Aliens...what do YOU believe?

Majin Gojira · Post by **Majin Gojira** » 2003-01-20 04:41pm

Aliens and UFO's are the Demons and Angels of the 20th/21st centuries.

Sektor31 · Post by **Sektor31** » 2003-01-20 05:27pm

Ever heard of this campaign by fundies to rebel against aliens if they ever decide to show their faces here?

Damn...I'd feel sorry if they even set foot on the soil. Not only would they get needles being poked up their asses, but probably be burned at the stake or <insert any other anti- horrific torturous death here>. No wonder they hide from us,

.

Warspite · Post by **Warspite** » 2003-01-20 05:43pm

The surely are out there, it's a big Universe for only an inhabitable planet...
Have they come here?
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

BTW, shouldn't there be more proof of alien presence in more than 50 years of "UFOlogy"?

Post by **Lagmonster** » 2003-01-20 06:17pm

Sektor31 wrote:Ever heard of this campaign by fundies to rebel against aliens if they ever decide to show their faces here?

Damn...I'd feel sorry if they even set foot on the soil. Not only would they get needles being poked up their asses, but probably be burned at the stake or <insert any other anti- horrific torturous death here>. No wonder they hide from us, .

I've heard some mention of it. I remember hearing about one group who said that if there ever were aliens, that the aliens would instantly be 'like any other beast on earth' to them, and allowed to be subject to humanity. Their logic is that Jesus came 'to save mankind', not aliens, and that the Bible allows humans to go forth and subdue all other life.

Enlightenment · Post by **Enlightenment** » 2003-01-20 08:20pm

Given the age of the galaxy and the time it would take for a cilivization to spread colonize the Milky Way, the evidence leans very much towards the conclusion that humanity is the only sentient species in the entire galaxy.

The Dark · Post by **The Dark** » 2003-01-20 08:26pm

I believe it is possible for other life to exist in the galaxy. Unfortunately, Drake's Law has too many unknown variables to truly be usable yet. Also, whether or not said life is sentient is another matter for discussion. I believe it very likely that monocellular life has arisen on other planets. As to whether or not intelligent life has occurred anywhere in the galaxy, the jury is still out

.

Pcm979 · Post by **Pcm979** » 2003-01-20 10:25pm

Zoink wrote:
Durandal wrote:The universe is a very, very large place. The chances of life not occurring somewhere else are so small as to be laughable. .
Laughable? How so. Play with the numbers:

Number of stars / galaxy : 100 billion

Number of galaxies / universe : 100 billion

Chance of "life" developing around some star: 1 in 100 billion

Chance of intelligent life developing from simple life : 1 in 100 billion

Yields about 1 intelligent species per universe.

Where, might I ask, did you get those figures? They seem a bit rough.

kojikun · Post by **kojikun** » 2003-01-20 10:36pm

he got those numbers out of his ass.

As far as humanity knows, life is guaranteed to spring up around sunlike stars. SolSys is all we know, and it has life so thats all we can base things on.

And intelligent life has sprung up atleast once here. However, dolphins are rather smart, as are elephants. Their forms are rather bad when it comes to technology, however.

But earth has something like 50,000,000 unique species, and theres roughly 1 sunlike star out of every 300 stars or something like that. So theres about 300 million Sol type stars in the galaxy. If life starts around one out of a million, and intelligent life is a one in a million event youd still have millions of civilisations in the universe.

But you dont need that many. All you need is one species. In a billion years bacteria from missions to mars could evolve and make mars a veritable paradise, so the same could happen on any number of planets. One species could inadvertantly spawn life on countless worlds, even if it takes them millenia to go from system to system. So even if they evolved a billion years ago, they could have caused mllions of species to evolve in thousands of systems.

GrandMasterTerwynn · Post by **GrandMasterTerwynn** » 2003-01-20 11:54pm

Sektor31 wrote:What is your stance when it comes to these?

Are aliens real?
Are there such people as abductees?
Are there really "starborn" people living here on Earth?
Etc. etc. etc.

Please don't let this become a creation vs. evolution debate. :roll:

Heh, I know what you mean. Back when I did the whole AOL messageboard thing (When I was young, dumb and full of shit) any talk about aliens degenerated into debates on creation versus evolution.

But anyways.

A) Yes, aliens exist. The building blocks of life are everywhere. They form pretty easily. It may have taken less than 100 million years for life to evolve on Earth. Life is also pretty adaptable. Life is also the ultimate expression of entropy. (It's really good at turning high-quality energy into waste heat.) As a result, life will be everywhere in this universe where it can get a toehold.

B) No. Abductees are delusional. The vast majority of them are either suffering from waking dreams, hypnagogic hallucinations, hallucinations in general, or one of the whole host of sleep-related things that cause people to experience subjectively strange things.

C) No. Travelling to another star would be an astonishingly expensive proposition. (See thread on FTL travel in this forum.) Any move on the part of a sentient alien species would be an ourtright colonization. And outright colonization tends to go easier on planets with no native sentients to compete for resources. (This, incidentally, also explains Fermi's Paradox. It states that if aliens exist, then where are they. There are only two ways to solve the paradox. One, is if FTL travel is cheap. This means that aliens have their pick of inhabitable systems, thus avoiding the inhabited ones. The other is that interstellar travel is impractical, severely limiting any alien excursion outside of their home solar system.)

TrailerParkJawa · Post by **TrailerParkJawa** » 2003-01-21 12:41am

As far as humanity knows, life is guaranteed to spring up around sunlike stars. SolSys is all we know, and it has life so thats all we can base things on.

We know no such thing! Where do you get that idea? What guarentee is there that a Sol like star has a rocky planet of sufficient mass and placement in the system? Is there a big gas giant like Jupiter to help sweep away planet killers?

Alex Moon · Post by **Alex Moon** » 2003-01-21 01:26am

Asst. Asst. Lt. Cmdr. Smi wrote:I do believe that intelegent life exists, but they don't have the technology to travel thousands of light-years. They might not even have our level of technology.

And, if they can reach Earth, why do they only hear on them abducting cows and rednecks? Wouldn't they be more interested in the elite of our society? And, why wouldn't they be open about their presence, instead of having only laughably grainy photos of them, and tabloid reports? These would be good questions to ask to any alien-believing nut.

Maybe the aliens have a very twisted sense of humor. Sorta like galatic frat boys.

Post by **Edi** » 2003-01-21 03:30am

Are aliens real?

As pointed out, there is undoubtedly a multitude of alien life elsewhere in the universe. Whether there is sentient alien life existing concurrently with us, let alone sentient alien life posessed of equal or more advanced technology is another question entirely. And even if there is, it could very well be in some other supercluster, so we wouldn't know about it anyway.

Are there such people as abductees?

No, there are just people wo have delusions about having been abducted by aliens.

Are there really "starborn" people living here on Earth?

Yes, every single one of us. All of the elements that make up our bodies (aside from hydrogen) have come about as the result of nuclear fusion in stars that have long since vanished and the remains of which gave rise to our solar system. All of us are the children of dead stars. But that's as far as it goes, tales of people who came from other planets or half-aliens or some such are utter crap.

Edi

The Duchess of Zeon · Post by **The Duchess of Zeon** » 2003-01-21 03:45am

Edi wrote: As pointed out, there is undoubtedly a multitude of alien life elsewhere in the universe. Whether there is sentient alien life existing concurrently with us, let alone sentient alien life posessed of equal or more advanced technology is another question entirely. And even if there is, it could very well be in some other supercluster, so we wouldn't know about it anyway.

I actually think that the most insurmountable obstacle to technological civilization is not colonization of space, which seems nearly inevitable when resources on the planet become strained, or even nuclear destruction, which is much far-fetched in its potential effects to wipe out total progress, but rather the actual development of industrial civilization its self.

The Industrial Revolution happened because of a very complex series of events. It was successful due to culture - even religion - geography, the common interplay of the States around it, available resources in the dirt below that geography, and a host of other factors. It might have happened in other circumstances, but it did not, it failed, and even those circumstances occur just one or two times beyond the development of industry in Britain.

Altogether, I would say that I suspect we could indeed find sentient life in this galaxy, maybe even very close by to us, and quite common actually, in relative terms. But I expect it to always be pre-industrial. The chances of us finding another industrial society, or a society more advanced than we are, would be astronomically high.

Sokar · Post by **Sokar** » 2003-01-21 03:53am

To paraphrase the good Dr. Sagan = " If we are all alone , what an awful waste of space......

I do believe in other non-Terran civilizations, but as it been posted before , I do not believe in abductees, anal probing of drunk rednecks or any of that 'little grey men' bullshit. Its almost a certainty that who ever they are that they exist, and if they have the capabilities to circumvent known physics and cross interplanertary distances they would know better, and have better things to do, than screw with the quaint little primitives "Oh look Quartnal! They still use petrochemical energy sources!! And they even have broadcast images rather than culture and literature!! AH.....Look .......Genocide!!" Sure they like slumming with the Earthie dogs

Maybe, if humanity is supremly lucky and we survive long enough we'll meet them in the interstellar void and possibly become friends ect.......I doubt it though. We revel in death and destruction

Enricko · Post by **Enricko** » 2003-01-21 10:46am

Hello, I'm a newbie here, but a bit of a lurker too.

About the possibility of alien life, NOVA on PBS did a broadcast a year ago on a cosmic phenomenon that could explain a low number of viable planets in the Universe. I don't know if it's really relevant to the discussion, but there it is:

IIRC, astronomers were puzzled by intermittent gamma-ray bursts happening everywhere, coming from deep space. After a couple of decades of research, spectrum analysis and such, astronomers found out that very massive stars were collapsing, liberating unbelievable amount of energy. Because of the stars' rotation, that energy, gamma-rays, was like a big flashlight, lighting up the skies.

The problem is that this flash of energy is capable of killing life on a planet at distance of hundreds of lightyears, a big cosmic death ray...

(More info go to http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/gamma/)

Maybe we are really alone! Those alien lifeforms who haven't been wipe out by asteroids and such, the alien civilisation that didn't nuked themself, they may have been exterminated by that!

OR

If there's alien anal probing going on for real, maybe I have a theory:
(I made that up after watching "Signs" and "ID4")

DUMP ALIENS:
The Aliens' homeworld is overpopulated. Billions upon billions of beings. Space colonies (like orbital stations and such) are not a viable answer for their problem. Eugenism(sp) could be the solution, but those aliens have feeling too, so there are protestations to that option.

So, they choose to send a portion of their population on another planet, at the other side of the Galaxy. The Alien government put their dumbest people, the weaks, the stupid, the retards, those with defects, in big automated spaceships, and there they go! We don't want you here, we don't want to kill you, go find yourself another planet!!!

The conclusion is foreseeable: the aliens arrive on Earth, run around abducting people

first dumb alien:"Hey, that guy in the corn field must be the leader of that planet!"
second dumb alien:"We will interrogate him?"
fda:"Yes, take the mind probe!"
sda:"Where should I put it?"

They only use a small part of there technology to conquer us (they don't know how to operate the rest), we survive the first strike and then we kick their sorry asses!!!

(I apologize if that humoristic view of alien shock you.)

Post by **Colonel Olrik** » 2003-01-21 11:01am

Enricko wrote:Hello, I'm a newbie here, but a bit of a lurker too.

Welcome! Glad you stopped lurking, it can drive you blind!

(I apologize if that humoristic view of alien shock you.)

You seriously think anal probing jokes shocks the people here? Obviously, you didn't lurk enough

edit: I'm your local Harbinger of Doom, keeper of law and order. Behave or be beheaded.

Post by **Lagmonster** » 2003-01-21 11:13am

It is ludicrously easy for chemicals to form the basics of life: self-replicating chemical bits. It is MUCH harder in evolutionary terms to get from that to, say, a basic invertebrate, than it is to get from that invertebrate to, say, a big tool-bearing sentient mammal.

Most protolife forms are likely to be destroyed by environmental upheavals, disasters or change.

Peregrin Toker · Post by **Peregrin Toker** » 2003-01-21 11:49am

I am convinced that, given the size of the universe, that there is life out there, and probably many civilizations.

However, when it comes to the abductions, I'm somewhat more skeptical. Many "abduction memories" have turned out perhaps to be false. On the other hand, there are those who have found unexplainable objects in their bodies after being "abducted"...

as a side note, have any on you seen "UFO" on Discovery Channel?

SirNitram · Post by **SirNitram** » 2003-01-21 12:29pm

Lagmonster wrote:It is ludicrously easy for chemicals to form the basics of life: self-replicating chemical bits. It is MUCH harder in evolutionary terms to get from that to, say, a basic invertebrate, than it is to get from that invertebrate to, say, a big tool-bearing sentient mammal.

Most protolife forms are likely to be destroyed by environmental upheavals, disasters or change.

If you learn anything from studying Earth's history, learn this: Lifeforms are fragile, easily breakable things. Life is near impossible to wipe out, no matter how many huge ass rocks you throw.

Post by **Lagmonster** » 2003-01-21 12:31pm

SirNitram wrote:If you learn anything from studying Earth's history, learn this: Lifeforms are fragile, easily breakable things. Life is near impossible to wipe out, no matter how many huge ass rocks you throw.

Sorry...I think I missed your point. You state that life is fragile and easy to destroy, and then that it's impossible to completely destroy it. I don't get which side you're on, sorry.

SirNitram · Post by **SirNitram** » 2003-01-21 12:37pm

Lagmonster wrote:
SirNitram wrote:If you learn anything from studying Earth's history, learn this: Lifeforms are fragile, easily breakable things. Life is near impossible to wipe out, no matter how many huge ass rocks you throw.
Sorry...I think I missed your point. You state that life is fragile and easy to destroy, and then that it's impossible to completely destroy it. I don't get which side you're on, sorry.

Lifeforms... Dinosaurs, Humans, Playtypuses... Are incredibly easy to destroy. I can end a human's life with a few too many pounds of force in one place.

However, probability and Big Fuggin' Rocks have been trying to wipe out all life on Earth practically since the first compounds got to replicating. Yet life is still here. Life, as a whole(From bacteria up to really complex lifeforms) is incredibly resilient and adaptable. Just keep in mind the number of mass extinctions that have happened and not stopped new kinds of life.

Post by **Lagmonster** » 2003-01-21 12:46pm

Okay, Nitram...got your general point. However, life has to get to the point where it can spread rapidly and across the planet, to the point where only massive and rapid environmental change can wipe it out, before it becomes as resilient as life on earth.

If proto-life formed (soup or sandwich, whatever model you prefer) in, say, the upper reaches of Jupiter, where the atmosphere is rich with the chemicals and energies needed to start life, it would almost certainly constantly be swept up and destroyed in the cold, or swept down and incinerated by intense pressure. Life may exist (in its simplest definition), but that doesn't mean, as I put it, that it's going to progress anywhere. Which is what my (albeit unsupported) statement of "It's harder to go from self-replicating chemical to worm than from worm to human" came from.

SirNitram · Post by **SirNitram** » 2003-01-21 12:51pm

This is true, Lagmonster, though I thought you were saying that once life had gotten started it would be easy to fell. But yea, in Jupiter or similar it'd be unlikely to get far. Even if it did, there would be no intelligence: There could be no stone age without stone.

Warspite · Post by **Warspite** » 2003-01-21 01:05pm

Enricko wrote: About the possibility of alien life, NOVA on PBS did a broadcast a year ago on a cosmic phenomenon that could explain a low number of viable planets in the Universe. I don't know if it's really relevant to the discussion, but there it is:

IIRC, astronomers were puzzled by intermittent gamma-ray bursts happening everywhere, coming from deep space. After a couple of decades of research, spectrum analysis and such, astronomers found out that very massive stars were collapsing, liberating unbelievable amount of energy. Because of the stars' rotation, that energy, gamma-rays, was like a big flashlight, lighting up the skies.

The problem is that this flash of energy is capable of killing life on a planet at distance of hundreds of lightyears, a big cosmic death ray... [...]

Welcome aboard!

Space is big, and with a lot of stars, a few hundred ly are irrelevant in this context.
For a planet to be able to develop life, it must satisfy (at least) one condition, a protection against most of the lethal radiation that "swims" in space, in the form of magnetic field, ozone layer and atmosphere.
Of course, a lot passes through, we are constantly being bombarded by radiation from space, but it's negligible, compared with the doses outside Earth orbit.
So, even with the amount of supernovae that exists (and have existed for the last billions of years), it is possible for life to develop, if certain protection mechanisms are... "created". (didn't like this last word, but it applies in a certain sense.)

Enricko · Post by **Enricko** » 2003-01-21 01:51pm

Warspite wrote

Space is big, and with a lot of stars, a few hundred ly are irrelevant in this context.
For a planet to be able to develop life, it must satisfy (at least) one condition, a protection against most of the lethal radiation that "swims" in space, in the form of magnetic field, ozone layer and atmosphere.

I'm not an astronomer, but what was said about those gamma-ray bursts was that they can strip a planet of its atmosphere, light flash-fire and boil the seas, at a distance of 150 ly in two directions (2 poles, the collapsing star is spinning)! No magnetic field (well maybe ones like Jupiter or Saturn) can protect a planet from that kind of energy.

I admit space is incredibly vast, and that if we survived every possible cosmic catastrophies, alien lifeforms could have too. But I believe the cosmos is scarcely populated because of them. The bursts we see today come from faraway galaxies, but they surely occured in the Milky Way less than one billion years ago...

Colonel Olrik: It wasn't the anal probing commentary, it was the Eugenism commentary (you know, Nazy, eliminate the weaks, etc) for which I presented my apologies.

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Aliens...what do YOU believe?

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