Obama GIVES US ALIENS!!! not kidding

If you were watching CNN, everything you heard must of course be true.

But to satisfy my curiosity, would you answer a couple of questions?  Did you, before the broadcast, have a close encounter with a Dobie sister?  Did the government spokesman ever use the adjective illegal to describe the aliens?

Your answers could save mankind, as we know it.

A democrat station like CNN would never allow the word illegal in that context.  He probably said undocumented alien. 

I'm not sure what is going to happen. Should be interesting if it happens though.

Roswell, well, no one is sure. If something did happen, the government had no right to cover it up. Contact with an extraterrestrial species is a serious matter, one that could change humanity.

I think you should lay off the 'shrooms.

Drugs are bad, kids.

According to statistics, 548 US citizens are abducted by aliens every night. I'm not sure any government could keep such a massive number of aliens secret, they must be all over to be so active.

How many of those aliens would in fact be alcohol or a cover-up for adultery?

I think you must have been watching an episode of Stargate.

Really?  You have the advantage.  Can you cite a source?  Please, no Hopkins reference.  Strieber reads were compelling.

If its a downed alien ship... the US would cover it up... but not because of the civilians... probably because they don't want other countries getting their hands on it. Knowing about another sentient race and having contact with them would be something NOT to cover up, since in my experience with human nature it would unite peoples and nations under (sad to say) a common fear. (who's seen watchmen?)

EDIT: wonky formatting.......

Wonky thinking. Buy 'em books, send 'em to school, they still don't learn a damn thing.

No argument with your logic.  Hell, who knows, ETs are as believable as say hmmm....angels. 

I think you may want to check this out

This rumour has surfaced several times from different sources, only adding to the intrigue..
Now, i'm absolutely certain aliens exist in the first place, there's no doubt about that. We exist, thereby they must exist.
Also, there are almost a dozen theories (physically plausible) on how to travel between stars within a human lifetime.

Now, if you have a civilization that evolved at the same time as, lets say, the dinosaurs evolved, but instead of being wiped out by a rogue meteor, they kept growing more and more intelligent (instead of "wasting" millions of years more on evolving small rodents into humans after the dinosaurs got wiped out, as on earth).
Then you have a potential alien world, with the same lifetime as earth, but with perhaps a million years more advanced sentient technological civilization. At the very least a thousand years (nothing in the cosmic timescale).

Now tell me what we knew of the world a million years ago. Nothing, thats what
You show a motorboat to a primate from a million years ago, it wouldnt even be able to comprehend it.
So to discount the possibility that other civilizations have visited us, as sci-fi as it sounds, is a fool's errand. You cant say either way.
And i dont think it would cause a religious or economical upheaval either. Heck many religions already clearly state, in their holy texts, that god created the cosmos and all within, not just earth. As for economy, well, if aliens said HI on tv, we'd still need to pay the tv bill and go buy food the next day..

Also Scoutdog, secrets can be kept very well.. Who really killed Kennedy?
As for keeping it secret, well what do you think? The governments of the world has never existed to keep its population educated, informed and safe. That just isnt how the world works. Even a thousand years ago, things were fairly similar. The uneducated generally gets drafted into the military more often than not, the less they know the less they can oppose. If you had a 100% high educated population, you wouldnt have any military, nor would you have any real power over the populace.
This aint conspiracy stuff, check out medieval history for yourself and compare it to today

The point is, secrets are kept from the population, to keep the ruling class in power and gain any advantage in knowledge they can over their rivals (rivals to the "throne" from within national borders, or outside).

Okay, first of all: haha, that's funny. But entertaining the (non-existent) possibility of this, you have some problems with your conclusions! And yes, maybe you are a freak  , but harmless freaks aren't so bad.

Why would it destabilize the military? They might even be more "stable" relative to the public which doesn't have the sense of duty the military does.  The public?  Well given that in the US, quite a few people (maybe a majority) believe aliens exist somewhere, I wouldn't be so sure about a panic either.  It would depend on the nature of the contact, how word of it spreads, and (unfortunately) how badly world governments mishandle the situation (it's fairly certain that they'd screw it up somehow).

Dunno if religions would really flip out as bad it people think either.  Some fundamentalists might snap but they're idiots anyway.  Didn't the Vatican even recently admit that extraterrestrial life would not invalidate religious belief?  And they'd be right saying that - the whole point of "faith" and the compatibility of science and religion is based on the fact that science (which includes ET contact) can't prove or disprove the basic concepts of religion.

Our science and tech would be outdated?  Well, yes and no.  Nothing wrong with old tech if it gets the job done, especially if it's all you have to do the job.  Would science be in tatters?  Not at all, not by a long shot.  I'd expect the excitement in science to fuel a scientific revolution never before seen -- with or without "cheating" our progress by stealing tech.

Now this is where I really have to disagree.  If aliens have advanced technology such as a "replicator" that they are willing to share with us (doubtful), it would be a good thing!  Sure there would be a lot of change and waves ripping through the economy, but if the government stays out of the way and lets the market adjust it'd be fine.  Better technology = more productivity = less work = more free time and/or more much needed "stuff".  By the logic you've used, we'd have outlawed cars because we were afraid it would put all the people running the horse and buggy industry out of work.  

So... friendly aliens?  Overall a good thing!  Neutral aliens... not sure but probably more a good thing.  Hostile aliens, well, then it's time to panic.    Luckily for us I'd also wager that hostile aliens are probably less likely than friendly or neutral ones.  What's to gain by crushing us?  If they're that advanced, we don't have anything they need.

The worst somewhat likely possibility is aliens that just don't care, and consider us insignificant - then they might cause us harm just by not caring, or out of minor convenience.

While I do not believe in the idea of the OP that any breathtaking anouncements will be made, there is one thing I feel I have to add to this discussion:

In our current economical system this would more likely be something like:

 Better technology = more productivity = less work = less employment = less money = more poverty

So in the hypothetical case that an alien civilization gives us highly advanced production techs, we should really start think about changing our society first.

As a colleague of mine once said: "You want REAL comunism? Look at Star Trek!"

Economics is not really my strongest area of expertise, but it seems to me that anything short of "over-unity" machinery (i.e. technology that needs less "stuff" than it gives out, which is only possible if it, IDK, can shift between parallel universes or something) would alter the vlue of resources within an economy, but not really change the basic laws upon which that economy is based. In other words, as long as the amount of resources is finite, people will still need to pay for stuff

As someone famous (who I cant remember the name of) once said: The biggest sing of intelegent life out there is that it have not contacted us.

You've identified a possible logical conclusion of many "mainstream" economists (called Keynesian) who focus on unimportant things such as "full employment" rather than concepts like maximum efficiency, or full production.

The best evidence against the theory you present is history itself. Did computers, cars, flight, advanced farming, more efficient construction machinery, and so on create poverty? Yes it put people out of work temporarily but this is required to advance society.  If the government had tried to "keep farmers employed" by outlawing farm machinery and advanced farming techniques, how many of us would be asleep now because we need to milk the cows in the morning?   Instead now we have a small number of people doing the work that many used to do--freeing up the other people to do jobs less important than growing food, but still desirable--we all like those ipods right?

The thing is your sequence is about right up until "= more poverty".  In such an environment with an abundance of luxuries and food and such, prices would drop drastically because supply would increase relative to demand.  So yes, there would be less work (sounds great!) to go around, but that'd just result in short work weeks.  I'd like the same standard of living I have now with only 5 hours worth of work!

Alas, the current primitive world is a place of (effectively) an unlimited amount of work.  There will never (short of alien showing up maybe..) be a "shortage of work" to do, just more or less of different types of work.

What you are pointing out is indeed a possible outcome, and certainly a more preferable one.

In an environment like you describe it, money probably would loose some, or most of it's importance anyway.
There is also an interesting essay by Bertrand Russel that touches the issue of abundance through efficient production:

In praise of idleness

Anyway the world is a quite complex system and I don't think I could predict the outcome of economic/social/political changes on that scale

Bill Waterson: Creator of Calvin & Hobbes

Very intelligent indeed