What would happen if mankind receives something like the Arecibo message?

[GeneralVeers]

What is your opinion? How would you react? How would mankind as a whole react?

Heheh. There is some SERIOUS irony here. The answer to the above question has been staring all of you in the face the whole time.

THIS THREAD ITSELF IS THE ANSWER.

Human beings all over the planet would react differently. Just as all you folks have. The human response would be chaotic and disorganized, with different national governments having different responses. And the end result of this mishmash would be as unpredictable as all the times various human civilizations have discovered each other throughout human history.

It's incredibly cliche', I know--but sometimes the answer to a seemingly intractable question is, indeed, closer than you realize.......

[Randazzo]

If we were to get something like that particular message, I suspect nothing would change at all.

Even if aliens showed up on our doorstep, I don't think anything would change drastically, unless of course they were shooting at us. Any changes would be temporary, be it unification or panic, and we'd eventually get back down to the business of hating and killing each other. Again, this is assuming the Aliens didn't show up with guns blazing.

"Religion" would most definitely survive, fanatics will carry that on until the end of the world.

[Tex_NL]

Even in the correct form I don't see how that image can convey anything useful at all.

And that is indeed the final nail in the proverbial coffin. We know what it's supposed to represent and with some imagination we can understand it. For any alien, without our frame of reference, it's just a stream of binary code.

[Heimdall5008]

Should aliens ever make their presence known?... this world would fall apart in a day.

Why?

To answer that, I have a better question: Should they show up, who are you going to listen to and want to follow?... those little green guys with the superior technology who travel through space... or the incompetent government/religious leaders (and media) incessantly yelling at their puppets, telling them what to do.

I never said anything about superior technology or showing up. My assumption was that also our alien "freinds" have not (yet?) a way to travel interstellar distances. So I stay with aliens at a comparable technologly level as earth.

[vixr]

I think it would be a lot like I acted when I was a kid faced with parental (alien) guidance... listen with a grudge and then do the exact opposite.

[DaMichel]

I highly doubt humanity has the capability to decipher any alien signal.

The so called Arecibo Message as it was send in 1974 to the M13 star cluster (25,000 light years away) was a binary signal that made up some stylized imagery. It was a grid based on two prime numbers, 23 pixels wide and 73 pixels high.

At the same time it was send the signal was given to multiple scientists and mathematicians with out any further instructions on how to decode it.

We already got the answer to this one! (I'm so sorry, but somebody was going to post this sooner or later. Those are pretty cool pieces of artwork at least!)

I highly doubt religion would be problematic more than it already is. There are plenty of different religions among people already, some (all?) of them claim to have the only true god. Adding aliens into the mix would not change much, i suppose. Rather, we would probably try to convert them to our religions.