Digital Sculpture
Topic: What if we found aliens?
2. Consider and clarify your topic
My question is “what if we found aliens?” This is an important question to me and for many people. In fact, I believe that there is one of the most important questions. Many people are too fickle to seriously contemplate the thought. The “real world” that we live in is so full of distractions that few people truly care about such things. Staring up at the stars was the pastime of our ancestors (and may have been the foundation of the first religions—a controversial idea), and they wondered the same kinds of things. What is we found aliens? How would society change? How long would it take humanity to build up its defenses or tear them down, as necessary? We could find aliens or we could be found by them. We could sense their existence with our precise instruments or we could one day find them among us. We might find aliens on Mars in the form of fossilized algae or crashed spacecraft from hundreds of millions of years ago. Would aliens be like those in the movie Contact (the best kind), or the movies War of the Worlds or Independence Day (the worst kind)? If we found non-trivial aliens (e.g. plants on Venus aren’t as interesting as intelligent beings), it would change society forever. Economies, science, politics, religion, human fickleness—each would either completely collapse or be strengthened to unimaginable levels.
10 tangible, related things:
- Alien spaceship
- Earth
- Astronomy things, like telescopes
- Computers
- Astronauts
- President of the U.S. / U.S. government
- Area 51
- Enlightenment/accruement of knowledge
- War
- Explosions
