My thoughts on disclosure

A reply to this post. It's taken me a week or so to think it through, so I've had some pauses in writing it.

> The government has conducted studies

Would like to see abstract of some of these studies, though I'm aware, that several similar ones have been written both by experts and non-experts alike.

Below is my disagreement with those predictions of doom and gloom. It's not a disagreement with you.

> 2: did Jesus also die on dozens (hundreds or thousands) of other planets to save their souls as well?

This would be profound.

> The leap in technology would put certain industries out of business almost immediately.

Disagree with the study results, due to people leaning to use legacy technologies for far longer than estimated.

Petrochemicals would still be in demand, but the money power off that fuel supply would certainly decrease, as would the power (virtual and otherwise) of all the authoritarian countries that produce gas and petrol. Not overnight, certainly.

Arab countries are actively looking to diversify their economies. Whereas Russia, being a grabby civilization that is is, has managed invade parts of Ukraine in a war started in 2014, and made very hot on 24 February 2022.

We have free-energy technologies already (wind, solar, sometimes hydroelectricity), but several nations are unwilling (or unable) to invest in those. Others do and have, but the buildup of infrastructure is insufficient to match the scale of incumbent dirty production.

> the leap in technology

There is no guarantee, that disclosure would bring any leap in technology: the United States, which by some is often complained to be supposedly be in possession of extraterrestrial kit, will never reveal anything to anyone else, so as to prevent authoritarian countries and dictatorships exploiting that tech for their nefarious ends.

Many humans on Earth would choose to avoid using demonstrably alien "non-Earth" tech entirely.

After the initial possible shock/euphoria, there would be entire communities, perhaps even several countries, who would still push to develop native Earth kit despite the presence of alien tech — not just because of the "not-invented-here" idea, but because we as a species and a civilization want to demonstrate our own ability and capabilities in doing great things.

Several decades after a possible speculative disclosure, there would be countries and communities like the Amish now, living only under a certain standard of development, using only Earth-based technologies, and avoiding alien tech as much as possible. I wouldn't blame them.

There would be an entire "alien tech divide", like now the digital divide and other such divisions:

* Some countries would become incredibly advanced, would progress at a break-neck speed, but would also be burdened with the responsibility of defending Earth.
* Other countries and nations would continue to only to use and develop Earth-based technologies, and would be fine just as well. People from the more advanced countries would come to visit those "we use only Earth tech"-countries, and would enjoy the environment as museum pieces.
* Of course, even now, there are countries and nations that are almost literally stuck in the past: Afghanistan, North Korea, Cuba, Iran, and Russia.

Their common denominator is total or near-total isolation: The Afghan society has been forced again to live in the medieval past, North Korea still relives the Korean War and is societally stuck in the year of 1953, Iran is somewhere in 1979, and Cuba remains famous for its old American cars.

Russia is the most technologically-advanced of that bunch, but is likely to stagnate due to it pouring money into its hot war of aggression against Ukraine and its people, and the resulting sanctions that it (Russia) has incurred. (Avoidance of this topic is not easy for me, as I'm very moved by both the unnecessary suffering of Ukrainians, and the bravery of the Ukrainian people in defending their land.)

It's true, that Cuba, North Korea, and Iran each have some developments and advancements, but they're not enough to offset the steep levels of underdevelopment, of which Russia also has plenty.

> Millions of jobs would be lost, the stock market would crash, leading to unrest etc.

As with the emergence of any new technology, new jobs meant to run and maintain these new technologies will crop up, as always.

Millions of jobs have been lost during COVID-19 and previous and other crises, stock markets have crashed and rebounded before, unrest always happens somewhere even without disclosure.

Therefore I do not submit to this non-pretty picture of events as doom and gloom, as described in the report.

It is true, that such reports of possible outcomes ought to be written and studied, so as to prepare contingencies for world leaders, and what decisions they should make to prepare their countries in particular, and humanity in general.

In many ways, doom-and-gloom prognostications appeal to the mass psychosis effect of populations, while not paying enough attention to the fact, that each individual has more immediate individual concerns: work, family, children, food, etc.

Disclosure is not necessarily something that would cause social unrest, thought it has non-zero potential, simply because it brings the unknown to the fore.

Instead, very earthly things can bring out large amounts of people, especially, if day-to-day living is disrupted on a large scale.

In some countries, people come to protest simply because a state wants to raise the pension age in order to have a more balanced budget.

How a nation will present itself to itself in a crisis plays a major role in forming its future.

The masses might make their move, or they might not, depending on how confident a population is.

Much depends on the cohesiveness of the society and the social compact within:

1. One nation can be confident, that things will be all right, and its people will cooperate and be closer together, despite all the hardships (see: Ukraine in 2004, 2013/2014, and 2022−present). Most democracies have processes ready to handle crises, and in these, the social compact of a people is usually strong.

2. The body of a people in some other nation might not be particularly confident, perhaps out of fear due to systemic repression. Such dissembling of a people leads to remoteness wrt one's leader's, inaction, abdication of responsibility ("we're not interested in politics"), and/or mistakes, and that in turn leads to a failed state and an eventual unenviable state of being at the mercy of proto-feudal leaders and/or warlords. Venezuela is there already, and Russia is slowly creeping there.

Disclosure would be likely to lead to first contact sooner, and that would certainly have the potential for the [Colombian exchange](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colombian_exchange), and the scenario of the plight of American First Nations due to the extreme inequality between First Nations' and colonialist levels of offensive/defensive technology. There might just as well be extraterrestrials with the "white saviour" syndrome.

A more localised danger would be the further emergence of religious or quasi-religious cults based on the existence of aliens, in addition to those that we have already. What if some off-worlders begin to exploit that?

A danger to culture would be some form of religious adherence to any ideology that some extraterrestrials themselves adhere to, with a view, as if one's own, human, culture were supposedly inferior.

This cultural in inferiority complex towards the best of human culture is based on a false assumption, that aliens' way of life is supposedly superior to ours, — based solely on their technological advancement.

We don't know what hardships were endured, what crimes and sacrifices were made by some of the non-Earth cultures to achieve faster-than-light travel and other improvements in technology.

There is never any guarantee, that their level of advancement and their practical methods of reaching that would be an advantage to us. After contact, we can learn from their history, and maybe avoid some of the mistakes they did.

If (a big 'if') a great number of extraterrestrial/extrasolar societies, per stories, do not use money, then that doesn't mean as if the use of market economies here on Earth would be supposedly wrong. It's just a way to manage resource distribution and moderate it in the even of limited supply.

Well-regulated market economies are a natural evolution of bare capitalism, just like Lutheranism is an evolution away from Catholicism, which had become corrupt by Martin Luther's time.

Either they have resolved energy and production bottlenecks, and have formed sustainable means of living in abundance, or they also have their haves and have-nots despite these solutions and high technology: A traveling crew or away team from a non-moneyed society might be very well-off and privileged, but an industrial worker or miner of valuable resources of that same species and society might still not be.

To somehow have the sufficient time to prepare for the eventual first contact, our human civilization cannot stop development.

Neither should we wait for the arrival of the proverbial "white ship" — an Estonian term representing the imagined ultimate "savior" vessel that was supposed to bring people to better shores, but never arrived.

In the real-life Estonian "white ship" story, the swindler who initially proposed and advertised that idea, got his money, and then scrammed, leaving the people who'd 'invested' their money to that idea of traveling away to better shores, waiting somewhere on the coast of no man's land for a ship to come, until most everyone finally realised, that the ship never arrived. Even then, some of the group had remained believers in that idea, trying to rationalize, that maybe the ship had sunk.

For many humans, believing in and waiting for disclosure has become almost like a religious experience; it's like waiting for the second coming of Jesus and expecting total salvation. Many 'believers' ardently imagine, that then all the world's material and even spiritual problems would supposedly be resolved. They will not be.

My own take would be finding a balance between increased awareness and preparedness (that, if clandestinely), and pushing the date of official disclosure farther away from the current moment. Too early disclosure would likely damage society and contaminate our culture even further. Too late preparedness would leave us more vulnerable to all that is out there.

A little bit about fonts

Posted as a comment reply here, too, as AC.

• Arial at 10pt/13.5px is the best reading font so far -- this at 150% scale with a 1920x1080 display resolution. It is the most optimal font to absorb long texts on screen, but is relatively tiny on paper, where I'd enjoy Times New Roman. Apple Garamond and the 80% condensed Garamond would be luxury.

• Chicago (found in early/classic Apple Macs) has great readability and the necessary compact size on early Mac display resolutions that are now smallish. To this day, it remains stylish and sufficiently futuristic, but not in the gaudy style of futurism that was envisioned with Westminster and Data 70, which were prominent in the 1970s and 1980s sci-fi flicks.

• Verdana at 9pt is the best for even smaller-sized text without losing legibility.

My favourite tall sans-serif font is Abadi MT Condensed Light. It's similar to News Gothic, but is taller and thinner.

Of open-source fonts:

In terms of readability, Helvetica is one of the best sans-serif fonts on Linux. Linux Libertine G is good, and Linux Libertine Display G takes the cake, but with 1.15 pt line height, bugs and all.