 100 years to get there, at full speed, with no errors or navigational errors or just flying back and forth from the last planet to this one. So we'd need... that's right! a spaceship capable of supporting potentially infinite generations of life. Basically, we would need a whole other PLANET, totally self-sustainable, that we could simply steer around without a sun. That's what prevents us from meeting any aliens. We didn't evolve for space, it's much too ... well, big. And that's assuming that life IS improbably close. According to the laws of probability and MY personal calculations, the next nearest sentient life probably isn't even in our galaxy - much less right next door.
And intergalactic travel is still an absolute joke. It'd take millions of years for us to fly to the edge of OUR galaxy - at light speed, which we can't even move at yet - much less through the empty space to the next nearest one.
And I have to believe that if there ARE aliens out there advanced enough to fly this far, that they too would be able to realize that.... hmmn, there's probably not a crapton of life right around us! And that they would LOOK for that life in other ways before going to find it. Space is too big to fly blind. And hey, if they're advanced enough to move at light speeds and make it here once they know where we are, I'm pretty sure they can find us in the first place. Which is the ONE big - talent? technological ability? - that we lack, and desperately need, before we genuinely try to find other life forms.
So you have these faraway aliens, who know there's life on Earth, but let's say they can't tell more than that, just that there Is Life. Now, without knowing more about the aliens and their personalities or culture or WHATEVER we have no unbiased way to guess if they would research further, or just come here; but if they DID research further, and learned anything about us, I would say with a great deal of confidence that what they learned would cause them to decide to look for a DIFFERENT planet with life.
To get a little back to the original question: (without being snarky and mocking all the fools who really meant "a Bible", as in, "Oh no! Those poor heathen aliens! They don't know the light of Christ!" I'm sure God sent a son to their planet too, folks. Don't be so prideful as to think we're the only planetful of people whose souls he cares about! Pride is a sin, you know. /sarcasm )
I think that if I really could give the aliens anything to represent humanity, it would be a tour of some of the worst places in the world, some of the best, and.... the boring ones. Some little town in the middle of nowhere, where normal people are living normal lives, being selfish and selfless and loving and heartless and, above all, living. Because that's what humanity is - life. Live will prevail, it always finds a way, and we are our planet's best example of that - we are the ultimate adaptor, capable of adapting to fit our environment AND changing our environment to suit us like NOTHING else is.
I think another good example would be to send a human to live with them - not a child, that would skew the experiment - to show that a fully developed human, already decided in habit and morality and personality, could adapt to their life and habits and ethics. THAT might be the only thing that could impress them after all the cans of plastic cheese and sneakers with lights in the heel.
And THAT'S why we won't meet aliens anytime soon. But they are totally out there!
This led to a LOT of babbling on my part. Serious geekery ahead.
The Bible - BUT FOR VERY DIFFERENT REASONS THAN THE JESUSFREAKS.
When these aliens realized that THIS was where a good chunk of the world was getting its morals AND ethics, they'd run screaming and quarantine us from the rest of the universe immediately. Any civilisation advanced enough for star travel would immediately be able to tell that a planet full of people either
a. hypocritical/deluded/egotistical enough to follow parts of it and claim that those parts are inviolate while admitting that other parts were apocryphal, archaic, and obsolete and therefore no longer infallible, or
b. dumb enough to restrict their actions to the laws of a culture that we grew out of two millenia ago
...that a planet full of either of these kinds of people are SURELY not organisms they want to hang out with or in fact allow out of the Special Ed classroom that is pre-spacetravel Earth.
On a more honest note, no, a Bible is not representative of the whole of humanity, so it would be a bad choice. I think... a dollar bill. Doesn't matter what denomination or country or anything, just the bit of money itself. The concept that we've invented something COMPLETELY, literally worthless, and that our entire world revolves around the worship/obtainment of something that truly means nothing, that we MAKE, that will be totally useless in a real survival situation. That, I think, would really drive it home. Because I have to believe that in order for a race to be capable of interstellar travel they'd be too advanced for money.
Let me shine a little science on this question, as well:
Let's assume for the sake of argument that there are beings out there advanced enough to travel from one solar system to another. Our fastest method of spacetravel INVENTED so far has been an antimatter engine that would move at approximately 1/5th the speed of light ("Warp" speed). We could make this, right now, but it would require 17% of the world's wealth and more than half of its resources. We could even build the ship it would go in, for a spaceship that could travel at 1/5th the speed of light.
In that ship, it would take us 20 years to reach the next closest star (binary/tertiary star system), Alpha Centauri. Let's say, again for the sake of the argument, that our ship is in fact capable of sustaining life for that long without so much as a tick of problem. But we know AC has no planets, so we'd have to keep going to the next star, which I BELIEVE is about 7 light years away, although in the other direction. (There's a lot that're 10-20, and a WHOLE lot that're 20-25 lightyears away.) So... just think about that. STATISTICALLY, evolved life is rare. Think about it - think about the requirements for it, how long those conditions must remain ideal in order for something as complicated as sentience to develop, and then for it to evolve into a people who manage interstellar travel, and you'll realize that if there ARE aliens... there's certainly not TONS of them, all at this super-advanced level of society. I'd say that there are doubtless millions of planets with life - on a cellular level - but far, far less that have anything as complicated as a mammal, much less a sentient, cognizant creature. So using the Fermi equation - which asks an impossible question, such as how many planets have life in the universe - you can sort of ballpark it and get a logical estimate, which for this all we need is "not a lot!" Especially when you think of the vastness of the universe, how tiny we are to our planet, how tiny our planet is to our solar system, how tiny our solar system is to our cluster, how tiny our cluster is to our galaxy, how tiny our galaxy is to our universe...
So, keeping in mind that sure, life is out there, but not a lot of it, not advanced enough to talk to, much less fly to us... how close do you think the next planet with life is? 20 light years? That's like... under our skin, it's so close! On a galactic level, anyway. But that'd still take us 100 years to get there, at full speed, with no errors or navigational errors or just flying back and forth from the last planet to this one. So we'd need... that's right! a spaceship capable of supporting potentially infinite generations of life. Basically, we would need a whole other PLANET, totally self-sustainable, that we could simply steer around without a sun. That's what prevents us from meeting any aliens. We didn't evolve for space, it's much too ... well, big. And that's assuming that life IS improbably close. According to the laws of probability and MY personal calculations, the next nearest sentient life probably isn't even in our galaxy - much less right next door.
And intergalactic travel is still an absolute joke. It'd take millions of years for us to fly to the edge of OUR galaxy - at light speed, which we can't even move at yet - much less through the empty space to the next nearest one.
And I have to believe that if there ARE aliens out there advanced enough to fly this far, that they too would be able to realize that.... hmmn, there's probably not a crapton of life right around us! And that they would LOOK for that life in other ways before going to find it. Space is too big to fly blind. And hey, if they're advanced enough to move at light speeds and make it here once they know where we are, I'm pretty sure they can find us in the first place. Which is the ONE big - talent? technological ability? - that we lack, and desperately need, before we genuinely try to find other life forms.
So you have these faraway aliens, who know there's life on Earth, but let's say they can't tell more than that, just that there Is Life. Now, without knowing more about the aliens and their personalities or culture or WHATEVER we have no unbiased way to guess if they would research further, or just come here; but if they DID research further, and learned anything about us, I would say with a great deal of confidence that what they learned would cause them to decide to look for a DIFFERENT planet with life.
To get a little back to the original question: (without being snarky and mocking all the fools who really meant "a Bible", as in, "Oh no! Those poor heathen aliens! They don't know the light of Christ!" I'm sure God sent a son to their planet too, folks. Don't be so prideful as to think we're the only planetful of people whose souls he cares about! Pride is a sin, you know. /sarcasm )
I think that if I really could give the aliens anything to represent humanity, it would be a tour of some of the worst places in the world, some of the best, and.... the boring ones. Some little town in the middle of nowhere, where normal people are living normal lives, being selfish and selfless and loving and heartless and, above all, living. Because that's what humanity is - life. Live will prevail, it always finds a way, and we are our planet's best example of that - we are the ultimate adaptor, capable of adapting to fit our environment AND changing our environment to suit us like NOTHING else is.
I think another good example would be to send a human to live with them - not a child, that would skew the experiment - to show that a fully developed human, already decided in habit and morality and personality, could adapt to their life and habits and ethics. THAT might be the only thing that could impress them after all the cans of plastic cheese and sneakers with lights in the heel.
And THAT'S why we won't meet aliens anytime soon. But they are totally out there!