Sadly, it's probably just a really interesting icy outcrop of some description. Current theories of Ceres' composition suggest an enormously thick icy layer covered in dust and rock, so a meteor strike could expose the ice (and probably cause all kinds of weird physics --- ice goes strange under extreme temperatures and pressures).
But let's say it is aliens, and in a week or so we get pictures of what is indubitably an alien city.
Publicly-accessible data from Dawn stops immediately. Specific data from the on-board components provided by the Netherlands, Italy and Germany are sanitized and given to the specific country. Everything else is classified under the umbrella of national security.
There is a hue and cry from many quarters regarding the blackout, bringing both the tinfoil hat brigade and legitimate scientists together.
The reaction of religious organizations run the full spectrum from warning of "work of the Devil" to those that welcome evidence of alien life as alternate forms of God's work.
The American media will ask the burning questions prompted by their internal research departments: what did the President know and when did he know it, and how will this affect the next episode of "Keeping up with the Kardashians"?
And the world will be subjected to a wave of horrible alien-themed movies, books and television programs quickly cobbled together to take advantage of the news.
North Korea will threaten the alien city with destruction if it doesn't acknowledge that Kim Jong Un is the ruler of Earth.
The price of oil will rise, inexplicably fall, and rise again.
The day-to-day lives of regular folks will otherwise be unaffected.
It's a fun thought experiment. I've had a similar one, imagining an alternate cold war with the divergent point being the mid 60's Mariner probe visit to Mars revealed canals, cities, vegetation, and a shallow ocean.
A city on Ceres would make NASA's budgetary woes go away instantly. Either there would be a new space race, or the various spacefaring nations would quickly make an arrangement for a multinational crew to visit, with each nation (or group like the EU) reserving the right to make claims later. I'm not sure how the public would react. I think they'd be glued to the news, but there wouldn't be any sort of panic, since both science and science fiction has led many people to expect finding this sort of thing one day.
Of course, it's worth considering that if there was an inhabited alien city on Ceres, the chances of them not knowing we were here would be nil.
So, alternative (a): they know we're here and for some reason don't want us to know about them.
Alternative (b): they know we're here but either don't care / are too alien to want to communicate.
Alternative (c): the city is uninhabited.
I would say that the most immediate reaction on earth would be shouting, initially at each other, but very quickly people would be shouting at Ceres --- everyone who can do some basic electronics and get hold of a satellite dish will be making transmissions. For alternatives (b) and (c) above, we wouldn't get a reply. For (a), well...
I hadn't thought of the aliens actually been indigenous to Ceres. It's an interesting idea. They would most likely have evolved in the water/ice layer, and be based on weird and exotic ice chemistry. That would make the city their equivalent of a lunar outpost, and it's quite plausible that they simply may not have noticed electromagnetic waves.
The chances of talking to them would probably be quite slim --- we would be appallingly alen to each other.
But it's possible that they've lost some of their technology. Or that it's a punitive outpost - a space-jail, where they work off their debt to their society by mining, or performing astronomical observations, or something else.
If you're a space-travelling human-like species, Ceres is pretty hospitable. Lots of water, lots of rock, enough gravity to keep things down while still being easy to get off of, a manageable temperature, and it's in the asteroid belt so there's plenty of nearby materiel for development (not to mention Jupiter not far away, energetically).
Earth's too hot, too far away from anywhere, and at the bottom of a great big hole. The only reason we like it is because we've adapted to its environment. It's not very good real estate. Plus, it's contaminated with life, which means lots of big, complex, wriggly molecules that get everywhere and fiddle with things. Get those in your life system and the alien equivalent of anaphylactic shock is probably getting off lightly.
Depending on where they came from, it may require less Δv to get to Ceres than to Earth. Or who knows, maybe it's an automated surveillance platform set up to monitor the Earth?
> I've had a similar one, imagining an alternate cold war with the divergent point being the mid 60's Mariner probe visit to Mars revealed canals, cities, vegetation, and a shallow ocean.
Press release from NASA: "Unfortunately, the Dawn probe appears to have experienced a technical malfunction, resulting in complete signal loss. Engineers are studying the problem, but no further information is currently available."
That's about all we'll hear, for a while at least.
Is it possible for amateurs/other space agencies with a big enough dish to capture the raw Dawn data themselves as it comes in, or is that stuff encrypted these days?
(I assume outgoing command signals use some sort of authentication scheme, but that seems unnecessary for incoming data.)
Hams have received probe signals before (see the amateur-dsn group on Yahoo) but I'm pretty sure no one has decoded data from any modern probe. They apparently have their reasons for encrypting it through obscurity if nothing else.
Some of our most advanced modulation formats were originally developed for DSN work, in fact. They represent a space-program spinoff that doesn't get the attention it deserves.
Oddly enough, not that much. You'll have a lot of emotion, and lots of ink spilled, but little will change for the day to day life of most people: They have their lives to worry about, aliens are cool, but don't put bread on the table.
Governments will race to get a mission with humans to visit.
What happens next depends on if there are living aliens there, or just an old city.
Maybe not on our daily lives, so I don't think (I hope..) there will not be wide spread panic. Maybe a few groups here and there but nothing we've never seen before.
What I would expect though, and I consider this a big deal, is the potential for humans to start answering one of life's most intriguing questions: are we, or are we not alone in this Universe? Like Clarke famously said, both alternatives are pretty scary.
So at least I would hope people would start pressuring governments to actually go there and make contact. As a lot of other people say, humans seem to be explorers by nature.
However there's the other fact that someone else posted. Probably this would not be know at first, so it's harder to gauge with that factor. I don't think NASA/Gov would release this info right away, but I do think if this info is ever released, it would make the world change a lot. Maybe not immediately, but for sure on the mid-to-long term.
> What happens next depends on if there are living aliens there, or just an old city.
But, when that mission arrives to inspect the lights, couldn't we expect that contact with alien technology, even if it is just an alien laser, to profoundly change our science?
Assuming, of course, we could even understand what we were looking at.
If you went back in time and gave Isaac Newton a smartphone but didn't tell him what it was, how it worked or even charged the batteries, it probably wouldn't change much of anything for a very long time. And that would possibly be a lot less alien in context than any actual alien technology we come across.
Assuming it even changes our science, which is not a given.
But let's assume it does. Our science has changed profoundly many times.
For example: Heliocentric solar system, Nuclear Bomb, and radio, just to give some of the most dramatic changes.
Did all that much change on Earth? Most people just went on like normal. Things changed, but slowly, there was no shock.
Can you imagine someone from long ago, who is told "We just found a way to speak to someone 300 miles away in an instant." They would probably go nuts imagining the immense change in peoples lives, in war, in commerce.
Yet, these changes actually happened, and while things changed, there was no turmoil.
The reality was not as dramatic as the expectation.
I think you're massively underestimating the amount of change.
Before technology most people lived on farms. Hardly anyone travelled more than a few tens of miles at most. Infant mortality was huge. Adult mortality was almost as huge. Living to fifty made you exceptional.
The average person had no education to speak of - no math, no ability to read or write, no knowledge of science, art, or culture.
The single biggest change is the fact that not only can most people read and write, but they have a vastly increased awareness of the world around them.
Now - imagine if that awareness was increased again to the interplanetary or galactic level. Imagine if live expectancy increased by a factor of two, or five, or ten. Imagine having access to a galaxy-sized Internet, with its own version of Wikipedia (and whatever the alien equivalent of Hacker News is).
I used to think 'ice' too, but think about this: the sun is basically a point-source of lighting for Ceres; and yet the bright spot can be seen at various angles. Now, it is possible that it's a huge jaggedy piece of, such that it reflects sunlight at a wide range of angles; but what if it isn't? :-)
a civil war on Earth, it would negate a lot of firmly held beliefs by some communities. Even secular groups might consider it imperative to stop any further contact.
Science negated more firmly held beliefs of many religious communities and nobody fought wars over that. They either adapted, or deny all evidences.
There was no Great Religious War Over The Theory of Evolution or over the age of universe. People prefer to live in denial. Much more convenient than dying in a war (indirectly acknowledging beliefs you don't like).
Religious people already have to deal with immense cognitive dissonance in a large number of contexts. Accommodating the discovery of extraterrestrial life won't be that difficult.
This just keeps getting better and better. Can't wait to find out what they end up with. I'm still betting on exposed water ice but would totally love it if this was the bright shiny core of a nickel/iron meteorite.
On the far right side of the picture, near the vertical middle, there's a crater with straight sides, like a ... hexagon. And there's a similar sized pentagon near the top.
Looks like Ceres is a Goldberg polyhedron.
Oh, and the bright spots are thermal exhaust ports.
Great pic. Would you mind telling me the setup you used o take it? I currently have a DSLR with only a 300mm lense and have yet to get a photo of the moon that nice...
Home-made newtonian telescope. 150mm aperture, 1200mm focal length (f/8). Panasonic G1 camera (DSLR-like but without mirrors). Camera lens removed, camera body mounted on telescope focuser, so the sensor was in the focal plane of the telescope primary mirror. A.k.a. "prime focus" photography.
Basically, the scope became the "camera lens".
Some post processing in Lightroom, mostly just cranking up contrast and saturation. Some denoising.
No idea what the exposure was, I just gauged it on the camera LCD so that I wouldn't get the over-exposure warning on the Moon surface.
Electric Universe Theory has non-mainstream coherent and sensible explanations for these type of phenomena. Any HN users well versed in it's explanations? Been reading up on it lately and I'd like to discuss.
Anyway, after around 5 to 10 hours of investigative reading on EU, it seems quite worthy to think about/ follow up on.
At the minimum it's become quite apparent that the Astronomical Standard Model has plenty of spots which are expressed as truth, when there are real problems with observation. I'm not even claiming EU is going to better, but staunch supporters do highlight some interesting inconsistencies and seemingly misguided judgements of modern astronomers. That's not to say their own pet theories are bound to be better though.
Given that you seem to be the only one in this thread who has read about this theory and takes it seriously, why don't you tell us how it explains these bright spots? Otherwise there's not much here to discuss. The Wikipedia article on "plasma cosmology" doesn't make it seem particularly relevant.
Mainstream science has coherent and sensible explanations for these type of phenomena, namely "ice has high albedo", that don't require a bunch of woo.
Probably rather "Fresnel equations" and "interestingly shaped surfaces", along with "fluorescence". (In the older gif, the spots stay bright even on the night side of the planet.)
To downvoters: While EU is almost certainly nonsense, keep in mind that cranks are the people who would be most interested in finding flaws in the standard models, so if those flaws exist, one might well hear them from cranks, even if their own models are far worse.
If you look at this, don't look at it to become more certain in EU, look at it to potentially become less certain in the standard model. Flaws are points of confusion we can mine for novel insight.
EU theory contains a lot of supposed explanations. I do it injustice (as do themselves) by labelling it as one all encompassing theory. It becomes easier to dismiss as a whole since not every single thing presented under the umbrella might be truthful.
That being said, here's one that you might benefit from thinking about. The modern explanation of redshift from astronomical bodies seems just plain wrong. Why? There are large currents of plasma which are observed to connect two objects whose measured redshift (according to mainstream astrophysics) would put them at different sections of the universe.
Since we use redshift to make assumptions about the nature of spacetime, the big bang and an accelerating, expanding universe; the latter invoking necessary dark matter and dark energy (a purely theoretical, abstract idea by scientists which might never be found experimentally) this point deserves more credence than other points which fall under EU.
As much as I was hesitant to question many things taught to me as truth in my physics, electrodynamics and quantum mechanics courses, I did. And was surprised. Some of it just doesn't corroborate with physical observations. I'm obviously not saying it's all wrong; that's stupendous foolish. But you should be more open to it instead of typing three words of dismissal.
"One can acquire certainty only by amputating inquiry"
"There some flaw in an otherwise well tested and understood theory, so let's give credence to an unsupported and discredited conjecture that ignores all the other theories proven virtues." That's pretty much the definition of 'woo' right there.
Sadly, it's probably just a really interesting icy outcrop of some description. Current theories of Ceres' composition suggest an enormously thick icy layer covered in dust and rock, so a meteor strike could expose the ice (and probably cause all kinds of weird physics --- ice goes strange under extreme temperatures and pressures).
But let's say it is aliens, and in a week or so we get pictures of what is indubitably an alien city.
Thought experiment: what happens next?