One day, people are going to wake up and, while appearing exactly the same, the world will be totally different. Everyone will go to work the same way they did the day before. Buses, planes and train will come and go on schedule. The moon will be rising somewhere in the world.

But everything will be different.

It’ll be the day when we finally have evidence for intelligence outside of our solar system. It will consume all media, for a while anyway, and it won’t be because we’re surprised to have found life–although we’ll be surprised to have found it at that moment. It’ll be because the context of our existence will be altered. We’ll know that somewhere, somewhere out there, there is intelligent life. It might be aggressive, like so many sci-fi thrillers, or docile, like the extra terrestrial intelligence in the movie Contact. But most likely it will be like nothing we imagined.

I’d like to think that that moment will cause humanity to come together. I know that’s too idyllic a scenario but I can’t see how, once we have some other intelligent life to compare ourselves to, we won’t see how trivial and miniscule our differences are in appearance, demeanour and even geography.

That day might come tomorrow, it might come a million years from now. It might never come…
 

 

(Image: Wikimedia commons)