The discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) would have great implications for humanity. While we may one day discover ETI which possesses lesser technological development than our own civilization, for the purposes of this essay I will only be discussing ETI that is technologically superior — that is, ETI which has advanced to the point where they (or it) can traverse the distance between stars, or communicate scientific / practical knowledge that is more advanced than ours. (Note: all following uses of “ETI” should be taken to imply “advanced ETI”).
Advanced ETI would undermine traditional theistic religious belief in at least two important ways:
- The discovery of ETI that does not believe what a great percentage of humans believe about theism, an afterlife, etc., would raise questions about the veracity of these religious claims. This is because it is highly plausible that an advanced ET civilization would know more about major philosophical and scientific questions, such as, the origins of the universe (or multiverse), how life arises, how consciousness emerges, and what happens to individuated consciousness when it is extinguished, etc.
- The discovery of ETI would entail that the holy books of some of the world’s most popular religions failed to mention, or provide an accurate account of other intelligent lifeforms in the universe. This would call into question the many other claims in these books.
The possible ways humans might react to this new information would take a variety of forms.
Some religious leaders and believers would scramble to revise their interpretations to make them more compatible with the discovery. (It should be noted that many non-theistic or non-traditional religious views already discuss the existence of ET life.) Others will become more entrenched in their traditional views and propose conspiratorial or denialist explanations of the discovery.
Predictably, some would suffer an existential or ontological crisis, and experience psychological shock / cognitive dissonance as a result.
In response to this rupture of their worldview, individuals may resort to psychological coping mechanisms to protect their belief / identity. For example, some will attempt to explain an ETI entity or entities in religious terms (e.g., demons, angels, god/s, jinn, etc.). As is predicted in the novel Contact by Carl Sagan, some may resort to violence to stop further contact with the ETI.
ETI contact may cause further destabilization by initiating a corollary breakdown in traditional value systems. Since secular life philosophies have not diffused widely in most societies, the vacuum left from the dissolution of traditional values may not be filled soon enough to prevent anomie.
An ETI civilization’s knowledge of the possible destabilizing effects that may result from contact presents a compelling explanatory hypothesis for the Fermi paradox. I consider this hypothesis to be a variation of the zoo / laboratory / planetarium hypotheses; I call this the destabilization hypothesis.
In essence, the destabilization hypothesis states that an ETI is currently concealing their existence to prevent mass destabilization of our global civilization. Speculating further on this hypothesis, I believe an ETI would wait to make overt contact until humanity has developed to the point where contact would not cause such massive destabilization. For example, they may be waiting to see if we get past another great filter — such as, not destroying ourselves with our weapons of mass destruction — or they may only step in if we get close to that point. They may also be waiting to contact us when we get close to a technological singularity or merging with artificial intelligence — I wrote about this here.
Whatever the case may be, if we find strong evidence of ETI in the near future, it will further erode traditional theistic religion — that is, unless the ETI happens to share some of the same religious beliefs as traditional theists do; however, this is a possibility that does not seem highly plausible.