this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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[–] unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 87 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

This would be a crazy interesting response tho.

If it were actually from an extraterrestrial being then this would mean they already knew of earth and its language before we even made contact :D

[–] OpenStars@startrek.website 36 points 9 months ago (1 children)

And that the reason they do not contact us is that we are simply not worth it:-). (so this being a hint to get our act together first if we want to open up additional communications in the future, I suppose)

Or it could just be a prank, from a billionaire with their own private space force :-P. Nowadays the likelihood of the latter has risen to become higher than the former.

[–] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

We may not want them to contact us. There is the hypothesis that if a civilization learns about another one on another planet, they might eliminate them before they become competition. It would easy to do too. Just hurl some asteroids or comets at the Earth at relativistic speed and we'd be toast.

[–] OpenStars@startrek.website 3 points 9 months ago

I remember that was an episode of Babylon 5 - if you answered the test correctly, the probe would blow you up. I suppose it's also a test of wisdom, not just intelligence:-).

But I also remember a short story in a book about humanity having uploaded itself into our sun, and thereby spread out into the stars, using those as supercomputer mainframes. i.e. what will come from us may look very unlike us now - similar to how a seed looks nothing like the plant that it becomes, or a child acts very differently than the adult that it grows up into.

Then again, if aliens now were to encounter the likes of Musk and Bezos as their points of first contact... I shudder to think what they would want to do to us:-( - after all, what would we do to us, if the roles were reversed? The very measure that we ourselves use is precisely the very thing that we fail at, i.e. we don't look at them and call them "good", do we? No, we are rather ashamed, but then again neither do we stop purchasing goods from Amazon or using Twitter/X (I mean... I do, but most of us do not).

[–] Cliff@lemmy.world 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de -2 points 9 months ago (2 children)

u right, my bad. maybe "its most spoken language" then

[–] dabaldeagul@feddit.nl 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

If I recall correctly that's Chinese (Mandarin?), but that's mostly because China is so large.

Only if going by first language, not by total amount of people that speak the language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers

[–] M137@lemmy.world 0 points 9 months ago