From HVEL: Aliens or no aliens

[trolls' bane]

Here's a thread from my message board created by my cousin "Zeak."
I thought it would make some interesting discussion.
I quoted every post in the thread below...

Originally Posted by Zeak

Do you believe in aliens from mars.Well I....well....uh....im not really shure.

Originally Posted by Siegfried (aka trolls' bane)

Well, aside from me *ahem*, this raises some interesting questions.
The real question besides "Is there life on other worlds (i.e. Mars)?" is now a much different question than 100 years ago. We must ask ourselves, "What kind of life?" Our ultimate goal, as humans, is to find other intelligent beings like yet unlike ourselves. This is the question about Mars. If we found life, what form would it take? Microbial life is the most likely and the first choice. Intelligent life, we now know, is not currently living on the planet Mars. We know this because of radio telescopes. Remember, visible light and radio waves are related. They are both part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Currently, our knowlege of the universe is mainly based on the electromagnetic spectrum.
The electromagnetic spectrum is simple to recognize. From right to left (this will have a few errors), we have: microwaves, radio waves, infrared, visible light (all of the colors we can see, with red on the right and violet on the left end), ultraviolet, x-rays, and gamma rays. Light, as we know, travels extremely fast, and vast distances in space are measured in light years, the distance it take light to travel in a year. Therefore, sicne they are all related, we know that all wavelengths of the spectrum (from microwaves, or long wavelengths, to gamma rays, with microscopic wavelengths) travel at the speed of light. Therefore, if there were, perchance, a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the closest star, which is four light years away, they are as of this moment receiving radio waves from 2001. It will take four years for what we are broadcasting right now to reach the planet.
Now, if there were intelligent beings on that planet who used radio to communicate, they would have been getting radio waves from us. Earth is a "noisy" planet, because advanced intelligent beings tend to make noise, not in the sense of sound, but in the sense of radio broadcasts, doctors using x-rays, etc.
Now for us, this would work the other way around. If there were intelligent being on mars, we would be hearign radio broadcasts made by them in only about ten minutes. We do not, however, hear anything of the sort. Therefore, if there are intelligent beings on Mars, they must be far less advanced than us, they must be extremely durable (with 200 mile/hour dust storms, tornados, dry ice snowing, little water, no vegitation, 1% Earth's air pressure, little atmosphere made out of Carbon Dioxide, and other problems. Bacteria, however, is very likely to be living on Mars.

Originally Posted by Zeak

Bravo Bravo Brendan i was amazed by that kind of speech thingy.that was excellent!

Originally Posted by Siegfried

*giant round object comes down to hover over the Hidden Valley**Lowers from inside of spaceship*

Originally Posted by Zeak

yeah yah yah yah.... (the aplause so loud it breaks the sound bearier)!!

Originally Posted by Siegfried

*covers ears*

[trolls' bane]

Speaking of which...I'm all alone here! *is afraid* what if there are orcs! *shudder*

[IronParrot]

You mean, Orcs in Space?

[trolls' bane]

Oh no! They've got into space too! Were doomed!
*dives for rapidly closing door on space ship*

[trolls' bane]

Who has heard of the common beleif held years ago that there were canals on Mars?
This all began in 1888 when astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli noted streaks on the Martian surface. He called them canali, or channels, which fatefully translated into English "Canals." This wrong conception would probably have diminished after a while, but instead, an astronomer in Flagstaff, Arizona observed Mars through a telescope in his observatory, and went so far as to map Mars with it's "canals." His name was Percival Lowell, who's theories about these markings turned the world upside down.

Will finish later.

[Lief Erikson]

I heard of it. There used to be a lot of fantastical theories about Mars.

[trolls' bane]

Well, some people still think that there is intelligent life on Mars. I think not. As I said in "Aliens or No Aliens," intelligent life makes too much artificial electromagnetic "noise" as in radio waves and other parts of the spectrum. Long-wavelength radio waves, as far as we know, are the best form of communication yet, so if we are right, then extra terrestrial civilizations would do the same. Humans are too obtuse, thinking that such civilizations would be hundreds or thousands of years more advanced, and this is where my electromagnetic noise theory is strongly opposed. In my opinion, this may be true with some E.T. civilizations (if there are any), but with others, they might be at a stage comparable to our 19th or 18th century, or much further behind. Science fiction authors tend to ignore this possibility, usually making any ET civilizations that can't vapourize us with Rayguns no less advanced than perhaps the beginning of primitive (compared to nowdays) 20th century flight. These two cancel each other out if they are talking about the possibility of intelligent life on the same planet, but as for Mars, I agree with most scientists that Mars is near the end of its geological activity, a dying cooling planet that once was a paradise but began to die off during its Hesperian Era. By the first third of the Amazonian Era, intelligent life, if there was any, would either have died off completely or be quite close to it, living at middle latitudes, where the permanent ice layer was at a medium depth in the ground and the air temperature wasn't too cold, maybe heating up to 14 degrees Fahrenheit, which, as we can observe on earth, is quite bearable to even the more modest species of life, including humans.
This is where they would have lived, slowly dying off because of starvation and thinning atmosphere. By the mid-Amazonian Era, Intelligent life would have died off, but bacteria, who can survive in many hostile conditions elsewehre, may have survived. Evolving in the dark, planet wide ice layer and at he poles, they might have survived, even thrived, and probably are still in existence whatever the case.

[MrBishop]

You'll like this link, I believe

Water Ice found on Mars

[trolls' bane]

Cool! I'll read it later.
I also have heard that it snows on Mars. 'Course, we don't want to have dry ice falling from our sky here.

[IronParrot]

I think the interest that has always been present around whether or not water is or ever was on Mars is as much founded on interest in sustainably colonizing it as it is about whether or not there was once life there.

[trolls' bane]

Originally Posted by IronParrot

I think the interest that has always been present around whether or not water is or ever was on Mars is as much founded on interest in sustainably colonizing it as it is about whether or not there was once life there.

That may be true, but in Lowell's time, we didn't think we'd ever fly there.

[IronParrot]

I'm not sure that's the case. Nineteenth-century folks don't have the knowledge we do, but they didn't lack the imagination. Consider that Jules Verne was already talking about blasting off to the moon decades before.

[trolls' bane]

True.
I thought it was also clever of them to think that the dark markings like Syrtis Major were large areas of vegetation.