Aliens Poll

[imaplanck.]

The ironic thing of course is that most that do not believe there is other intelligent life believe the universe is infinite, while most of those who do believe there is intelligent life believe the universe is finite....

 

Finite possibilities,

Buffy

 

:xx:

Well I wouldnb't know, I dont believe anything!

[Jim Colyer]

I remember Carl Sagan. Exraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

[kalesh]

I believe that there is intelligent life in the universe apart from the earth and that they may have visited, not nessecarily in the recent past. What if they visited when the earth had no intelligent life :) found us uninteresting and left?

Does that count?

[Tormod]

What if they visited when the earth had no intelligent life :( found us uninteresting and left?

Does that count?

 

In this poll it does, of course, if that's what you believe! :doh: But how would you set out to prove such a thing. Not an easy task.

[rocket art]

I've seen what would constitute as UFO's not so rarely on clear nights in my place; they crawl like sniffing ants (which means very fast, very agile because of far distance) up in the sky and traversed from south to north. But this NASA vid shows way too many round, very mobile 'debris':

YouTube - Re: Tether Project Nasa, hundreds of ufo's they're here!! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbPR1yI3XSI

 

They visited, and usually natives attempt to explain it by inventing religions.

 

A former Canadian defense minister however, was more demanding:

UFO science key to halting climate change: former Canadian defense minister - Yahoo! News

[Thorshammer]

I chose "Yes" aliens, "No" visits yet.

 

I base my answer on the writings of one of my favorite scientists, the late Carl Sagan. He spent his life trying to find alien life, and at one point did an exhaustive study debunking all of the existing "blue-book" data in his time. Nothing could be proven to be alien spacecrafts, out of thousands of images and reports. It's interesting to note that "saucer" sightings picked way up when we first started making flying saucer movies, and have been going ever since.

[Thorshammer]

I've seen what would constitute as UFO's not so rarely on clear nights in my place; they crawl like sniffing ants (which means very fast, very agile because of far distance) up in the sky and traversed from south to north. But this NASA vid shows way too many round, very mobile 'debris':

 

They visited, and usually natives attempt to explain it by inventing religions.

 

A former Canadian defense minister however, was more demanding:

UFO science key to halting climate change: former Canadian defense minister - Yahoo! News

 

That NASA footage is just begging for someone to add in a fleet of Romulan D-7's de-cloaking...lol..

[Titas Aduksus]

Well I just love this subject, drakes equation has a whole pile of unknowns but if you type in what is known the answer comes up as 1! - us.

 

There is no evidence of extrasolar life anywhere - not a shred. (extrasolar just in case there is something lurking in a methane swamp on Titan..).

 

Somebody has to be first, why not us?

 

If life existed on earth for billions of years as single celled organisms only then clearly the chance of it evolving beyond that could be seen as remote.

 

If they are out there, I hope they give this place a miss, if they were organic we would have zero immunity to any disease they might be immune to with the reverse being true...

 

It's nice to see that the majority of voters are in agreement - that there probably are lifeforms with 'intelligence' (whatever that is) somewhere out there....

[Pyrotex]

Personally, I think life is a rare enough phenomenon that it occurs maybe once in every 42 spiral or barred galaxies. It does not occur at all in elliptical galaxies because they have no dust and therefore have created no 3rd generation stars--which are necessary as older stars do not have enough heavy elements such as carbon, nitrogen, potassium, iron, etc, to create carbon-based life forms.

 

Yeah. About one planet with life in every 42 spiral or barred galaxies.

 

And I figger about one planet with intelligent life in every 42,000 s.o.b. galaxies.

 

That still makes for billions of intelligent civilizations somewhere out there.

[silverslith]

Definately intelligent life out there and probably common. Clays have been shown to be able to catalyse the production of complex protein molecules out of simple hydrocarbons and thats just carbon based stuff.

 

Even Alpha Centauri seems at leat 4 times as likely to have produced life as us with two wonderful stars very simular to our own and twice as long to have produced it due to 1.1 billion extra years of age. Very likely that a solar system requires 2-3 billion years to ripen to the point its ready for life to evolve. Once it gets started life follows an exponential curve with respect to complexity and mechanisms to speed evolution, only complete extermination could prevent intelligence evolving which also follows exponential growth functions.

Life here could have easily been seeded by them or others either deliberately or via transfer of frozen bacteria on cometary material.

 

In my mind ACentauri is very much the suspect (or at least the first to arrive) for the huge rush of ufo sightings that suddenly started ~5 years after the first Atom bomb tests. With a billion years more advanced civilisation than us they'd have been watching us already and would have got the message about our alarming and violently motivated birth as a nuclear species. They would certainly have faster than light communication but may be subject to lightspeed limitations for travel.

 

Any intelligent life we may meet will almost certainly be unimaginably more advanced than us and will most likely have left biological forms behind in the remote past. They would no more give us their technology than we would design for ants systems to carry deadly grains of nerve toxin and train them to carry them to our sugarbowls. They may give us glimpses of technology well below their level but above ours to hint that we are not alone in the universe and encourage us to imagine and behave respectably.

Any intelligences that get past the short infant phase in the knee off the exponential curve where knowledge begins doubling in fractions of a lifetime will have abandoned the insane greed for power and territory that we currently suffer from.

 

Any mature intelligences will see slowing the eventual death of the universe by minimising the consumption of energy as the prime directive. The most evolved intelligences in the universe will certainly have trancended mortality and will have technology so advanced that they are both:

-changing the properties of our universe to avoid its running down of energy and possible big crunch scenarios.

-creating new universes with properties they consider ideal for life to develop, very likely the origin of our own current universe.

I hope that humanity manages to cross the chasm and reach this level one day. :rolleyes:

[silverslith]

I'd say we're quite the interstellar tourist attraction and study opportunity at present. In the 10+ billion year lifespan of an interstellar race the 100 years from cracking of nuclear technology to finding our interstellar waterwings is a pretty rare event.:(

[Buffy]

Actually dual-star systems like Alpha Centauri are likely to be quite hostile to life, because for the planets that revolve around them there would be much larger radiation/temperature swings than you would find in a single star system. The biological processes would have to be able to survive a much wider temperature range than anything we have here!

 

That doesn't make it *impossible*, just harder, although if life *did* evolve there, it might be *much* more robust than us!

 

Running hot and cold,

Buffy

[Peter Parker]

I beleive in intelligent life and I think its possible that they may have visited. Since the universe is virtually inifinite the assumption that a species that has lived and evolved far longer than us is very plausible, imo

[silverslith]

Actually dual-star systems like Alpha Centauri are likely to be quite hostile to life, because for the planets that revolve around them there would be much larger radiation/temperature swings than you would find in a single star system. The biological processes would have to be able to survive a much wider temperature range than anything we have here!

 

That doesn't make it *impossible*, just harder, although if life *did* evolve there, it might be *much* more robust than us!

 

Running hot and cold,

Buffy

 

Do your research buffy! Silverslith prefers to dine on knowledge;) . Wikipedia:

 

A hypothetical planet around either α Centauri A or B would see the other star as a very bright secondary. For example, an Earth-like planet at 1.25 Astronomical Units from α Cen A (with an orbital period of 1.34 a) would get Sun-like illumination from its primary, and α Cen B would appear 5.7 to 8.6 magnitudes dimmer (−21.0 to −18.2), 190 to 2700 times dimmer than α Cen A but still 170 to 2300 times brighter than the full Moon. Conversely, an Earth-like planet at 0.71 AUs from α Cen B (with a revolution period of 0.63 a) would get Sun-like illumination from its primary, and α Cen A would appear 4.6 to 7.3 magnitudes dimmer (−22.1 to −19.4), 70 to 840 times dimmer than α Cen B but still 520 to 6300 times brighter than the full Moon. In both cases the secondary sun would, in the course of the planet's year, appear to circle the sky. It would start off right beside the primary and end up, half a period later, opposite it in the sky (a "midnight sun"). After another half period, it would complete the cycle. For a hypothetical Earthlike planet around either star, the secondary sun would not be bright enough to adversely affect climate or plant photosynthesis (being as far away as Saturn is from our Sun), but would mean that for about half the year, the night sky, instead of a pitch black would appear a dark blue, and one could walk around and even read rather easily without artificial light.

[Moontanman]

Recent activity in the Aliens thread probably justifies this poll. I offered a few other options to identify some differing views...

 

Option 2 is supposed to also imply "and there's no other life in the universe" but the poll mechanism doesn't like long options....

 

I'm definitely in the is intelligent life but hasn't visited us. We're way too boring to bother visiting...

 

Cheers,

Buffy

 

 

Actually the aleins visit three times a week, I trade them buds for space coke, no wait that was a movie, cheech and chong, oh well. I am torn between they don't exist and they are visiting us regularly. If they exist it wouldn't take but a few hundred thousand years for them to occupy the entire galaxy, if they don't well you can see what that would mean. of course there is the third option, all intellegent life wipes it's self out with war fare in a short time

and never has the chance to do anything but briefly wonder about the stars before disapearing in a wave of total warfare.

 

Michael

[InfiniteNow]

of course there is the third option, all intellegent life wipes it's self out with war fare in a short time

and never has the chance to do anything but briefly wonder about the stars before disapearing in a wave of total warfare.

 

I suggest that such an outcome speaks rather poorly to the assumed intelligence of said life.

[Boerseun]

I suggest that such an outcome speaks rather poorly to the assumed intelligence of said life.

Definitely not impossible, though.

 

The Earth being a case in point, where our much-vaunted intelligence is disproportionately funded by the State for such life necessities as nuclear submarines, nuclear ICBMs, thousands upon thousands of nuclear warheads pointing at civilian targets on the other side of the world, and all of them itching to be launched. Accidents happen. Incoming meteorites with sufficient bulk might make the military erroneously identify it as an incoming nuke, and retaliation, of course, is part of the package.

 

We're not stupid. But intelligence, by no means, guarantee survival. We might commit mass-suicide through some idiotic happening like above, and that will be that.

 

I wouldn't say that suicide by intelligence is a guaranteed outcome like Moontanman might suggest, it might happen that we somehow survive this and eventually end up an enlightened space-faring interstellar species. But it will still take a while. And sometime in that timespace some terrorist might get his hands on a few nukes and in just trying to finally blow up the rest of New York he starts World War 3 - that might last maybe just an afternoon, after which there will be no more Western (or any other) Civilization.

 

A few intelligent alien species will blow themselves to hell and gone, a few wont, I guess.