[theandrewbailey]

I remember reading somewhere that due to the differing pace of evolution and technology advancements, any intelligent living aliens we meet are almost certainly going to be gods or cavemen. I can't find the reference.

[krapp]

It's from Arthur C. Clarke: "If one considers the millions of years of pre-history, and the rapid technological advancement occurring now, if you apply that to a hypothetical alien race, one can figure the probabilities of how advanced the explorers will find them. The conclusion is we will find apes or angels, but not humans."

[0]http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/alientech.php

[kfarr]

I like that quote but lately feeling like advanced tech doesn't necessarily mean angelic

[nkoren]

Old-school angels were just as likely to rip your face off as serve you tea and cookies. Read the older Abrahamic texts, and it's clear that to encounter an angel was often a terrifying experience, even when it went well.

Obviously their marketing department has given angels quite a rebranding over the last thousand-odd years, but still...

[julius_set]

Cue the plot of Doom Eternal

[krapp]

Angelic doesn't imply good, just being sufficiently advanced enough to seem like magic (to use another Clarke quote.) Demons are technically angels after all.

[zabardasth]

> And she took on another heart—no longer minded toward earthly things—but ecstatically in the angelic dialect, sending up a hymn to God in accord with the style of the angels. And as she spoke ecstatically, she allowed “The Spirit” to be on her garment.

It seems that speaking to one would be quite a terrifying experience, especially if one were speaking in tongues.

[krapp]

When angels are described in the Bible, it's often in strange and abstract terms, beings with multiple faces, legs made of burning bronze, eyes where eyes shouldn't be, etc. As if the writer was having difficulty comprehending what they were seeing,much less finding language for it. And the first thing angels do when they encounter humans is tell them not to be afraid, because of course the logical and proper reaction to skyscraper-sized interlocking, burning, eye-covered wheels with multi-faced, multi-winged beings in the middle is bowel evacuating terror.

And of course, many of Lovecraft's eldritch horrors were simply aliens that were so alien that the mere sight of them broke human minds, and that were no more concerned for humanity than humanity is for a particular anthill.

That's probably what an actual encounter with an alien is going to be like for us. We'll try to understand why a living infinite-dimensional hypersphere made of flesh made of time whose eyes are our eyes all at once just showed up and "unfolded" our sun into a non-Euclidean shape we can't even describe mathematically without being driven slowly to madness, while it won't even know we were there.