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About LinkBacksMan, that could be rated as the dumbest thought of 2007Originally Posted by Sinizter
Yes I believe there are aliens out there
No, there is no such thing as aliens.
Man, that could be rated as the dumbest thought of 2007
Nah. That would the woman who was "guided" by her satnav onto a rail crossing and then got her car hit by a train.Man, that could be rated as the dumbest thought of 2007
All Hail the AACS : 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I think thats more of a lack of thoughts, a very serious lack.
there was one in the daily mail a while back about some daftie who drove her £96000 Merc into a river because her satnav told her to.
if it had been a brick wall, would she have done it then?
We're only here for the Banter - The Luvvies - Chewin' The Fat
Violence and Lubrication is the solution to fixing everything, if it still doesn't work, you need more lubrication.
And possibly beating the hell out of other races alien to them too.
Read "Revelation Space" by Alister Reynolds (Scifi) for an interesting take on why intelligent space faring life might not be as abundant as it should be. Inhibitors! (A gentler introduction to his unviverse is "Chasm City")
Science is already finding other planets in far off galaxys and solar systems. It will only be a matter of time before an Earth like planet is found (I think this has been done btw with a planet 1 1/2 times the size of Earth)
The best chance for us to find alien lifeforms, albiet not sentient ones, is Europa. The likelyhood of water being abundant due to geothermal energy and the discovery of creatures in the vast depths of our own oceans living next to suphurous vents is probably the best hoped for scenario.
"Reality is what it is, not what you want it to be." Frank Zappa. ----------- "The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." Huang Po.----------- "A drowsy line of wasted time bathes my open mind", - Ride.
I don't think we should worry about being overrun by an alien race.
a) How long would it take for an alien species (without access to spacetime folding technology e.g. wormholes) to reach us? If you take a nearby star to be Proxima Centauri, 4.2 light years away - assuming that they would travel slower than the speed of light, it would still take many many years for them to reach us.
If the race did have the technology to travel faster than light, then why would Earth be the right place to visit?
By chance? I doubt it somehow. If a spacecraft set off from a star with a random trajectory with the hope of finding other planets with life, then the chances are astronomically small.
b) What would be the benefit of overtaking Earth? It's hardly plentiful in rare materials (Earth is fairly small as planets go i think). And surely, an advanced alien race will have developed techniques concerning material production - a rather cliched idea of Alien technology, but i'm sure it's possible - things like using smalled atoms to make larger atoms (in effect, like the universe - hydrogen fusing to helium, etc.).
Territorial conquest? Surely if a species wasted a few years of it's time travelling to Earth, it probably has expanded it's territory to nearby planets - so why go to Earth? What would be the use, we are not an inherent threat to nearby star systems.
Well.. that's my view on it anyhoo..
Plus if you take the equasions of likelyhood of life existing outside of Earth, then part of that is the likelyhood of there being many many more empty but inhabitable planets existing that they could quite happily move to if theirs is in danger. The odds of an advanced race being hostile can't be too high or they probably wouldn't co-operate enough with each other to get that advanced in the first place
Anyway, if Aliens attacked us we'd just wipe them all out with a computor v1rus uplaoded into they're m0thorship!!!1
1.21 GIGAWATTS!!!!!
Not really, its a very valid point that's been made. Based on it being a “dumb thought” – you wouldn’t be religious by any chance?Man, that could be rated as the dumbest thought of 2007
Describing something as being “dumb” because it doesn’t fit into the perfect self contained world that many religious people make for themselves is often a sign.
Imagine an advanced alien species coming and visiting. They see that the majority of the world believes in some supernatural being, that cant be seen, cant be touched, cant be communicated with in any provable way, based on events that happened thousands of years ago that have utterly no absolute evidence.
They would probably look at us in the same way we look at cave men.
Of course, they may have their own religion, which brings us on to the original point.
Aliens or not, religion has been the major factor in the majority of wars. It’s not illogical to assume that it could play a part in any future wars.
Any aliens that are smart enough to travel interstellar distances stand a good chance of being able to detect some of the billions of non-natural occurring noise we send out.
To any advanced civilisation with that technology, our planet would light up like a supernova.
When humans used to walk everywhere, the thought of going from town to town was almost impossible.
When humans started to use horse and carriages, the thought of going across the country was almost impossible.
When humans started to use the first cars, going from country to country was almost impossible.
When humans started to use aeroplanes, leaving the earth was almost impossible.
When humans started to book flights to space, going to another planet seemed almost impossible.
Notice a theme here?
People at any given time have trouble grasping what may be developed in the future.
While its not here yet, development of plasma based engines are already well under way. While this is not warp drive, we are constantly going forward.
Why the heck would someone with advanced technology set off on a random course?
They would research it before hand, and choose the most likely planets to investigate.
Rare is relative. It depends what ‘they’ need.
We don’t know what other civilisations may class as rare. We can’t judge that based on the lack of knowledge we have.
Besides, Earth itself is pretty attractive. Able to support life, a stable climate in the scheme of things, a stable orbit around a sun which isn’t about to die anytime soon…..
A few years are speculation without knowing what technology they have though. They could be here in seconds for all we know.
Assuming that these aliens live in an environment similar to earth (which is a big assumption), then we have no idea how many of these exist. We could be in the only one of a handful in the galaxy for all we know (again, unlikely though IMO and statistically speaking)
Pre-emptive strikes are something that has been used throughout history. They are fairly efficient at eliminating threats before they develop
Oh the irony of having Picard as my avatar at the moment
Ok, one thing you're all missing here, except for iranu, is that earth may not be a particularly attractive place to come too.
Oxygen is actually a poisonous, highly corrosive substance... and roughly 21% of our atmosphere is made up of it.
Suppose you'd evolved on a hot, dense world with a helium atmosphere.
You might not even be carbon based but silicon based instead. Water could be poisonous...
Agent's right, 'rare' is a relative term, but so is 'habitable' as well as 'attractive'.
I think it'd be grossly conceited of us to assume that aliens would be at all interested in Earth as a possible home...
In fact, life could be much closer to home than we think anyway. Sure, carbon based life might exist in the water around volcanic vents on Europa, but what about in the clouds of Jupiter itself?
That gas giant planet is one massive organic chemical mixer... and seeing as the latest 'best guess' for the genesis of life is a warm 'soup' of organic chemicals, Jupiter might have had 'life' thriving for millions of millennia.
And of course, I'm making the same mistake and basing my assumptions on life that needs organic compounds within a certain temperature range... who's to say that life can't exist using chemical processes that aren't dependant on heat?
The universe is a bloody enormous place... really, really enormous. So big that it really is beyond our comprehension just how vast it is...
Click this link and just look at how many stars there are in that one shot alone...
http://www.telescopes.cc/ic405large.htm
Now imagine us as being one of a handful of planets orbiting one of those stars... We are very, very tiny.
But, and here's the hopeful bit, the simplest law of averages makes it quite clear that although it's highly likely mankind will flourish, fade and become extinct before we ever make contact with an alien race, we can be sure that in that brief time (on a universal timescale) that we did exist, we were most definitely NOT alone in the Universe.
In fact, more pressing than finding evidence of off-world life, we should be focusing ALL of our efforts on getting OFF this planet... This is not a safe place to be.
Right now humanity has all it's eggs in one basket. So far we've logged around 4,000 near-earth-objects (NEO) of which around 800 are classified as potentially hazardous.
An iron based asteroid of roughly 2km diameter is big enough to cause serious damage and perhaps even trigger global volcanic activity, which in turn will cause a massive global winter.... they reckon this is what finally did it for the dinosaurs... and before them they was a massive prehistoric impact, the crater for which can still be seen... It's the Gulf of Mexico... that one was a slate wiper.
So, we know that we either suffer an ice age, something our pollution seems to be staving off at the moment, or a massive rock comes screaming out of the sky to burn everything and then cause a few thousand years of freezing weather to knock off anything that survived the initial blast.
To be honest it's a bloody miracle we've made it this far...
So rather than look out for alien life we should be looking out for our life and get the hell off here. At least if we can colonise somewhere a few generations flight away, we can come back and recolonise the 'home' planet when it gets wiped... who knows, maybe that's what has already happened and we've just forgotten....
Exactly.. why would Earth be by any standards likely? As you go on to say, what do "they" need?
To us maybe.. :/
Possible, but again, highly unlikely - as i said, ruling out wormhole or other space manipulation technology, and assuming that faster than light travel is impossible by means of special relativity, then the fastest they could possibly get to Earth is 4 years - Proxima being the current closest star at 4 light years.
I whole heartedly agree with the walking-cart-space shuttle idea though.
If you put all of humanity's great technological achievements on a timeline, the vast majority would be in the last 200 years. And as people have said, 500 years ago saying that the world was round was roughly blasphemy, so goodness knows what we'll find out sooner or later. It will be interesting to see what CERN comes up with this winter.
EDIT: Nick, totally agree with you mate. We either sort out our act or get off this rock. Someone said that we don't put enough money into the space race - the NASA budget cleverly hiding the massive military sink - and it's probably true. If a tenth of the US military fund was put into developing interplanetary travel, then we'd be well on our way to Mars by now
And to add to the space pic - that's probably part of a galaxy somewhere. Now consider the Deep Field. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:H...d_location.gif
One degree across. That's a hell of a lot of galaxies and star clusters.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Ultra_Deep_Field
A tiny fraction of that one degree.
Make up your own minds.. o.o
Last edited by Whiternoise; 12-05-2007 at 10:56 PM.
Its kinda funny - I wrote a big section on how we shouldn't assume that other life forms would be humanoid based.
Due to a mixture of bad grammar and a phone call, I didn't include it
My line of thinking is that any civilisation that can do long distance space travel will know a thing or two about biology, and will know the criteria and limits of which certain life forms flourish in.
Problem is, so much of this is extrapolation, which is an issue with something that some consider infinite.
I certainly agree that we should not assume that intelligent life looks like us or indeed is based on carbon like us. The trouble that we have is that we don't have any evidence for anything else other than carbon based lifeforms, therefore it will not be proven that such non-carbon based lifeforms can exist until either we create them or we indeed meet them!
This is why I restrict the best chance as Europa with regard to what we already know about Earth. It would seem to fit with what we know, however, wouldn't it be fantastic if we did find microbiological "stuff" on Jupiter! (or for that matter any other planetary body.)
We certainly have some huge challenges ahead of us with regards to the colonisation of our own solar system without looking for ET but that doesn't mean to say we shouldn't be open minded about that scenario.
I am quite sure that these challenges will be met (in time) but it maybe that we augment and change our earthly bodies through science and technology in order to adapt as a space faring "culture".
Lets say for example that we had the technology to go to the nearest star system now and it would take us 500 years to do so. How would those explorers have changed by the time they arrived at their destination? Would they be considered human?
I can easily see scenarios whereby a human who was earthbound would not relate in much of a way to a "human" whos ancecestors changed their bodies in order to cope with the rigours of space on their 500 year journey, let alone their new habitat. (not going into the Psycological side here either which really is a interesting).
"He's more machine than man" - Obi Wan Kenobi's phrase may come to pass. (although I hope that does not incorporate the "evil and twisted" bit.)
"Reality is what it is, not what you want it to be." Frank Zappa. ----------- "The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." Huang Po.----------- "A drowsy line of wasted time bathes my open mind", - Ride.
Guys, we are an alien experiment!
It explains everything...
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Wow..!
Just read all the way through this thread, very glad it was bumped from 3 years ago!
Was a very interesting read, my basic view is that Aliens Exist because its extremely improbable they dont.
Hopefully this thread keeps going, the discussions very interesting and ive learnt a thing or two while reading.
Needs new monitor / speakers / headphones / keyboard.
Before that i need money :s
i agree with you a 100% on this to say there is nothing else out their even bacteria. Is silly how have we managed to be here?
Well from that quote you obviously know that I'm religious and you're just trying to exploit it, which is quite sad.
No, I didn't say that because I'm religious, I said it because it's true. Even if I weren't religious I'd say that. And if you think I said it because I might be "offended" then you're completely wrong. Do you really think I spend my time being offended by what people have to say on an Internet forum? I see a big red flashing light illuminating the word "no".
But thanks for making the generalisation of religious folk, obviously they're all exactly the same in your world
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