>>321770
People get excited for a week and then we get bored and go about our lives.

mass hysteria

>>321770
We would lead efforts to colonize/subjugate them because that's human nature.

>>321780
>Around the water cooler, "Did you hear about them aliens they discovered the other day, Rick? Pretty interesting stuff... so when will you have those quarterly reports in?"
There will be no mass hysteria or anything even significant. The significant shit is subtle and takes time, like the effect the Moon landing and the Earthrise image had on humanity.

Are they sexy?

If so, rape and colonize.

If not, colonize, and probably rape slightly less.

"whatever it is we're going to fuck it"

Depends on what the life is. If it's a pseudo-fish somehow swimming on Europa, nobody will really care. If it's confirmed intelligent life, from a long dead civilization from outside our solar system, people will be a lot more curious, even though it will probably be impossible to tell anything about them other than the fact that they existed.

>>321770
Look what happened a few months ago when they thought they found a dyson-sphere in progress. No one cared.

>>321770
I'm not sure really

A wide new field of speculative cosmological game theory

>>322147
As I heard it, "alien structure" was the last entry in a long line of more plausible hypothesis, essentially there as a joke. It just happened to get picked up as a news story by a few over-eager outlets. If there was a confirmed alien structure that was the focus of a paper I think that would have caused a much greater reaction.

>>321965

>If it's a pseudo-fish somehow swimming on Europa, nobody will really care

This would be the biggest event in biology, period. Scientists would literally kill for a chance to study its anatomy, cellular structure, and genome. Wouldn't even need to be a fish. A lichen-analogue or single celled organism would produce a similar reaction.

>>321770
Depends what you mean by "discovered".

If we find conclusive evidence that 4.500 light years away there is a alien civilization people would probably be like "Okay, I'm still going to eat this BigMac bro, so whatever".

However, if an inter-galactic alien spacecraft suddenly appeared off the coast of San Francisco, people would probably lose their shit.

>>322333

Conclusive evidence of an alien civilization within that kind of range would make every world government collectively shit their pants and start funneling billions into warp field research.

>>322348
Doubt it. There would certainly be more money granted for it, but I doubt world governments would be that nervous considering the reality of the range we are talking about.

>>322273
I though I wrote "aside from scientists" in my original post, but it turns out I didn't. That was entirely my mistake and you raise a valid point. Sorry.