What If: We Discovered Sentient Life In The Universe

While we technically have many sentient beings on Earth besides humans, such as our primate friends, dogs, cats, etc. We have yet to find another sentient species outside our own planet. It is widely assumed that life exists elsewhere, but without proof of this, it is just a guess. But what if we discovered a sentient species elsewhere? Moreover, what if we discovered another intelligent sentient species like humans?

As cool as it might be, it’s one of the scary scientific what-ifs we need to be concerned about. Let’s first state the obvious. The species might or might not be more intelligent than us. They also might wish to enslave humans or make us their pets. It is also possible they’d want to wipe out all human or sentient life and replace us with their own kind. They will at least have a language we do not know, as well as customs we are not aware of. Making communication a bit dicey, at least at first.

What If: Time Travel Is Real

Everyone wants time travel to be real, and it sort of is. We now know spacetime is its own time and gravity is what dictates time on various planets. We simply adjust to this and therefore all time is based on gravity levels. This is why we could likely jump several years in Earth time within a few hours. It’s really all about speed and how fast we’re moving. However, while we could jump forward we cannot go backward. But what if we could? If this could take place, one of two things would likely happen.

First, branched realities or multiverses would be formed (if they are not already). Anything we change will start its own new reality or universe. The original reality would remain unchanged. On the other end, we’d have one universe but any changes would not be noticed. The rest of the world will never know anything else occurred, and it is likely the longer you remain in this changed reality, the less you’ll remember about the former. Thus, if time travel was real then we’d never really know it was, no matter which version of it we find ourselves in.

What If: The Earth Went Through A Biblical Flood

To be fair, in pretty much every religion and even in history, there are stories about a “great flood.” The stories might differ a bit, where some claim the whole world flooded while others claim a specific region did. It is really all in what you want to believe. But let’s go with the Christian version, involving Noah, his great ark, and the flood of 40 days and 40 nights. If this happened, some great event would need to cause it as this is a flood of the entire world. Let’s say two large meteors broke through and landed in the ocean, coming with their own water. They also land in both artic areas and melt all the ice.

This would likely result in flooding, but it would first start tidal waves that will drastically hurt cities near shores worldwide. They’d completely flood and we’d likely see all land underwater for a short time. Water would go down a bit, but we could assume in the U.S. that both the East and West coasts would be completely underwater. The water might begin to freeze up again one day, allowing these shoreline cities and states to rise back up. But not for a while. Major electrical grids, oil lines, and much more would be hit hard. Many plants and animals would be hit hard and we’d be in an extinction-level event.

What If: An Asteroid Made Landfall

Funny enough, asteroids have hit the Earth before and did nothing worth note. But much larger ones caused mass extinctions in world history. Such as the one that caused the Ice Age to take place. This asteroid was quite large, but an asteroid does not necessarily need to be massive to cause damage. If an asteroid the size of the average New York apartment hits the Earth, it could level a small city. That is because it would likely hit with a great deal of speed. If it landed in the middle of a city, this speed would cause an impact that would increase its damage potential. Let’s look at it in terms of a quarter.

The coin falls and hits the Earth, it would likely be felt but not much. Damage potential would maybe be about 5 to 10 feet max. Now let’s combine two quarters, the damage potential would be 20 to 40 feet. Keep combining and you’ll see a huge issue. The size combines with speed to create damage potential even greater than the size. Extinction level asteroids hit and blocked out sunlight for quite some time, due to dust and smoke rising. This caused global temperatures to drop, because sunlight could not pierce through. We now have some protectors from these asteroids but none of them are guaranteed to work.

Where do we find this stuff? Here are our sources:

National Public Radio (NPR)

National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA)

University of Rochester

USA Today

National Center for Science Education

The Independent

Live Science

Inverse

Space.com