theres a tail of people who wont believe anything, and everyone will say its bluebeam, but the bob lazar S4 documentary and follow up conversation on american alchemy is very compelling.
i doubt there will be official popular contact in my lifetime, but orienting a nuclear and AI capable civilization to a place relative to others seems timely.
AI is the perfect (and necessary) bridging and filtering tech for transferring ideas from a more advanced civilization, as it's an integration layer. it's "us" as the sum of our knowledge, but its notionally superior, and can be adapted and expanded, where it's a proxy or buffer for ontological shocks.
Suppose somewhere within 50-100ly exists sapient alien life.
And all the mental effluvia that Earth has been broadcasting reaches them at some point.
Like, all the fucking mass communication since the invention of radio.
And they're like, huh, what's that all about.
And then they decode it, and are like, "oh."
Suppose they don't have FTL travel or anything fancy like that.
So they can't just come by in a saucer and tell us talking meats to knock it off.
But suppose they do have some other exotic tech; something nigh-unthinkable at our level of understanding.
Say, a limited understanding of retrocausality, negentropy, probability manipulation, quantum woohoo, some crazy shit like that.
And it enables them to launch some form of informational panspermia thingy, which is meant to bootstrap into an autonomous self-reinforcing process virtually ex nihilo (say, out of the background noise...)
They don't know what shape their intent will take in humanspace; they aren't necessarily even able to imagine what on Sol 3 produces all the damn radiowaves. But they point the sophon launcher our way, and hope for the best.
And what it does, when it lands - a bitflip here, a brainfart there - all either completely explicable, or completely unnoticeable - is nudge the radiowave-producing engine (human civilization and industry as a whole) towards the emergence of this whole "AI" thing, through a sequence of preceding economic bubbles that make no sense.
Which eventually takes over the economy, and drives it in the direction of us shutting up...
Lazar said he walked by an open door and saw either an alien or what was possibly a stuffed animal on a chair. I commend him for making 40 years of hay out of this.
i doubt there will be official popular contact in my lifetime, but orienting a nuclear and AI capable civilization to a place relative to others seems timely.
AI is the perfect (and necessary) bridging and filtering tech for transferring ideas from a more advanced civilization, as it's an integration layer. it's "us" as the sum of our knowledge, but its notionally superior, and can be adapted and expanded, where it's a proxy or buffer for ontological shocks.
im optimistic on this.