[flubert]

What if we went in the opposite direction. Let's say we discovered another more advanced civilization on a relatively nearby star. I wonder how bad would people on earth would now feel, and how the feelings would be distributed. Would rich people be more affected or poor people? Would some people find excitement in trying to attain what the aliens had? Would others become despondent? Would it be a complete non-event because they are so distant?

[daodedickinson]

I think that civilization might pop like a bubble and mass despondency would occur as it seems to have occured when "low" discovers "high" on earth. There is a feeling of superfluousness when one realizes they cannot contribute to the forefront of culture, as I feel depressed when I feel I will never have enough programming skill to get a job on this planet and will just be a human pet my whole life. Nevertheless, I don't think aliens will ever show up. Human desires are ultimately illogical and if "cultures" "advance" enough I think they will disappear like the Dwemer, they will no longer be able to cross the is-ought divide except perhaps to desire survival - perfect adaptation to the environment. But perfect adaptation to the environment implies the antithesis of power: it means your being is completely determined not from anything inside but the outside. This means becoming invisible, becoming at one with the universe, becoming the laws of physics themselves. Just imagine if we got the technology to install into the brain like "whoa I know kung-fu" in The Matrix. People could be backed up on github. Individuality would die out and most people would feel horrifically superfluous. "Civilization" might have drastically reduced desire for human bodies, especially combined with desire engineering (one could remove survival instincts and bring world population down to the 500 million many elites already want [including an editorial in my local paper today]). But what is the end of such a society? I think space exploration would be pointless if one had the computational ability to imagine whole worlds and keep population down to a steady state except maybe one nearby planet in case of an asteroid. One might engineer away the wanderlust when trying to abolish pain and depression and all suffering.