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Are we alone?

Started by Unbeliever, August 31, 2016, 05:45:51 PM

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PorkPie

Are we alone? who knows, there may be far more advanced life out there laughing their 3 balls off at our backward civilisation.

Maybe they have thought about making contact and thought better of it.

Don't believe them.

Unbeliever

#61
Quote from: PorkPie on December 14, 2016, 05:14:13 PM
Are we alone? who knows, there may be far more advanced life out there laughing their 3 balls off at our backward civilisation.

Maybe they have thought about making contact and thought better of it.











God Not Found
"There is a sucker born-again every minute." - C. Spellman

Hydra009

#62
Quote from: Gawdzilla Sama on December 12, 2016, 10:48:25 AMAnd the "willing" requires that they be interested in talking to us or visiting. Why would they do that?
The Earth isn't very interesting except for one thing:  its biosphere.  I'd imagine that it would be an alien biologist's (or alien sociologist's) wet dream.

Hydra009

Quote from: PorkPie on December 14, 2016, 05:14:13 PM
Are we alone? who knows, there may be far more advanced life out there laughing their 3 balls off at our backward civilisation.

Maybe they have thought about making contact and thought better of it.
It's conceivable that an advanced alien race might be reluctant to make contact with races who haven't met some condition, like mastery of space travel, or societies deemed too primitive to be able to handle first contact without incident.

Heh, and our popular media (often depicting war with aliens) would likely not please alien audiences.

trdsf

Quote from: Hydra009 on December 14, 2016, 06:15:23 PM
It's conceivable that an advanced alien race might be reluctant to make contact with races who haven't met some condition, like mastery of space travel, or societies deemed too primitive to be able to handle first contact without incident.

Heh, and our popular media (often depicting war with aliens) would likely not please alien audiences.
SETI Nerd Mode ON.  :D

No one outside of about 80 light years could know about that last anyway, and that would require being able to pick up and decode our very earliest radio transmissions, and build up a sufficient understanding of American English to be able to get what Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" was all about -- and they would have to have picked up that linguistic mastery within the ten, fifteen (Terrestrial) years from the start of powerful commercial broadcasting.  With about fifty light years -- when the z-grade sci fi movies of the 50s started being shown on broadcast TV -- they would get a chance to see such sensitive, intelligent alien encounters on film as Teenagers from Outer Space and It Conquered the World and The Blob, *then* they might look at us and perform whatever their equivalent of a slow shake of the head is.

Earlier than that, the only way that anyone out there would think to look here would be if they both happened to notice our star had small, rocky planets, and also were able to separate out the reflected light from Earth from the emitted light of the Sun.  An oxygen atmosphere would get their immediate attention since that's unstable.  And within about 200 light years, that's the zone where if they can make that fine of an observation, they could infer a primitive technology by the schmutz we were putting into that interesting oxygen atmosphere.

In short, oxygen implies life; crud implies technology.

The biggest issues with SETI are first, that we only have the vaguest idea of what we're looking for.  Intelligent life is like obscenity to the late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart - we can't define it easily, but we'll know it when we see it.

Second, we may be chasing a vanishingly small window of opportunity.  Human made radio emissions are barely a century old, even less so radio emissions that could be picked up at the distances necessary for an ET's SETI project to catch.  And in that brief time -- brief relative to the time that our species has been here -- broadcast is already becoming obsolete in favor of cabled delivery.  What parts are broadcasted are relatively weak, or aimed at terrestrial receivers.  The days of the 250,000+ watt AM radio border blasters that propelled Wolfman Jack to fame are essentially over: the broadcast portions are a tight beam up to a satellite, a directional beam back down again, and a localized broadcast either from your nearest cellular tower or from your wi-fi router.  Outside of a little accidental spill from the upward beam to the satellite, none of these are going to be detectable from the Moon, much less from another stellar system.

So I think it's most likely that if (when?) we hear another signal, it will be from someone who is actively trying to be heard rather than the accidental leakage of broadcasts.  Sagan's scenario in Contact is entirely plausible: a dedicated station that, when it detects a signal of sentient origin, begins beaming a message back once it has a fix.

It's also entirely plausible that such an automated station may be another civilization's tombstone, marking off someone who used to be there and is no longer, quietly listening in the dark when there's no longer anyone to report what it's heard to.
"My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total, and I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution." -- Barbara Jordan

Gawdzilla Sama

Quote from: Hydra009 on December 14, 2016, 06:03:15 PM
The Earth isn't very interesting except for one thing:  its biosphere.  I'd imagine that it would be an alien biologist's (or alien sociologist's) wet dream.
Why? Is it special? Do we know that for certain?

And...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkMFLUXTEwM
We 'new atheists' have a reputation for being militant, but make no mistake  we didn't start this war. If you want to place blame put it on the the religious zealots who have been poisoning the minds of the  young for a long long time."
PZ Myers

Jason78

Quote from: PorkPie on December 14, 2016, 05:14:13 PM
Are we alone? who knows, there may be far more advanced life out there laughing their 3 balls off at our backward civilisation.

Maybe they have thought about making contact and thought better of it.



Winner of WitchSabrinas Best Advice Award 2012


We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real
tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light. -Plato

Unbeliever

Yeah, better listen to that wise 4-ball-chinian!









God Not Found
"There is a sucker born-again every minute." - C. Spellman

Baruch

Haha .. but someday you will be old, and look like a hideous alien from a 1950s B movie!
Ha’át’íísh baa naniná?
Azee’ Å,a’ish nanídį́į́h?
Táadoo ánít’iní.
What are you doing?
Are you taking any medications?
Don't do that.

Mr.Obvious

#69
I once started writing a story in which humanity was visited by a perfect race of aliens. They had enough resources and technology to bring us into the space-faring stage of our kind. They had so much to teach us and were willing to, because they saw potential in us. But, on the other hand, they deemed us too dangerous and barbaric; should we have their technology and our tendency to violence, war and rivalry. So they tried to teach us purity and rewarded us with technology the better we behaved ourselves as a species. Lies and jealousy and greed and ... were all foreign concepts to them.
The story was to focus mainly on the suspicions surrounding this mysterious species and their intents. Were they really trying to help us (or was this like 'to serve man')? Were they just trying to control a potential threat they saw in us? Were they really as powerful as they seemed? Were we, in 'behaving' ourselves not becoming more like them and less human?
The protagonist of the story would go investigate and find that the longer he searched, the more sinister their intents seemed. Until the conclusion of the story; which would show they did try to help us, in their eyes, and share their fortune with us. But that in trying to make us pure, they allowed us to corrupt them. And by that, they'd become as dominating and poisonous as we could be.

My computer crashed. And while what I'd written was in no way superb, I wish I had a copy of that.
Long story short: I don't think I'd wish us upon just any other civilization though.
"If we have to go down, we go down together!"
- Your mum, last night, requesting 69.

Atheist Mantis does not pray.

Baruch

This is how Vulcans helped the Earth in the 22nd century ;-)  But even if the Vulcans exterminate you, it is the logical thing to do ;-))
Ha’át’íísh baa naniná?
Azee’ Å,a’ish nanídį́į́h?
Táadoo ánít’iní.
What are you doing?
Are you taking any medications?
Don't do that.

Unbeliever

Quote from: Baruch on January 03, 2017, 07:58:44 PM
Haha .. but someday you will be old, and look like a hideous alien from a 1950s B movie!

Hell, I already look like a cross between Quasimodo, the Elephant Man and Jocko (from Koontz's Frankenstein series).
God Not Found
"There is a sucker born-again every minute." - C. Spellman

Baruch

Quote from: Unbeliever on January 04, 2017, 04:23:40 PM
Hell, I already look like a cross between Quasimodo, the Elephant Man and Jocko (from Koontz's Frankenstein series).

Ah, but that means you get plenty of good dates ... beautiful girls feel sorry for Quasimodo and Beast ;-)
Ha’át’íísh baa naniná?
Azee’ Å,a’ish nanídį́į́h?
Táadoo ánít’iní.
What are you doing?
Are you taking any medications?
Don't do that.

Cavebear

Quote from: Mr.Obvious on January 04, 2017, 04:40:03 AM
I once started writing a story in which humanity was visited by a perfect race of aliens. They had enough resources and technology to bring us into the space-faring stage of our kind. They had so much to teach us and were willing to, because they saw potential in us. But, on the other hand, they deemed us too dangerous and barbaric; should we have their technology and our tendency to violence, war and rivalry. So they tried to teach us purity and rewarded us with technology the better we behaved ourselves as a species. Lies and jealousy and greed and ... were all foreign concepts to them.
The story was to focus mainly on the suspicions surrounding this mysterious species and their intents. Were they really trying to help us (or was this like 'to serve man')? Were they just trying to control a potential threat they saw in us? Were they really as powerful as they seemed? Were we, in 'behaving' ourselves not becoming more like them and less human?
The protagonist of the story would go investigate and find that the longer he searched, the more sinister their intents seemed. Until the conclusion of the story; which would show they did try to help us, in their eyes, and share their fortune with us. But that in trying to make us pure, they allowed us to corrupt them. And by that, they'd become as dominating and poisonous as we could be.

My computer crashed. And while what I'd written was in no way superb, I wish I had a copy of that.
Long story short: I don't think I'd wish us upon just any other civilization though.

Moral of the Story...

You probably can't understand (or really help) any other separately evolved intelligent creature.
Atheist born, atheist bred.  And when I die, atheist dead!

Mr.Obvious

Quote from: Cavebear on January 05, 2017, 12:42:39 AM
Moral of the Story...

You probably can't understand (or really help) any other separately evolved intelligent creature.

No, its: always make back-ups. If I...

Oh. Oh wait... 
"If we have to go down, we go down together!"
- Your mum, last night, requesting 69.

Atheist Mantis does not pray.