h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

An important point would be what if extraterrestrial life were discovered? What would be the psychological, religious and social implications? Would it be sentient? Is it more likely that we are the more advanced race and would discover life on other planets rather than them visitng/communicating with us? Would we even recognise extraterrestrial life? Would they actually be carbon-based? Would they live "out-of-phase" with us? Perhaps even here and appear as ghosts or something? Will these questions ever stop?

Life... Don't talk to me about Life...

Carbon based? Probably. Carbon and silicon both have certain replicative properties that make them excellent building materials for life. They are also pretty non-reactive materials, so they won't do things like detonate on contact with oxygen (yes, a frivolous example but valid).

Like us? Probably not. No reason they would be. Yes, the bipedal body and binocular vision thing works well for Earth but there's no reason that somewhere with different basic conditions would produce a humanoid form. And we certainly won't see many Star Trek style humanoids with lumpy noses .

Living "out of phase" with us... impossible to say, since we'd never be aware of them. We could share this world with millions of creatures who exist Out of Phase and we'd never know it either.

Would they recognise us as intelligent? Probably. There are certain things that a technological civilisation will need - like maths (and therefore an understanding of things like Prime numbers and Pi). The assumption is that we would be able to thrash out a basic understanding based on mathmematical concepts and then work from there.

Would they want to talk to us? If they are exploring, yes. If they are going to all the trouble of creating an interstellar technology and mooching about the cosmos then they will probably be fascinated with us. Either we're noble savages or an interesting xenobiological/xenosociological study... any way you cut it, if they've found us and are allowed to talk to us then they will.

The implications? The implications for religion are huge. Any faith that says God created the universe might be in trouble if alien visitors do not believe the same thing. Obviously, if the visitors have any system of faith at all the blow is lessened considerably - we all have different words for God.
If they have no system of faith at all...that's when some of our religions will have a problem. Of course, the various faiths on earth will be able to work around this, I'm sure.

The social implications might be fun. It would be like discovering a new country. But other than that, why would the discovery of alien life be traumatic?

I'm not sure if it would be traumatic. I think we'd have a right to be wary. One reason is due to infection. In films they never seem to worry about this at all. Humans happily make contact with Vulcans without thinking that we or they may contract some infection or another. This is what happened when the Europeans started visiting the New World. Thousands of the indigenous people died from what we would think of as simple infections. Why couldn't this happen if we made contact with an alien civilisation. Arthur C. Clarke did a story of this some where along the lines of humans visiting Venus. The problem with this would require a period of quarantine which would probably appear hostile to both parties involved.

The reason that the European invasion of the New World brough disease is that it was a case of humans interacting with humans.

It's unlikely that human disease organisms would have much effect on aliens and vice versa - most of the diseases we get from animals have crossed the species barrier but that's because we share so many similarities with them. You don't see many mammals suffering fin rot, do you?

And the chances of alien life being similar enough to catch our diseases is small...we would simply not be a good enough host for alien germs, and vice versa.

Of course the flipside to this is that yes, anything coming in from outside would go through the human immune system like the proverbial hot knife...so maybe quarantine would be a good idea after all...

This might be a good point to mention "War of the Worlds"...

Yeah, I don't think we have to worry about germs from other solar systems. But from Mars might be another thing, as it could be both Mars and Earth has been seeded with the same basics, and would be a bit close to each other.

Also The Andromeda Strain by Michael Chrichton should be about this.

I forgot about the Andromeda Strain.