What are you smoking where there's a clear line from "this thing crashed in the desert 50 years ago, we still know basically nothing about it" to everyone becoming an atheist and tax evader?
Alien intelligence would be one of the most important discoveries of our species but you still have to wake up the next morning and go to work.
A real eye opener regarding this has been the ongoing war in Ukraine. For some reason I always had this picture of war being people constantly hiding in bunkers, looting and stealing in a sort of apocalyptic doomsday prepper way, whoever remains working in tank factories around the clock, that sort of thing.
But no, their entire country is being blown up on a daily basis, apartments being hit by cruise missiles, streets being shelled and people just go to work and school or whatever like it's business as usual. I guess in the end, what else can you really do? Life is banal.
Like if the imminent threat of grisly death doesn't get people to stop living in a society then literally nothing else will. Not aliens, not AGI, not the return of Jesus, not even everyone magically turning into frogs. Well ok that last one might do it.
Their entire country is being blown up on a daily basis,
That's the thing - except for places very close to the front lines, only very tiny portion of the country is getting hit.
So no, it's not "the entire country, on a daily basis".
You are correct though that the media loves to paint it as a 24x7 apocalyptic hellscape (mostly via selective imagery, independent of what is actually said in the articles). That's how they get your anxiety molecules jumping, and thus make their money, after all.
>For some reason I always had this picture of war being people constantly hiding in bunkers, looting and stealing in a sort of apocalyptic doomsday prepper way, whoever remains working in tank factories around the clock, that sort of thing.
For cities actively under siege, that's exactly how it is though. Read about St. Petersburg or the battle of Vukovar.
> banal: so lacking in originality as to be obvious and boring.
People going to work every day while there are bombs dropping, in the middle of a war, trying to keep the exchange of goods going so they can pay for the war and to survive, is not banal. It's not obvious that people would go to work in a war zone, and it's not boring, and in many times in history people did not go to work during a war (except for farmers, whose lives depended on it)
They didn't say war is banal, they said life is - which it is. Going to work every day, going to the gym, making dinner, doing laundry. Most of it's boring, and a lot of it you have to do whether or not something 100 miles away is getting bombed.
I'm not smoking anything. I'm merely speculating on what I think is a rather interesting hypothetical situation. It's generally interesting enough to sell millions of copies of books and thousands of movie tickets on similar subjects, after all. I just think being told that you've been lied to for decades, your elected leaders don't really call the shots but some classified group does unilaterally for the entire planet, there's some unknown creature potentially at the top of the food chain prowling the planet for the first time ever, and now you have to just suck it up and go back to flipping burgers to be rent burdened, is a really hard pill to swallow. For reference, we've gotten close to civil unrest in the past, when it became clear with the Pentagon Papers to the public that they were lied to about Vietnam being winnable and the scope of the conflict, and public opposition eventually forced the war to end. People were facing conscription and burning their draft cards. To think the working public today, as squeezed as they are by the elites, might face extraterrestrial threat and the greatest lie of all time and just clock in the next morning like nothing has changed, I think, is a bit of a gamble.
Alien intelligence would be one of the most important discoveries of our species but you still have to wake up the next morning and go to work.