- The mystery of ’Oumuamua, the first interstellar object ever observed, continues to deepen. A new analysis argues that if it were a comet, it would have broken apart as it passed near the sun.
I always have to wonder what would actually happen on the day that becomes no longer a joke. You want to think that the response would be as dramatic as fiction claims it will be. I think that we can become accustomed to many shocking things and that we would settle in with the idea of aliens a lot faster than we might think.
Fiction is dramatic by design. You need to find the interesting somewhere and "Mars Needs Women" is a lot more dramatic than "So we observed this sequence of flashes that we eventually, over the course of years, decoded to 'fuck it's lonely over here BTW our sun has been a cinder since y'all were monkeys' and there were some mournful blog posts and a terrible attempt at a Hollywood movie but by and large life continued apace." My favorite First Contact story remains Larry Niven's Fourth Profession. Hey zebra2 sci fi club.
It depends on the circumstances, like if they show up themselves vs. if we find an automated probe. A probe is much more likely, thank christ
