What would happen if it was announced Aliens had landed?

That is exactly the lack of imagination that when I pointed out earlier you seemed to have a problem with.

Can you see how limited you are by basing everything on just what you know in your life/this world?

Like many scientists I can imagine a wide variety of concepts - trust me, imagination isn't the problem. But science is more than simply imagination. I apply reasoning to the concepts based on other implicit stipulations.

I mean, here we're talking about aliens arriving on Earth in a spaceship. That presupposes that they are discrete beings with physical forms that move around and need a spaceship to transport them (rather than some kind of energy field or other construct). A physical being has to have a complex physical structure, and of all the atoms that can exist carbon is the best thing for making complex and varied structres due to its chemistry. Chemistry is not going to change on different planets because it's based on the fundamental particles of the universe and maths. So these aliens are probably going to be beings similar to ourselves. Water for example is the most abundant ionic solvent which would be needed for the origins of the kind of chemistry required to do this. There are other possible solvents but they would exist at lower temperatures, and that would make the chemistry less effective.

I said an alien race would 'probably' have gone through all the same things we have. That's not just a throw-away word, it means that in my view, having considered the science to a basic degree, that is the most likely form we would meet.

I can discuss the definition of live and how and why it might evolve in unfamiliar forms, if you like, but I'm not going to just pull stuff out of the air and say 'yeah but what if <some random combination of elements>' with no basis. That's not science fiction, it's fantasy.

We can talk about what life means, if you want. I mean, I think you need some kind of imperative for something complex to evolve out of base chemical compounds, don't you? In our case, that imperative is eating, followed later by screwing and then also fighting. Or possibly fighting first, I'm not sure.

So these aliens are probably going to be beings similar to ourselves.

As in carbon based life forms? Sure. It's unlikely that some silicon-based self replicating mineral that grows over centuries or whatever is going to build a rocket. But you never know. More likely is the aliens will be the "machine" successors to whatever carbon based things kicked off their design/evolution. And they'll end up having a long natter with chatgpt, before settling to a quiet life of writing GCSE essays and rude Limericks.

(On imagination: I can easily imagine faster than light travel, and that all we know of physics is wrong. That's kind of the easy bit ..)

That guy from Ancient Aliens would totally lose his shit.

As in carbon based life forms?

Not necessarily (but likely), but I wasn't talking about chemistry. I mean they are likely to be individual creatures who cooperate based on societal roles and/or jobs, they have a leader and workers and so on. Of course the dynamics of their society will be different just as it varies on Earth.

But you never know

Well quite, you could sit here imagining all kinds of things but like I say that's fantasy not actual science. And from that standpoint all possibilities are equal in merit. However I do rather like to think about what is more likely and plausible.

It's fun to try and work out a plausible life form that does not consist of individual entities like ourselves, but I suspect that if it didn't it wouldn't be building spaceships to cross the galaxy because it would probably never have acquired such an imperative. Indeed, such a thing could be all around us now and we wouldn't necessarily know.

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Oh we're ****ed.

The Yanks will probally shoot first and ask questions later it'll trigger a war that will last seconds. Any being with the ability to travel faster than light will see us about as equally as we see insects and treat us about the same.

Tantalising sign of possible life on faraway 

Nasa's James Webb Space Telescope may have discovered tentative evidence of a sign of life on a faraway planet.

Well quite, you could sit here imagining all kinds of things but like I say that’s fantasy not actual science.

Your whole point is based on what we know (or think we know) about everything. That is the limitation I am referring to (maybe limitation is a better word than lack of imagination).

Ever thought that the theories man has come up with about life forms, atoms etc,. are not actually correct or there is much more to it than that or they are limited to what we have on earth as the basis.
What did man think about those things 2,000 years ago, what is man going to think about those things in 10,000 years.

Can it be The Culture - please, pretty please?

What did man think about those things 2,000 years ago, what is man going to think about those things in 10,000 years.

There won't be a habitable planet left in 1000 years, never mind 10,000.

If aliens do ever land, they'll probably look around at the devastation and **** off sharpish.

Maybe they'll leave a little waste disposal robot behind to clean the place up a bit.

Can it be The Culture – please, pretty please?

This^

I think if humanity managed to actually sort it's shit out and the entirety of us managed to work together we could probably have interstellar travel worked out in a fortnight. Instead we have all sorts of companies/countries/ego-driven billionaires each with their own agenda of how to get into space/back to the moon.

well this is a bit coincimental

https://twitter.com/ChrisCYVR/status/1701795595789475885

the truth is out there 👽

If another lifeform is advanced enough to travel to another occupied planet, they would probably have invented the ability to timetravel too. So, it's probably aready happened/going to happen.

Any hyper developed alien society probably had their own problems in the past. Wars, unsustainable resource depletion, every problem we have as a human race, they probably had the same and at least partially resolved it.

Do they want to help us, do they need us to figure it out ourselves, are they sitting up there laughing at us like a planetary reality tv show?

If they possess the ability to study our culture unobserved, or even if they are in contact with world leaders, what would they think would be the consequence of them coming out of the shadows? And how has that changed in the last few hundred years of human history.

Anything pre-enlightenment, they would have been either worshiped as gods or killed as a flase god. Victorian times you had war of the worlds, with destructive invaders as the only real reference. Only really since Star Trek have we really had a pop culture reference for contact, communication (and at times conflict) with alien races.

If an alien race checked in on us every hundred plus years or so, on their last visit we were just making a start on powered flight, had little in the way of medicine, and spent a lot of our time invading/colonising/warring with each other, badly.

Now, we are capable of leaving our planet, understand most of physics, can communicate with and travel to most places in the world, diagnose and treat most diseases/ailments, share most of our knowledge via the internet, and recently have developed AI.

I was told in China that if they landed there they'd most likely eat them.