Imagine the ramifications if we discovered the opposite: we find alien life but instead of it being exciting and profound, we manage to deduce that aliens are necessarily mundane, pedestrian, dispassionate, utterly uncreative--that we realize any species that's in any way interesting or prone to creativity gets snuffed by an their own inevitable chaos and pathologies. Something like: a flame that burns brightly can flare up, but it means it'll be extinguished in just a few thousand years. Perhaps only the dim glow of a flame that's barely lit is capable of surviving the eons and thus having a chance of encountering others.
Perhaps it never even occurred to the aliens that we'd want to make contact with them. That we'd be interested in the existential ramifications that would come from communication. Maybe they zip around the ocean with as little motivation as dragonflies choosing to change direction when skimming over a lake.
That discovery might lead to even more existential dread than had we discovered a rich smorgasboard of alien civilizations. We'd see ourselves and realize that our virtues are precisely what guarantees our near-term demise.
Something like: a flame that burns brightly can flare up.
Perhaps they've been around for hundreds of millions of years and they've been watching us for a few hundred thousand waiting for us to overcome our propensity to destroy each other, become sane and, for our consciousness to ignite.
Or perhaps it's even more gaslighting bullshit fake news.
Personally I am looking forward to the invasion of giant killer vegetables. The only thing that bothers me is that the giant killer tomato is bound to chose the wrong side in partisan politics and we will be back to bickering about nothing again.
Oh and interstellar travel of a physical made of hadrons type real thing is definitely either impossible or so hard we will never bother doing it. No one really has any idea how big space is, I mean it is really really big. I doubt we will ever live on another plan
More logically around for billions of years, with a new galactic species generated by a galaxy this size, something like once every million years or so. The circumstance for that transition from primitive to modern would occur quite rarely, no indications it happened on this planet before us. So billions of years and nothing and the change only occurred because of the recent occurrence of cyclic ice ages, giving the boost to intellectual adaptability over more physical evolution, us rock throwing monkeys le
The environmental conditions necessary to evolve the intellectual adaptability were extremely harsh, and yet, once domination of an environment by a species is achieved, the impetus for further intellectual development is stunted. Rock-throwing monkeys, as it were, seem perfectly willing to rest on our laurels... perhaps we are even digressing.
If machined materials not of this plant (sic) do exist in the hands of the governors, it seems much more likely they are from a prob
Sure we will. Either they will produce meaningful evidence, in which case we'll know it's true, or they won't, in which case we'll know it's all a bunch of bullshit.
we find alien life but instead of it being exciting and profound, we manage to deduce that aliens are necessarily mundane, pedestrian, dispassionate, utterly uncreative--that we realize any species that's in any way interesting or prone to creativity gets snuffed by an their own inevitable chaos and pathologies.
Subtitled "The History of a Modern Myth"
written by David Clarke, Aurum Press, UK, 2015.
A cautionary tale and everybody should read it, especially in this day of Twitter, Facebook, Trump, etc etc.
“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” -- Arthur C. Clarke, author of science fiction.
"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." -- H. P. Lovecraft, author of horror stories.
"The discovery of the essential truths that define our existence is mankind's ultimate concern." -- Brain-Fu, author of inane drivel.
Well, it'll happen one day. If we are the only life in the cosmos, that would be fantastically strange. The odds against that must be... astronomical. It would mean this is some weird special realm and we were put here by a god.
As for distances, the universe is setup to generate life. Humanity may be a weed but weeds grow everywhere. And we don't know what we haven't discovered yet, and we've barely got started with technology.
Why haven't we been contacted yet? Star Trek has been saying for 50 years that The Prime Directive is key. Meanwhile A.C.Clarke gave stories of vast experiments with species.
Further, we never solved the mind-body problem. We don't know how matter becomes sentient, or if that's even causal. If your brain is doing everything, then it is perfectly simple that it continues to do everything without a being experiencing the inner movie of living. If the brain does everything, executes everything purely by cause and effect, then consciousness isn't needed. A car does not have to experience the movie of driving down a road, it only has to process inputs and run them through its models and generate outputs. So these aliens might not even be from the stars, they may exist in other planes of consciousness, sort of as A.C.Clarke alluded to about beings who stored their consciousness into the fabric of spacetime itself...
They probably tried to say hello already but then we replied with all those scary B-movies.
The word you want is "sapient", as "sentient" just means "able to sense". And we do kind of know, at least the broad strokes, through the study of neurology and evolution. We can see what parts of thinking happen where in the brain, and the order in which those functions evolved.
It starts with sophisticated vision processing, the ability to break raw visual data into objects (groups of lines that move together) and construct a 3D model of the world around us from those objects.
As far as I know, one of the biggest drivers behind the Cold War and the seemingly endless proxy wars across the globe was the mutual desire by all the nuclear powers involved to avoid another "war to end all wars". This is a direct result of the Mutual Assured Destruction principle. No one is willing to start a nuclear war if they are convinced that no one will win it, leaving only radioactive wastelands on both sides. (note that this doesn't exclude the possibility of a nuclear attack as part of a "scorch
Well, there is something called convergent evolution that certian environments tend to create similar looking organisms. For other reasons however, I dont think aliens are likely here, the micro-organisms they bring could have the most devastating impact, often its the smallest things which are most dangerous. The bacteria for instance could wreak havoc in oceans which are dominated by native bacteria. Any alien would inevitably set off a global environmental disaster of invading micro-organisms.
I agree that alien life is highly unlikely to be humanoid and quite likely to be so alien as to be beyond our ability to meaningfully communicate. My go-to example is octopi and cuttlefish. They are clearly quite intelligent, in some cases quite the equal with primates, dolphins and other species held up as examples of sentience.
But their basic design, the evolution of their brains is so wildly divergent from ours that, while we can interact with them quite well, we can't quite truly understand them or com
I really don't think we want it to be aliens. Just look what happened to the native Americans upon their "discovery" by marginally more advanced Europeans. Now extrapolate that for aliens who have mastered timely interstellar travel. They'd be so far beyond our comprehension technologically that they might as well be wizards and if their species survived the rigors of evolution there's no reason to think they wouldn't be just as violence prone as we are.
I really don't think we want it to be aliens. Just look what happened to the native Americans upon their "discovery" by marginally more advanced Europeans. Now extrapolate that for aliens who have mastered timely interstellar travel. They'd be so far beyond our comprehension technologically that they might as well be wizards and if their species survived the rigors of evolution there's no reason to think they wouldn't be just as violence prone as we are.
Plausibly, marginally more advanced isn't enough to do other than take advantage, but vastly more advanced might imply they have evolved past the the early predisposition toward dominance by ruthlessness.
Our species wouldn't be where we are now without the ruthlessness, but it likely can't get to that next level without eradicating it.
I think one was much more advanced in technology in the other. Not at all just marginally more advanced. One was a highly technological civilization with massive ocean faring ships, guns, formal state structures etc. while the other wasn't. By now we visited the Moon, our robots have been analyzing other planets on the surface and in flyby, we have probes exiting the solar system and people may visit and live on another planet in perhaps as short as a decade.
White America enslaved black people from Africa, but - despite the continuing existence of many who want to roll it back to the Good Ole' Days - a war was fought to free them and even now, there are white people who do not believe in racism, and are working to stop it.
What all but a minute percentage of the white people are concerned about is why the activists are more worried about slavery in a society that eliminated it 150 years ago than about societies that are practicing it right now.
Wow, someone got triggered. Just because the parent mentioned white slavery in the US doesn't mean there wasn't slavery in other places. He was just using a specific example. Yes, you had the Moors. You had Arabs taking white slaves during the Crusades (you also had whites taking white slaves, look up the Children's Crusade-although the historiography around that is murky, it could be apocryphal), and of course white Romans owned white slaves as well.
I think proof of alien intelligence visiting us would only provide yet another source of division and friction among the human race. There will be some who wish peaceful contact, who see the aliens as friends and possible saviours given their (presumably) far greater technology. They will point to the fact that these aliens appear to have passed one of the Great Filters that are proposed as one answer to the Fermi Paradox. This would imply that the aliens have somehow evolved ethically/morally beyond the ki
I mean seriously, if there was really aliens, you’d think their equivalent of teenagers would’ve stolen a ship for a joyride and stopped in a bunch of major cities for selfies with the indigenous creatures by now. Sorry, but space is just big, boring, and anything interesting it just too damn far away.
... to have developed feasible FTL travel or means of making travel duration on a cosmological scale somewhat sensible then a planet like ours is a curiosity at best or about as interesting as a culture of bacteria is to us.
I can imagine automated drones observing or visiting us, but nothing like the regular ufo abduction stories - AFAICT those stories don't fit in or make much sense when we're talking Aliens from a different system.
or about as interesting as a culture of bacteria is to us.
So what you're saying is they would take us out of our environment, put us in a lab and stick long cylindrical things in is. Man those "probers" were right!
What most people are not (yet) aware of is that water is THE galactic currency -- of which Earth is sitting on the proverbial gold mine. Go figure.
The same way that we consider some lower life forms to be a delicacy, e.g. caviar, is the exact the view held by a few (technological) advanced species towards us. Every species is on the food chain for someone else, relatively speaking. Thankfully these are the minority and not the majority.
Some human abductions are indeed real -- primarily because they are
Why? Wouldn't rings (Saturn/etc) be easier to mine, transport and not mess with gravity wells? Besides most documentaries I've see show that it doesn't always turn out well for the aliens. Nobody cares if you snatch a comet or two.
What most people are not (yet) aware of is that water is THE galactic currency -- of which Earth is sitting on the proverbial gold mine. Go figure.
Oxygen is the 3rd most abundant element in the universe. It is part of CNO cycle which is dominant in bigger stars. Hydrogen is the most abundant element in space. There must be huge amount of water in space. It would be a terrible substance to select as a currency for a space faring race. There is more water on Jupiter's moon Europa than it is on Earth. There is much muchmuch more accessible water father out in the solar system.
In that vein, Europa would be the proverbial platinum mine. Europa has more water than all of Earth's oceans, lower gravity, and no pesky sentient lifeforms with nuclear weapons that might take offense from taking that water (that we know of). There are also vast clouds of water just floating around in space; water isn't really that rare. What is probably more rare: chlorophyll.
Chlorophyll would be unique to every world with plants, evolved over millions / billions of years to be specific to that planet'
And yet Earth got attacked for its water anyway. When asked by a captured scientist why they didn't mine Europa, the aliens said they found in Earth's records a warning from a far more advanced civilization than even they: "ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS – EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE." and they got scared.
What most people are not (yet) aware of is that water is THE galactic currency -- of which Earth is sitting on the proverbial gold mine. Go figure.
Everyone else has already explained why this is dumb. Hopefully you meant it as a joke.
What Earth has of interest to other species is... species. Our specific biodiversity is the only thing they can't get somewhere else. And we're destroying it rapidly...
there is a distinction between being Technological advanced versus being Spiritual advanced. i.e. Aliens are proof that being Technological advanced is orthogonal to being Spiritual Advanced
I've got news for you. The way giant memeplexes like religions and politics works, any that dominate galactic society after billions of years will sweep into Earth and crush our pathetic Republican vs. Democrat, or communism vs. capitalism, or Christianity vs. Judaism vs. Islam.
> about as interesting as a culture of bacteria is to us.
Have you met scientists? We're really interested in bacteria, scientists will also film grass growing and make charts of paint drying. And it's rather likely that aliens would need scientists to develop FTL.
They have definitely been building up to this for a while. Very interested to see what they eventually release. I find it strange, though, that there could be vehicles not of this earth (meaning that they mastered interstellar travel, I assume) that then crash into earth. I mean, they can do interstellar travel, but they can't avoid hitting earth? Just strikes me as odd is all.
I'll simply point out how reports of strange triangular shaped UFOs almost vanished overnight once the existence if the F117 was made public. Whatever these new craft are they'll almost certainly have a terrestrial origin.
Or even another agency within the US using its own forces as test subjects. What better to test out your latest tech against than your previous generation tech in active service.
They have definitely been building up to this for a while. Very interested to see what they eventually release. I find it strange, though, that there could be vehicles not of this earth (meaning that they mastered interstellar travel, I assume) that then crash into earth. I mean, they can do interstellar travel, but they can't avoid hitting earth? Just strikes me as odd is all.
Anyway, watching with interest.
Anything that follows the structure "several people home it's aliens but the whole point of the program is to check to see if other countries are leapfrogging us" is pretty clear. "Many children hope it's the Easter Bunny that hides the candy, this survey was created to understand the psychology of where and how parents do their hiding."
Hope all you want, retired officials including the important-sounding Senate majority leader, but if aliens visit, you'll either know or you won't know but the odds of th
Doesn't necessarily mean interstellar travel, in fact that seems the long shot. Ours wasn't the only habitable planet in the solar system, perhaps these are venusians or martians? Or perhaps our notion of "habitable" needs to expand a bit to include some of the moons out there? Hell, a prior civilization from earth seems more likely than an interstellar species given the distances involved.
They have definitely been building up to this for a while. Very interested to see what they eventually release. I find it strange, though, that there could be vehicles not of this earth (meaning that they mastered interstellar travel, I assume) that then crash into earth. I mean, they can do interstellar travel, but they can't avoid hitting earth? Just strikes me as odd is all.
Anyway, watching with interest.
You don't believe that a percentage of the population of space faring aliens have poor judgement, make mistakes?
Their equivalent of driving while intoxicated, perhaps.
they mastered interstellar travel, I assume) that then crash into earth. I mean, they can do interstellar travel, but they can't avoid hitting earth? Just strikes me as odd is all.
You saw where Garmin, the (old) GPS manufacturer, is under a tack? [theverge.com] Well it's no WONDER they crashed; they're just glad they didn't land on the night side of the Sun. It's horribly hot and humid there in the daytime.
They could avoid hitting earth just fine. But it turned out an atmosphere so ridiculously rich in oxygen as that of planet earth sets just about everything on fire, it turns out.
We could already send a hundred probes toward some rocky planet in the neighborhood eg. in Proxima Centauri b (4.25ly). A very old tech probe, Voyager 1 is in interstellar space already, nearing a distance of one light day away from us already, it took a mere 43 years to do so. A good fraction of a stable of modern spacecraft would get to Proxima Centauri b in maybe 20 thousand years, with today's better rocket tech. While it'd be a tall order to expect that even some of the spacecraft could reboot in Proxi
The Moon landing has been established. However, for years some "lunatics" (pun intended) found many reasons to discredit the event. There were no star in the sky, low gravity was simulated, shadows didn't make sense... The UFO reasoning is quite the opposite. While there are other explanations to these "events", some people prefer to inflict into us (esp. the less knowledgeable souls) the most phantasmagorical one.
Btw, releasing worrying information about UFOs 3 months ahead of a capital election is probably a coincidence.
Worrying? More likely "entertaining" than "worrying"....
And no, I wouldn't be worried to discover there were real aliens looking over this piece of real estate - not like I can do anything about it, since I don't have the money on hand to buy up all the land capable of growing sugar-maple trees....
I'd love if there was official confirmation that the Roswell crash was a Soviet psyops exercise designed to freak out the American military and make us waste enormous effort chasing our tail looking for spacemen. The story goes they put incapacitated children in a weird shaped craft that was designed to crash. The children had been surgically mutilated to resemble those skinny large-headed "greys". If it worked, even for a few days and convinced those in power they had found an actual flying saucer, would
There is clear evidence that the Roswell crash was a German Ho 229 aircraft. It might have been a Soviet hoax [gizmodo.com], or it might have been made by one of our Operation Paperclip scientists. National Geographic has declassified pictures [nationalgeographic.com] (non-paywall version, same pic [loiaconoli...agency.com]), and it's easy to see the very unique 229 body.
Applying Occam's Razor, it makes far more sense for the US Government to hide the truth of Nazi scientists working inside the US with a story about an alien UFO; especially with us having Von Braun, l
I've met the aliens. they are great, great people. They know me. I know them. They're kinda grey looking. Wonderful, wonderful people. The one was beautiful. Reminded me of my daughter. I think this alien was sexier than my daughter. Beautiful, beautiful specimen. It was perfect. I retweeted somebody. I don't know.We have done this right. And we really -- we really have done this right. We're going to tell you about other things that we have done right.
Assuming standard model physics and given the difficulty of sending biology over long distances through space, it's much more likely that our first contact will be with alien probes. Think of sending an interstellar device small enough to be accelerated at high Gs using fixed lasers, with just enough onboard thrust capability to decelerate into the Oort cloud of a target star. It could then forage for elements to, in a series of tools-to-make-the-tools increments, manufacture a transceiver and antenna capa
It will be just another Project Blue Book set of conclusions. They are: Swamp gas weather balloons drones Frisbee's Clouds pie plates thrown into the air Coboy Neil on his magic carpet RC Cigar's etc... etc...
If the planet was being visited by aliens, this would have many huge implications that make the thing rather unlikely. That is, any alien landing would bring with them tons of other organisms, like bacteria, microorganisms, maybe even larger bugs and so on. What would these things look like? They would probably look instantly out of place genetically to other organisms. How different would their DNA be for instance? Its also improbable they are visiting right now but not in the distant past, like 100s of mi
I am pretty sure if they can figure out interstellar travel, they can figure out hygiene. I could see them deliberately leaving artifacts though such as a library on the far side of the moon. Except they haven't.
If they were acting on some prime directive, they would go through all of the trouble of only sending in sterilized probes into the biosphere. I can see that. But an actual alien landing on the surface would be out of the question, if they were so careful. Its interesting, to consider, how one spore, one bacteria, could completely change a biosphere. Consider how ubiquitous bacteria is and the drastic effects to the biome if foreign organisms were introduced. The smallest ones can have the biggest impact,
The timing for disclosing this kind of news can not be overlooked. It comes precisely when the nation is in multiple crises, so when the federal government would like people look elsewhere.
My late uncle, who worked for the military, once told me that if the truth about the alien presence on Earth was revealed, that half of the population would commit suicide.
I've always wondered what revelation would cause half of the population to kill themselves. Maybe that those aren't actually blueberries in the Jiffy Blueberry Muffin Mix.
"that may involve vehicles made of materials not of this plant" nope, Not even close. it will be another slew of video showing birds in parallax from a high distances like the videos a few month ago. Basically somebody is having a laugh, or better a distraction, thrown at the plebe. If there was such a thing as UFO/Alien, if you think ANY country could hold it secret, then I have a bridge to sell you.
Well the original body-snatchers were plant-based pod people. This may be a slip of the tongue for Rubio and higher ups at the pentagon who are pod people, but wish to discredit reports of other aliens.
The only thing worse than a biased news organisation is someone who proceeds to assume everything they post is false instead of actually applying through to the topic. I mean it's not like the pentagon hasn't been on a steady trend of opening up on the topic [nytimes.com] Oh wait no! a NY Times link. I guess all the videos they posted from the pentagon's UFO unit aren't real and it's just my brain wishfully willing the MPEG4 compressed bits into existence!
You're right, everything goes through a bias filter. Everything, not just those sources you disagree with. If you're not "de-biasing" a story you've read, you're just self-selecting those biases you're most comfortable with. So I guess the "point" is to read the news without turning into a wall in the echo chamber.
what's the point in wasting time to de-bias the stories?
If you understand the bias then the you gain valuable information from reading biased stories, not only about the reporting style but about the readership. My sister is a journalist for a well respected newspaper, while she was living in the UK I saw she subscribed to the Dailymail. I said "what the hell" and got a very sane reply: "It's important to read what stupid people read so you can understand them."
I'm not calling NYT readers stupid, but it's important to always read new
It turns out when aliens capture you, they give you an intelligence test. You are asked to repeat "Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV". If you pass, they let you go as being too stupid to pose a threat.
To be awake is to be alive. -- Henry David Thoreau, in "Walden"
Would have been nice! (Score:3)
If it's aliens at least something exciting and profound would happen to the human race.
Maybe then we will stop our petty squabbling and focus.
Alas, it's probably nothing (sigh)...
Re:Would have been nice! (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps it never even occurred to the aliens that we'd want to make contact with them. That we'd be interested in the existential ramifications that would come from communication. Maybe they zip around the ocean with as little motivation as dragonflies choosing to change direction when skimming over a lake.
That discovery might lead to even more existential dread than had we discovered a rich smorgasboard of alien civilizations. We'd see ourselves and realize that our virtues are precisely what guarantees our near-term demise.
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Something like: a flame that burns brightly can flare up.
Perhaps they've been around for hundreds of millions of years and they've been watching us for a few hundred thousand waiting for us to overcome our propensity to destroy each other, become sane and, for our consciousness to ignite.
Or perhaps it's even more gaslighting bullshit fake news.
We'll never know for sure either way.
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Or ... maybe interstaller travel is really difficult and they're not here at all.
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Personally I am looking forward to the invasion of giant killer vegetables. The only thing that bothers me is that the giant killer tomato is bound to chose the wrong side in partisan politics and we will be back to bickering about nothing again.
Oh and interstellar travel of a physical made of hadrons type real thing is definitely either impossible or so hard we will never bother doing it. No one really has any idea how big space is, I mean it is really really big. I doubt we will ever live on another plan
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Some would say we've already had an invasion by giant citrus fruits disguised as orange people.
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More logically around for billions of years, with a new galactic species generated by a galaxy this size, something like once every million years or so. The circumstance for that transition from primitive to modern would occur quite rarely, no indications it happened on this planet before us. So billions of years and nothing and the change only occurred because of the recent occurrence of cyclic ice ages, giving the boost to intellectual adaptability over more physical evolution, us rock throwing monkeys le
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Fascinating. The Fremen principle.
The environmental conditions necessary to evolve the intellectual adaptability were extremely harsh, and yet, once domination of an environment by a species is achieved, the impetus for further intellectual development is stunted. Rock-throwing monkeys, as it were, seem perfectly willing to rest on our laurels... perhaps we are even digressing.
If machined materials not of this plant (sic) do exist in the hands of the governors, it seems much more likely they are from a prob
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Perhaps we are digressing so much that we lost track of our digressions and meant "regressing".
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Spot on. You've nabbed the digresser.
Shoot! I hope they don't revoke my probation for this... with the Covid making the rounds, it's a bleak time to return to grammar prison.
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"We'll never know for sure either way."
Sure we will. Either they will produce meaningful evidence, in which case we'll know it's true, or they won't, in which case we'll know it's all a bunch of bullshit.
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Or they will claim to have evidence and not produce it, which is bullshit in our books, but others will take that as hard facts.
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Maybe if it's false, you won't know. It's a bit like the Halting Problem.
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Why do we always assume that aliens have some kind of Gene Roddenberry type civilization, as if that is the only path forward?
Re: Would have been nice! (Score:2)
watching us for a few hundred thousand
Likely more than just watching; somebody completely "recompiled" our DNA or we'd still have twenty four chromosomes like our cousins.
Mike Pence (Score:3, Funny)
we find alien life but instead of it being exciting and profound, we manage to deduce that aliens are necessarily mundane, pedestrian, dispassionate, utterly uncreative--that we realize any species that's in any way interesting or prone to creativity gets snuffed by an their own inevitable chaos and pathologies.
So, like, Mike Pence is a space alien?
How UFO's Conquered the World! (Score:2)
written by David Clarke, Aurum Press, UK, 2015.
A cautionary tale and everybody should read it, especially in this day of Twitter, Facebook, Trump, etc etc.
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“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” -- Arthur C. Clarke, author of science fiction.
"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." -- H. P. Lovecraft, author of horror stories.
"The discovery of the essential truths that define our existence is mankind's ultimate concern." -- Brain-Fu, author of inane drivel.
Re:Would have been nice! (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, it'll happen one day. If we are the only life in the cosmos, that would be fantastically strange. The odds against that must be... astronomical. It would mean this is some weird special realm and we were put here by a god.
As for distances, the universe is setup to generate life. Humanity may be a weed but weeds grow everywhere. And we don't know what we haven't discovered yet, and we've barely got started with technology.
Why haven't we been contacted yet? Star Trek has been saying for 50 years that The Prime Directive is key. Meanwhile A.C.Clarke gave stories of vast experiments with species.
Further, we never solved the mind-body problem. We don't know how matter becomes sentient, or if that's even causal. If your brain is doing everything, then it is perfectly simple that it continues to do everything without a being experiencing the inner movie of living. If the brain does everything, executes everything purely by cause and effect, then consciousness isn't needed. A car does not have to experience the movie of driving down a road, it only has to process inputs and run them through its models and generate outputs. So these aliens might not even be from the stars, they may exist in other planes of consciousness, sort of as A.C.Clarke alluded to about beings who stored their consciousness into the fabric of spacetime itself...
They probably tried to say hello already but then we replied with all those scary B-movies.
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We don't know how matter becomes sentient
The word you want is "sapient", as "sentient" just means "able to sense". And we do kind of know, at least the broad strokes, through the study of neurology and evolution. We can see what parts of thinking happen where in the brain, and the order in which those functions evolved.
It starts with sophisticated vision processing, the ability to break raw visual data into objects (groups of lines that move together) and construct a 3D model of the world around us from those objects.
Then comes "object persisten
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Well, there is something called convergent evolution that certian environments tend to create similar looking organisms. For other reasons however, I dont think aliens are likely here, the micro-organisms they bring could have the most devastating impact, often its the smallest things which are most dangerous. The bacteria for instance could wreak havoc in oceans which are dominated by native bacteria. Any alien would inevitably set off a global environmental disaster of invading micro-organisms.
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But their basic design, the evolution of their brains is so wildly divergent from ours that, while we can interact with them quite well, we can't quite truly understand them or com
I really don't think we want it to be aliens (Score:2)
I really don't think we want it to be aliens. Just look what happened to the native Americans upon their "discovery" by marginally more advanced Europeans. Now extrapolate that for aliens who have mastered timely interstellar travel. They'd be so far beyond our comprehension technologically that they might as well be wizards and if their species survived the rigors of evolution there's no reason to think they wouldn't be just as violence prone as we are.
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I really don't think we want it to be aliens. Just look what happened to the native Americans upon their "discovery" by marginally more advanced Europeans. Now extrapolate that for aliens who have mastered timely interstellar travel. They'd be so far beyond our comprehension technologically that they might as well be wizards and if their species survived the rigors of evolution there's no reason to think they wouldn't be just as violence prone as we are.
Plausibly, marginally more advanced isn't enough to do other than take advantage, but vastly more advanced might imply they have evolved past the the early predisposition toward dominance by ruthlessness.
Our species wouldn't be where we are now without the ruthlessness, but it likely can't get to that next level without eradicating it.
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I think one was much more advanced in technology in the other. Not at all just marginally more advanced. One was a highly technological civilization with massive ocean faring ships, guns, formal state structures etc. while the other wasn't. By now we visited the Moon, our robots have been analyzing other planets on the surface and in flyby, we have probes exiting the solar system and people may visit and live on another planet in perhaps as short as a decade.
Of course FTL isn't solved but it might aready be
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White America enslaved black people from Africa, but - despite the continuing existence of many who want to roll it back to the Good Ole' Days - a war was fought to free them and even now, there are white people who do not believe in racism, and are working to stop it.
What all but a minute percentage of the white people are concerned about is why the activists are more worried about slavery in a society that eliminated it 150 years ago than about societies that are practicing it right now.
Re: I really don't think we want it to be aliens (Score:2)
Wow, someone got triggered. Just because the parent mentioned white slavery in the US doesn't mean there wasn't slavery in other places. He was just using a specific example. Yes, you had the Moors. You had Arabs taking white slaves during the Crusades (you also had whites taking white slaves, look up the Children's Crusade-although the historiography around that is murky, it could be apocryphal), and of course white Romans owned white slaves as well.
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Not saying it was drones (Score:2)
But it was probably drones.
I mean seriously, if there was really aliens, you’d think their equivalent of teenagers would’ve stolen a ship for a joyride and stopped in a bunch of major cities for selfies with the indigenous creatures by now. Sorry, but space is just big, boring, and anything interesting it just too damn far away.
Not of this plant (Score:4, Funny)
may involve vehicles made of materials not of this plant.
No, they're of that plant, or the other plant. You know, cactus and hemp. Or maybe some mushroom.
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Someone has been listening to Gustav Holst's "The Plants"
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If an alien civilisation is advanced enough... (Score:5, Insightful)
... to have developed feasible FTL travel or means of making travel duration on a cosmological scale somewhat sensible then a planet like ours is a curiosity at best or about as interesting as a culture of bacteria is to us.
I can imagine automated drones observing or visiting us, but nothing like the regular ufo abduction stories - AFAICT those stories don't fit in or make much sense when we're talking Aliens from a different system.
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It's probably some 100,000 year old grad student project she did for her dissertation and then forgot about.
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or about as interesting as a culture of bacteria is to us.
So what you're saying is they would take us out of our environment, put us in a lab and stick long cylindrical things in is. Man those "probers" were right!
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What most people are not (yet) aware of is that water is THE galactic currency -- of which Earth is sitting on the proverbial gold mine. Go figure.
The same way that we consider some lower life forms to be a delicacy, e.g. caviar, is the exact the view held by a few (technological) advanced species towards us. Every species is on the food chain for someone else, relatively speaking. Thankfully these are the minority and not the majority.
Some human abductions are indeed real -- primarily because they are
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Re:If an alien civilisation is advanced enough... (Score:5, Informative)
What most people are not (yet) aware of is that water is THE galactic currency -- of which Earth is sitting on the proverbial gold mine. Go figure.
Oxygen is the 3rd most abundant element in the universe. It is part of CNO cycle which is dominant in bigger stars. Hydrogen is the most abundant element in space. There must be huge amount of water in space. It would be a terrible substance to select as a currency for a space faring race. There is more water on Jupiter's moon Europa than it is on Earth. There is much much much more accessible water father out in the solar system.
The rest of your post is fishy too.
Maybe you were trying to be sarcastic...
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Chlorophyll would be unique to every world with plants, evolved over millions / billions of years to be specific to that planet'
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And yet Earth got attacked for its water anyway. When asked by a captured scientist why they didn't mine Europa, the aliens said they found in Earth's records a warning from a far more advanced civilization than even they: "ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS – EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE." and they got scared.
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I hear our plants aren't incredibly efficient at converting and storing the Sun's energy
sigh (Score:2)
What most people are not (yet) aware of is that water is THE galactic currency -- of which Earth is sitting on the proverbial gold mine. Go figure.
Everyone else has already explained why this is dumb. Hopefully you meant it as a joke.
What Earth has of interest to other species is... species. Our specific biodiversity is the only thing they can't get somewhere else. And we're destroying it rapidly...
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I've got news for you. The way giant memeplexes like religions and politics works, any that dominate galactic society after billions of years will sweep into Earth and crush our pathetic Republican vs. Democrat, or communism vs. capitalism, or Christianity vs. Judaism vs. Islam.
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I've always said, instead of wondering if the aliens have souls, we should be praying they think we do.
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Proof? Where's your proof that aliens are even here, or exist at all outside of your head?
Maybe you did one too many shrooms this week.
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> about as interesting as a culture of bacteria is to us.
Have you met scientists? We're really interested in bacteria, scientists will also film grass growing and make charts of paint drying. And it's rather likely that aliens would need scientists to develop FTL.
They have been building up to this. (Score:5, Interesting)
They have definitely been building up to this for a while. Very interested to see what they eventually release. I find it strange, though, that there could be vehicles not of this earth (meaning that they mastered interstellar travel, I assume) that then crash into earth. I mean, they can do interstellar travel, but they can't avoid hitting earth? Just strikes me as odd is all.
Anyway, watching with interest.
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Yea, odd how they seem to curiously go down in flames near military bases at night all the time. I wonder what could be causing that.
Re: They have been building up to this. (Score:2)
I'll simply point out how reports of strange triangular shaped UFOs almost vanished overnight once the existence if the F117 was made public. Whatever these new craft are they'll almost certainly have a terrestrial origin.
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Or even another agency within the US using its own forces as test subjects. What better to test out your latest tech against than your previous generation tech in active service.
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It's those dang Brits: https://www.digitaltrends.com/... [digitaltrends.com]
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They have definitely been building up to this for a while. Very interested to see what they eventually release. I find it strange, though, that there could be vehicles not of this earth (meaning that they mastered interstellar travel, I assume) that then crash into earth. I mean, they can do interstellar travel, but they can't avoid hitting earth? Just strikes me as odd is all.
Anyway, watching with interest.
Anything that follows the structure "several people home it's aliens but the whole point of the program is to check to see if other countries are leapfrogging us" is pretty clear. "Many children hope it's the Easter Bunny that hides the candy, this survey was created to understand the psychology of where and how parents do their hiding."
Hope all you want, retired officials including the important-sounding Senate majority leader, but if aliens visit, you'll either know or you won't know but the odds of th
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Doesn't necessarily mean interstellar travel, in fact that seems the long shot. Ours wasn't the only habitable planet in the solar system, perhaps these are venusians or martians? Or perhaps our notion of "habitable" needs to expand a bit to include some of the moons out there? Hell, a prior civilization from earth seems more likely than an interstellar species given the distances involved.
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They have definitely been building up to this for a while. Very interested to see what they eventually release. I find it strange, though, that there could be vehicles not of this earth (meaning that they mastered interstellar travel, I assume) that then crash into earth. I mean, they can do interstellar travel, but they can't avoid hitting earth? Just strikes me as odd is all.
Anyway, watching with interest.
You don't believe that a percentage of the population of space faring aliens have poor judgement, make mistakes?
Their equivalent of driving while intoxicated, perhaps.
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The spacecraft itself should have basic accident avoidance features such as avoiding smacking into a planet.
MCO (Score:2)
I mean, they can do interstellar travel, but they can't avoid hitting earth?
Seriously, how can a space-faring people overcome all the obstacles of space travel, then crash due to some dumb mistake? Oh wait... [wikipedia.org]
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they mastered interstellar travel, I assume) that then crash into earth. I mean, they can do interstellar travel, but they can't avoid hitting earth? Just strikes me as odd is all.
You saw where Garmin, the (old) GPS manufacturer, is under a tack? [theverge.com] Well it's no WONDER they crashed; they're just glad they didn't land on the night side of the Sun. It's horribly hot and humid there in the daytime.
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They could avoid hitting earth just fine. But it turned out an atmosphere so ridiculously rich in oxygen as that of planet earth sets just about everything on fire, it turns out.
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We could already send a hundred probes toward some rocky planet in the neighborhood eg. in Proxima Centauri b (4.25ly). A very old tech probe, Voyager 1 is in interstellar space already, nearing a distance of one light day away from us already, it took a mere 43 years to do so. A good fraction of a stable of modern spacecraft would get to Proxima Centauri b in maybe 20 thousand years, with today's better rocket tech. While it'd be a tall order to expect that even some of the spacecraft could reboot in Proxi
Probably as real as the *No* Moon landing claims (Score:2)
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Donald Trump phone home?
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Worrying? More likely "entertaining" than "worrying"....
And no, I wouldn't be worried to discover there were real aliens looking over this piece of real estate - not like I can do anything about it, since I don't have the money on hand to buy up all the land capable of growing sugar-maple trees....
Well it’s either the Quagaars... (Score:2)
Or it’s just a garbage pod.
mazing Stories (Score:2)
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Are you saying the Japanese where stupid when they went across the Pacific mostly undetected, but got caught flying over a navy base...
Yes. Look how it turned out for them in the end.
Nothing against litle green/grey people (Score:2)
If they're orange OTOH...
Finally, (Score:3)
Some Legal Aliens. Woohoo
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Some Legal Aliens. Woohoo
Sorry to burts your bubble, but non-citizen residents of the US are called legal aliens already.
Roswell Soviet origin (Score:2)
I'd love if there was official confirmation that the Roswell crash was a Soviet psyops exercise designed to freak out the American military and make us waste enormous effort chasing our tail looking for spacemen. The story goes they put incapacitated children in a weird shaped craft that was designed to crash. The children had been surgically mutilated to resemble those skinny large-headed "greys". If it worked, even for a few days and convinced those in power they had found an actual flying saucer, would
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Applying Occam's Razor, it makes far more sense for the US Government to hide the truth of Nazi scientists working inside the US with a story about an alien UFO; especially with us having Von Braun, l
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Thanks for the cites. The 229->A12->stealth lineage is pretty clear to see.
Not of this "plant" (Score:3)
I've met the aliens, they're great great people (Score:5, Funny)
I've met the aliens. they are great, great people. They know me. I know them. They're kinda grey looking. Wonderful, wonderful people. The one was beautiful. Reminded me of my daughter. I think this alien was sexier than my daughter. Beautiful, beautiful specimen. It was perfect. I retweeted somebody. I don't know.We have done this right. And we really -- we really have done this right. We're going to tell you about other things that we have done right.
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Lay off the peyote, dude.
Little green machines? (Score:2)
Assuming standard model physics and given the difficulty of sending biology over long distances through space, it's much more likely that our first contact will be with alien probes. Think of sending an interstellar device small enough to be accelerated at high Gs using fixed lasers, with just enough onboard thrust capability to decelerate into the Oort cloud of a target star. It could then forage for elements to, in a series of tools-to-make-the-tools increments, manufacture a transceiver and antenna capa
Let me guess (Score:2)
It will be just another Project Blue Book set of conclusions.
They are:
Swamp gas
weather balloons
drones
Frisbee's
Clouds
pie plates thrown into the air
Coboy Neil on his magic carpet
RC Cigar's
etc... etc...
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So? Those really are credible things it really could be.
Alien theory has major problems (Score:2)
If the planet was being visited by aliens, this would have many huge implications that make the thing rather unlikely. That is, any alien landing would bring with them tons of other organisms, like bacteria, microorganisms, maybe even larger bugs and so on. What would these things look like? They would probably look instantly out of place genetically to other organisms. How different would their DNA be for instance? Its also improbable they are visiting right now but not in the distant past, like 100s of mi
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I am pretty sure if they can figure out interstellar travel, they can figure out hygiene. I could see them deliberately leaving artifacts though such as a library on the far side of the moon. Except they haven't.
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If they were acting on some prime directive, they would go through all of the trouble of only sending in sterilized probes into the biosphere. I can see that. But an actual alien landing on the surface would be out of the question, if they were so careful. Its interesting, to consider, how one spore, one bacteria, could completely change a biosphere. Consider how ubiquitous bacteria is and the drastic effects to the biome if foreign organisms were introduced. The smallest ones can have the biggest impact,
Nice distraction in a disastrous time (Score:2)
The timing for disclosing this kind of news can not be overlooked. It comes precisely when the nation is in multiple crises, so when the federal government would like people look elsewhere.
UFOs are filming a reality TV show (Score:4, Informative)
The UFOs are just relay stations and camera crews for an intergalactic reality TV series titled, "Earth, Will They Make It?"
Truth==1/2 Population Commits Suicide (Score:2)
My late uncle, who worked for the military, once told me that if the truth about the alien presence on Earth was revealed, that half of the population would commit suicide.
I've always wondered what revelation would cause half of the population to kill themselves. Maybe that those aren't actually blueberries in the Jiffy Blueberry Muffin Mix.
When can I laugh ? (Score:2)
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The vehicles were *not* made of plant. I can only assume they were made of meat.
Meatal, perhaps... ships coated with Kryptonian leather.
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Re:Relax, everybody (Score:5, Insightful)
The only thing worse than a biased news organisation is someone who proceeds to assume everything they post is false instead of actually applying through to the topic. I mean it's not like the pentagon hasn't been on a steady trend of opening up on the topic [nytimes.com] Oh wait no! a NY Times link. I guess all the videos they posted from the pentagon's UFO unit aren't real and it's just my brain wishfully willing the MPEG4 compressed bits into existence!
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I don't think everything is false.
Then don't say stupid things.
what's the point in wasting time to de-bias the stories?
If you understand the bias then the you gain valuable information from reading biased stories, not only about the reporting style but about the readership. My sister is a journalist for a well respected newspaper, while she was living in the UK I saw she subscribed to the Dailymail. I said "what the hell" and got a very sane reply: "It's important to read what stupid people read so you can understand them."
I'm not calling NYT readers stupid, but it's important to always read new
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It turns out when aliens capture you, they give you an intelligence test. You are asked to repeat "Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV". If you pass, they let you go as being too stupid to pose a threat.