The ending of one of my favorite movies ever came to mind…
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What If they try to evangelize us?
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Does this remind anyone else of Contact too? Both the book and the movie (in the latter, Dr Arroway’s candidacy for making first contact was initially scuppered on the ground that she doesn’t believe in a deity, and therefore not representative of humanity)
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We can realistically and reasonably accurately make many more assumptions about the styles of thinking, means of communication, level of different types of intelligence, and possible emotional states when dealing with other humans than we can with another, independently evolved (or created) species. And I don’t mean the “created” bit sarcastically, we could actually encounter a species that was (and knows it was, with proof) intelligently designed by it’s ancestors or other aliens instead of a product of biological evolution, that grew up on a terraformed world that was actually only a few thousand years old with no fossil record. We could encounter a hivemind that is functionally immortal as a collective and therefore utterly unmoved by our concepts of individual deaths and the idea of an individual mind or soul. The space of possible aliens is vast.
Not that past or present humans actually tend(ed) to have good (or any) explicit mental models of any of this when encountering new cultures, but today we do know enough that we could, but only for other humans.
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Those are interesting distinctions, but you are positing a theology that is much more in dialog with the realities of the physical world than most theologies that I’m familiar with. The 16th-century Christians who first encountered Americans did not consider the Americans to be people, so they /may as well/ have been constructed hive-minds, theologically-speaking.
From a practical viewpoint, as sci-fi author Charles Stross puts it, “[T]here’s no physical object worth the cost of interstellar travel. Whole idea is nonsense.” (Because anything to be found on an alien, inhabited planet will be found many orders of magnitude closer to home.) Stories of space travel are often informed/inspired/rehashes the spread of humans around the globe and European colonialism in particular. Earth colonialism and exploratory instincts simply don’t scale up to interstellar distances, however.
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It’s true. There’s no economic or materialistic reasons to make the trip here when the only thing our solar system has to offer that you can’t find anywhere else is us. That does mean that if someone did care to show up in person, though, religion might be pretty relevant.
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Except for the priests who spoke out against the atrocities being committed against the people here.
You might be surprised to learn that there really was never a time where all Christians acted or believed in lock-step. Debate and discussion has been part of the whole thing since at least the council of Nicea…
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Yeah, but anyone who has a religious belief is just a delusional idiot… /s
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I’ll go with whatever religion they got.
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The other part of that is that if it’s us they’re interested in (though given the distances and lack of information they could glean, it’d be impossible to have any real knowledge of us), they’d be sending signals, not coming here, and certainly not coming here in person. (NASA’s interest is about how to break the news if they find evidence that suggests an exoplanet with life - i.e. oxygen in atmosphere. Not anything remotely like first contact.)
As for how religion would be relevant to that, see my above skepticism that theologians would give any meaningful insight into how religious people would respond (which is the bit that’s meaningful).
That depends on the type of interest. I didn’t say our religion is the only one that would be relevant.
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Another example of why it’s important to consider how various religious believers would likely react to news of extraterrestrial intelligence. Some of them are bound to react poorly and we’d need to be prepared for how that might play out…
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It’s going to be like The Covenant from Halo if any aliens turn up in person.
Alternatively, we’re a bunch of heretics and therefore an interesting day out for devout aliens.
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An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilizations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop. The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you’d tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbors were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass… when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you’ve just been discovered, you’re all subjects of the Emperor now, he’s keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests.
Iain M. Banks, Excession
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Or we could be aliens who happened to reincarnate in Earth.
The Minbari discovered that some of their people were born here and decided to surrender to the human forces after waging a devastating war in Babylon 5.
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Humanity would either ignore the proof in front of their eyes, much as they’ve already avoided being drawn in by other religions (not to mention ignoring overwhelming evidence that the concept of God was created entirely by man), or they’d yawn and assume that those extraterrestrials were part of God’s plan all along.
In either case, why do we need to prepare for some mysterious reaction? Do you really think there will be mayhem in the streets?
