Why do people think there would be mass panic over UFO's?

[Coito ergo sum]

People panic about flu. If that's enough to throw people into mass hysteria then I'm sure some UFOs being confirmed as aliens would make the world go even more nuts.

Hmmm....nobody panicked about the flu here in the US, not that I saw.

All seemed calm when swine flu was around last year....even in my area, where there were people being diagnosed with it all the time, everyone just sort of went about their business.

[Thinking Aloud]

People panic about flu. If that's enough to throw people into mass hysteria then I'm sure some UFOs being confirmed as aliens would make the world go even more nuts.

Hmmm....nobody panicked about the flu here in the US, not that I saw.

All seemed calm when swine flu was around last year....even in my area, where there were people being diagnosed with it all the time, everyone just sort of went about their business.

There's media hysteria, and then there's run into the streets screaming hysteria. The former is common, but the latter extremely rare. An alien IFO would cause the former, but (bar the zapping commencing) little of the latter.

[Toontown]

Wouldn't it depend on what "the truth about UFO's" is?

What would the aliens' interest in earth be? Simple curiosity? A stopover on an interstellar route? An interstellar watering hole?

What if the aliens think of us as nothing more than exceedingly ugly, fetid, sweaty dolts, of no possible use whatsoever, and they wouldn't miss us at all if we were gone? However, it hardly seems a simple matter to send an exterminating armada across many light years of space. Perhaps they are simply unable to amass the numbers necessary to do away with us as (humanely?) as they would like. Yet. But soon, they plan to have perfected a quick, painless, euthanizing agent, and the means to distribute it over the planet quickly.

Perhaps our days are numbered. Perhaps that is the truth about UFO's. Perhaps aliens find us even less lovable, on the whole, than we find each other.

Think about it. Humans have committed genocide, against members of their own species. Humans have expended vast efforts to do away with members of their own species. Why should we expect better from aliens?

Mutherfuckers best get your heads outta your asses, stop fighting among yourselves, turn outward, and face the strange. Because it's out there. And it's coming for you.

[Thinking Aloud]

[RuleBritannia]

UFO =/= Alien

[Coito ergo sum]

I might do that if they were shooting at me.

But, just finding out that they existed....I'd be like...hmmm.....that's nice to have my suspicions confirmed.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

UFO =/= Alien

UFO = Little Space Buddies with a Thing for Your Ass.

[Trolldor]

Most people have seen an UFO, nobody's seen an EFO.

[leo-rcc]

Obviously, if they wanted to attack us, they have had decades to take us by surprise.

During those decades a huge fleet of warships has been heading our way, at close to the speed of light, from a nearby, recently conquered, star system. We don't have long left!

But due to an error in scale their invasion armada was swallowed by a small dog.

[amused]

Because the universe was supposedly made just for us.

We may not be the center of the solar system any more (thanks a lot Galileo) but we are the center of God's attention.

If there are aliens then we're no longer that center.

And if we are no longer that center, then maybe God doesn't really care about us as much.

Which means He's not watching everything.

Which means we can get away with stuff.

Which means that other people might get away with stuff.

Which means we have to defend ourselves from the other people who are trying to get away with stuff.

Which immediately leads to panic.

[Horwood Beer-Master]

...Obviously, if they wanted to attack us, they have had decades to take us by surprise...

"Take us by surprise"? If beings who have attained the level of technology required to conquer interstellar distances were out there and meant us any harm, they could give us three century's advanced warning of their arrival and we'd still end-up getting our vaporised arses handed to us on a plate.

[PsychoSerenity]

Obviously, if they wanted to attack us, they have had decades to take us by surprise.

During those decades a huge fleet of warships has been heading our way, at close to the speed of light, from a nearby, recently conquered, star system. We don't have long left!

But due to an error in scale their invasion armada was swallowed by a small dog.

[Feck]

Mass panic would only occur if the UFOs turned out to be alien attackers that were actively blowing stuff up or generally rounding up "samples" from the population and whisking them away.

A benign UFO that turned out to be a benign alien visitor with no intention of sucking out people's brains would cause about as much excitement amongst the general population as the recent creation of artificial life did.

Copying a set of DNA/RNA and putting it in a cell is not creation
Any more than This is ART

[PsychoSerenity]

Mass panic would only occur if the UFOs turned out to be alien attackers that were actively blowing stuff up or generally rounding up "samples" from the population and whisking them away.

A benign UFO that turned out to be a benign alien visitor with no intention of sucking out people's brains would cause about as much excitement amongst the general population as the recent creation of artificial life did.

Copying a set of DNA/RNA and putting it in a cell is not creation
Any more than This is ART

I'd disagree - How many other life forms have their own web address encoded into their DNA?

[Feck]

Just like the image above has an author ? maybe even a copyright ? That's like Gutenberg claiming Authorship ! When some one writes the sequence from first principles and uses DNA sequences that have not been used before (as much as is possible )to code for the proteins THEN I will be impressed .When they generate new proteins that do the jobs of the ones found in nature already I will be more than a little gobsmacked ! And then I would love to see them MAKE an organism to host those DNA sequences !!!!!!!

The problem is not just PCR! anymore than Science is just copy/paste from Wiki !
This goes in the same bucket of sensationalist reporting as when they added a few extra Telomeres to the Chromosomes of a nematode and announced to the world they had a cure for ageing !


BLEH Now stop making me talk shop when I'm drunk