What Happens If China Makes First Contact?

First contact is a species event, I really don&#x27;t think it matters who makes it first. My reasoning is derived from a though experiment (happy to explain, but it should be obvious), which is all we have to go on this stuff. Long story short: it&#x27;s highly probable that a species wouldn&#x27;t care about our primitive political systems when engaging with us. It would most likely be a philanthropic event - which is a strong indicator of why nobody has engaged with us: we&#x27;re not worth the time.<p>As usual this article places to much emphasis on the human. We really aren&#x27;t that important. Our political systems are irrelevant in the grander scheme.

Me: I&#x27;m writing off this article if it doesn&#x27;t mention &#x27;Arrival&#x27;.<p><i>Liu told me that first contact would lead to a human conflict, if not a world war. This is a popular trope in science fiction. In last year’s Oscar-nominated film Arrival, the sudden appearance of an extraterrestrial intelligence inspires the formation of apocalyptic cults and nearly triggers a war between world powers anxious to gain an edge in the race to understand the alien’s messages.</i><p>Ahh, there we go. Thank you.<p>Long article. I didn&#x27;t read all of it, but the parts I skimmed were good. I had no idea that China had its own answer to Arecibo.<p>EDIT: not sure why this is getting downvoted. The title of the post is literally one of the biggest plot points of Arrival. It would have been somewhat tone-deaf to popular culture had the article come out with this title and not mentioned Arrival. And sure enough it did. That was my only point. I wouldn&#x27;t have made this comment if the post were titled &quot;China&#x27;s Answer To Arecibo&quot;.

Given the vast distances involved, I&#x27;ve always thought first contact would be much closer to this short story by @qntm:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qntm.org&#x2F;retrospective" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qntm.org&#x2F;retrospective</a><p>It&#x27;s a fantastic read, set aside a few minutes to go through it, you won&#x27;t regret it.

A fundamental question, of course, is whether FTL is possible. Special relativity says it isn&#x27;t, and worse, that it would violate causality. We&#x27;re probably fundamentally limited to having very slow conversations with any civilization that&#x27;s within tens of light years. If any. We might find out about some that are further away, but there&#x27;s not going to be interaction.

If the aliens want us to know they are there, it won&#x27;t be because we have a specialized radio dish to receive their transmissions -- it&#x27;s unlikely that we&#x27;d be able to distinguish their regular communications from noise. In another 50-100 years, the earth will likely stop transmitting the kind of high power, trivially modulated signals that we&#x27;re looking for, which leaves a very small window of opportunity to detect other alien species.<p>It&#x27;d be like Marconi trying to decipher a modern spread-spectrum encrypted RF datastream.

why is china so frightening to the west as a representative of humankind?<p>they are imperfect, sure-- their abysmal human rights record will soon be matched by a collapsing xenophobic West.<p>but they are evidence that humanity can produce contiguous government without overt destruction of rivals even when capable of doing so. they are evidence that humanity can persist in peaceful trade with other civilizations, even if troubled internally.<p>china is no leader of &quot;the free world&quot; to be sure, but they are far from irresponsible recipients of first contact.... they have no interest in humankind&#x27;s eradication, and they likely have plans for contact in the exceedingly unlikely chance that it occurs.

If the aliens are strong enough to land their spaceship on earth, investigating all countries is probably a piece of cake for them. There is no reason for them to tie themselves to a certain country or area.<p>In another case, if they establish communication with a certain country&#x2F;organization, but they cannot arrive, and somehow can only communicate with that certain country&#x2F;organization, then it could be a different story.

— “But perhaps tomorrow we’ll wake up and find an alien spaceship the size of the Moon parked in orbit.” —<p>I am sure the Pentagon and NASA have a plan if a &quot;moon-sized&quot; object with a deliberate orbit suddenly appeared in the night sky or was detected by a space telescope or an amateur astronomer using Mars as a gravity boost.<p>What would be more amusing if they were coming here to live underwater.

I think US would be the country for &quot;first contact&quot;, then Russia.<p>Most of our planet is water. US has the biggest&#x2F;best Navy &amp; intelligence systems. And also pretty aggressive spirit.<p>Russia has 1&#x2F;6 (IIRC) of our planet&#x27;s land mass and also a very stubborn spirit.<p>So my uneducated guess is ET is going to be chatting with either Trump or Putin.<p>...God help us...

Nothing? Even ignoring the fact that humans can&#x27;t generate a powerful enough signal to respond, it&#x27;s probably going to be several thousand years for them to get the response. They&#x27;ll likely be far more interested in claiming the achievement of discovering the signal, than concocting a response.

Is the octahedron on the picture supposed to be an alien spaceship?<p>It reminds me of a creature in a certain animation I watched.

What if we are the first&#x2F;only intelligent beings in the universe and it is upon us to spread to other galaxies and stars?<p>Probabilistically unlikely for us to be the only ones, but just a thought.

The consequence would be they get first contract and a better deal for producing AlienPhones?

Do we really think they&#x27;ll be using radio communication? We&#x27;re already dabbling with quantum comm ourselves. And if they can travel the stars, they&#x27;d have been incentivized to develop something better long ago. One would think...<p>Hell, maybe the whole galaxy has quantum wifi.