Do you believe in UFOs: is there sentient life besides our own?!!!

[Falagar]

Originally Posted by RÃ*an

remember the joke about that? The Internet has proven that theory false!

Don't think that test lasted infinitely.

[Nurvingiel]

Nor are there an infinite number of internet users. Also, we mostly don't bang randomly at the keyboard.

Still, it's a funny joke.

[Alcuin]

Gee, I heard Elvis was an alien.

If there are more advanced civilizations out there, the last thing I want is for them to find us! Remember the American Indians? The Inca? The Aztec? Tribal peoples all over the world were taken as slaves by their neighbors – and no, you politically correct zealots, not only by Europeans, but also by the Chinese, the Indians (proper, of the Indian subcontinent), Africans (the European and American slave trade was fed by local African kings who raided and sold neighboring tribesmen into bondage: no European dared go beyond the shore without an official escort for centuries); as well as the Aztec and the Inca and the Apache; not to mention the ancient Egyptians, the Romans, the Persians, - they all exploited and enslaved their weaker neighbors, everywhere! (Arabs still keep slaves, and from time to time, they get caught bringing them to the United States.)

Now, with that kind of history behind us, should we imagine for a moment that some outer-space venturers are going to stumble upon us – or worse, find us by systematic scouring – and leave us alone to our own little ignorant devices? Are we that naïve? Greed is universal, I fear, and we would soon be beset by unscrupulous little green men trying to barter Manhattan for a bunch of novelty trinkets worth 27 Imperial Credits and a bottle of intoxicant so strong it’ll put the whole city of New York in a swoon for a week, so that they don’t care if the Upper East Side and all its inhabitants are hauled off to Tauri Cygnus X-5B or some such place.

I am sick to death of mindless morons mouthing the mantra “Oh, I wish aliens would come and visit us and impart their cosmic wisdom to us!� Impart their cosmic wisdom my eye! How long do you suppose the slave ship ride is to some market a dozen or a score or a couple of hundred light-years away? Assuming of course that they don’t simply try to eradicate the whole human race in one fell swoop and take this little jewel all for themselves. Yeah, yeah, Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum are gonna implant a computer virus into some centralized alien computer system and make them vulnerable for five or ten minutes so that Randy Quaid can knock out their mother-ship in a glorious display of self-sacrifice, just like they did in Independence Day. Right, and my Aunt Elanor single-handedly held off a whole Panzer division during the evacuation of Dunkirk and saved Western civilization. If you believe either of those, would you like to buy a moon orbiting the neutron star at CTB 1 (G116.9+0.2)? Must sell – cheap; good fixer-upper for a first moon, nice place for vacations; don’t mind the wretched little Terrans mining the dark side. @#%! My Norton Antivirus knocks out viruses and worms and Trojans: do you really believe some extra-advanced, super-intelligent, ultra-teched-up bunch of spaced invaders isn’t going to recognize that Mydoom.KX3 or Sobig.AA.F or Klez.N is a problem and stop it?

“We are the Borg. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.�

Uh-huh. Just the kind of guys likely to find mankind in our cozy little cradle.

[hectorberlioz]

Alcuin, I must say...yours are the most sensible rants! You should replace Oprah in her time slot...


I'm a big X-Files fan, and I have to say, I've never "closed the door" to the possiblity of other life in space, nor perhaps even for aliens to already visiting earth etc...it's just that, I don't find myself worrying about it too often .

I don't really give a dang as to the whole "conspiracy" part of the legends though...

[Nurvingiel]

Alcuin, that was awesome.


I think that in order to wrap our heads around intelligent life in the universe, we anthropomorphise aliens. This is understandable, as really we have no clue what aliens are/would be like. But really, they aren't necessarily going to be bipedal, and they probably won't act like us.

We tend to put either our worst characteristics or our best characteristics onto aliens, imagining that they will either be like the Vogons from The Hitch-hiker's Guide the the Galaxy, or benevolent, peace-loving beings.

If there is intelligent life out there, they will probably also be complex. Shows like Babylon 5 and books like The Forever War do portray aliens in a more complex way, I'm sure people think this way too sometimes when talking about the possibility of aliens coming to Earth.

For all we know, aliens have been to Earth but chose not to contact us. Maybe they took one look at how we treat each other and the planet and ran like the wind. Maybe they observed how much of Earth's resources are devoted to automobiles and assumed that they were Earth's intelligent life-form, and we are some sort of symbiote of lesser intelligence.

Maybe what we think is cosmic dust is actually a highly advanced alien, currently studying the fascinating planet Mercury. That third planet from the Sun, they really couldn't care less about.

We really are incredibly egotistical to assume that aliens will be interested in us at all.

[hectorberlioz]

Originally Posted by Nurvingiel

For all we know, aliens have been to Earth but chose not to contact us. Maybe they took one look at how we treat each other and the planet and ran like the wind.

Ok, that's it...

I can't stand this idea. I see it permeated in Star Trek, and it absolutely drives me up the wall...how come aliens get to be so holy and non-violent? Who the heck thought of this idea that "aliens have come to realize the importance of non-violence and preserving life and culture." As Alcuin would say, My Foot! *nasal voice* "Humans just aren't at that stage yet, where they're willing to look past their differences and be non-violent"

What's hilarious is that a lot of Star Trek has this kind of message, not to mention The Prime Directive ...and yet Roddenberry has the nerve to impose HIS views on aliens!

[Alcuin]

Ah, satire. Bitter, ironic satire. (Hence Oscar the Grouch.)

Glad you enjoyed it. (I like tonic water myself. And turnip greens. And watercress ... all bitter.)

Now, if you really wanna get scared … think about … COWS! Maybe human beings are just food to aliens!

So – who wants the aliens to come visit?

-------------------------------

Oh, yeah...

HAPPY HALLOWEEN from Salem, Massachusetts!

[Valaru]

I do beleive in extra-terrestrial life. The statistics support it (unless you are a creationist).

I also beleive in people with WAY too much time on their hands coming up with hoaxes about little grey men with anal fetishs.

[Alcuin]

Originally Posted by Valaru

I do beleive in extra-terrestrial life. The statistics support it (unless you are a creationist).

I also beleive in people with WAY too much time on their hands coming up with hoaxes about little grey men with anal fetishs.

Yes, yesss, sstatisssticssssss... look at all the alien life we have found ssso far.

[Valaru]

Originally Posted by Alcuin

Yes, yesss, sstatisssticssssss... look at all the alien life we have found ssso far.

We exist, on one small planet, circling one little star, with a universe filled with to close to an infinite number of stars and planets, statistically there has to be life out there, unless we are a total anomaly, which we can't be as they found some fossilized microbes in some mars rocks.

[trolls' bane]

Sentient besides our own! *rolls on floor, in a fit of uncontrollable laughter* Besides--*pause to laugh*--our own!

Okay, sorry.
What conclusions have you come to in this? It's a lot to read.

GREAT post, Alcuin. You're going into my memoirs with that. (Not to compete with Hector's, but with my actual memoirs I plan to eventually write after I reveal to the Earth that I am Siegfried, Imperator and Supreme Consul of the Martian Senate, and spy into the inner workings of Terran society to report to the Martian Invasion Militia Intelligence.)

Telcontarian, could you PLEASE offer more than just videos? Some of us have computers that freeze or have critical errors at the slightest hint of a media file.

You know, there's a website the people at the Astronomical Society of the Desert's star party told me was hilarious. I have yet to read it, but the website is www.zetatalk.com. (The Zetans, by the way, are popularly known as "the Greys".)

[Alcuin]

In all seriousness, Valaru, statistics doesn’t prove anything in this case. Technically, you cannot prove anything with statistics: you disprove things within arbitrarily set bounds called “confidence levels,� and there is neither any confidence level nor any reliable data from which to build such a structure.

If you’re interested, there’s a formula known as “Drake’s equation� that might describe the number of civilizations in a galaxy, whatever “civilization� may mean in this context; however, there are a several of variables in the equation for which the parameters are completely unknown, and, as far as we can tell, appear to be approaching zero.

Besides, by the lights of some “civilization,� we might not qualify as “intelligent life.� Or you might find some civilization that moves very slowly, and fail to ever notice it or its achievements.

You can take it from a guy who spent over two hours Halloween afternoon roaming through the NIS Statistics handbook looking for matches to a parametric distribution, statistics do not prove that there is alien life anywhere else in the universe, however silly the null hypothesis may appear, or however silly it may yet appear in the future, as it very well may.

Or not. Feel free to argue your position ’til you’re blue in the face. (But be sure to post a picture… I’ve only seen a couple of blue-in-the-face guys in the past few decades.)

[Valaru]

Support, not prove, it is true statistics prove nothing.

but one out of nine, no ten, no eight planets (or whatever) has life, in one solar system, chances are better than not that there is life out there on another planet somewhere, intelligent life even, though chances are they would be so diffrent from us, we could never communicate with them, if we ever met, which is unlikely.

[trolls' bane]

[Nurvingiel]

Originally Posted by hectorberlioz

I can't stand this idea. I see it permeated in Star Trek, and it absolutely drives me up the wall...how come aliens get to be so holy and non-violent? Who the heck thought of this idea that "aliens have come to realize the importance of non-violence and preserving life and culture." As Alcuin would say, My Foot! *nasal voice* "Humans just aren't at that stage yet, where they're willing to look past their differences and be non-violent"

That was part of the point of my post Hector.

Though Star Trek does have the Borg. "We are the Borg, you will be assimilated..." I wouldn't exactly invite them to tea.

Originally Posted by hectorberlioz

What's hilarious is that a lot of Star Trek has this kind of message, not to mention The Prime Directive ...and yet Roddenberry has the nerve to impose HIS views on aliens!

To be fair, all Sci-fi writers have to do this as we don't have any contact with real aliens.

[Valaru]

Star trek uses the "ancient astronaut" theory, that all life was seeded throughout the universe, and that is why 90% of the species they encounter are humanoid

[Anglorfin]

I have no idea whether our planet has been visited by aliens in the past, but I've always held that it's egotistical of us to believe that we are the only sentient planet in the whole universe. It's as bad as the old idea that the sun revolved around the earth. I've never understood how doubters could even possibly mount an argument against infinty, or close to it. On the other hand I hate all those consipracy nuts that scream "coverup" whenever the terms UFO, flying saucer, or ET are uttered within earshot.

I think the main reason space fascinates so many people is because it really is the final frontier. It's the best place to let our imaginations go wild. And what's even better is that there might even be a chance that our imagination is not too far off from the real thing. Who knows? Maybe dragons or unicorns exist on a different planet. Regardless of the actual odds, we'll probably never know for sure what is out there. But there is always a chance, which is why the idea of alien life is so compelling.

[Alcuin]

Originally Posted by Valaru

Star trek uses the "ancient astronaut" theory, that all life was seeded throughout the universe, and that is why 90% of the species they encounter are humanoid

Hm. Do you suppose they might really do this because 100% of the actors are humanoid?

[Valaru]

Originally Posted by Alcuin

Hm. Do you suppose they might really do this because 100% of the actors are humanoid?

they had a dog once, lol


oh wait, that was battlestar galactica.

[hectorberlioz]

Originally Posted by Nurvingiel

That was part of the point of my post Hector.

Though Star Trek does have the Borg. "We are the Borg, you will be assimilated..." I wouldn't exactly invite them to tea.

To be fair, all Sci-fi writers have to do this as we don't have any contact with real aliens.

I'm sorry Nurv...no real offense meant to that great series called Star Trek...I like it a lot myself ...and I was definitely bieng very sarcastic about the last comment...

Originally Posted by Anglorfin

I have no idea whether our planet has been visited by aliens in the past, but I've always held that it's egotistical of us to believe that we are the only sentient planet in the whole universe. It's as bad as the old idea that the sun revolved around the earth. I've never understood how doubters could even possibly mount an argument against infinty, or close to it. On the other hand I hate all those consipracy nuts that scream "coverup" whenever the terms UFO, flying saucer, or ET are uttered within earshot.

It's interesting you should bring up Infinity, because I had been thinking about last night. I think the idea that space is infinite is the key to knowing about how God created time. In a book called "The Science of God" (the writer is Jewish, and an evolutionist, but writes about how God and Evolution do not conflict), Gerald Schroder talks about how the "billions of years" that we keep coming up with passed at a very different kind of speed.

I had thought about it myself before I read the book. I had wondered about how, if in the fury of creation, a certain "time" got imprinted, which did not go by our time.....

*sees weird stares*