Aliens Poll

[Turtle]

Thanks Turtle, I think, is it really worth reading all that ?

 

for the purposes of this thread, no it's not worth it or necessary. paper #49 on the inhabited worlds covers most of the material in the book concerning alien races.

 

as far as i can tell, the whole extra-terrestrial races business got started around 1877 with Schiaparelli's mars maps and the "lines" he saw on mars that he called canali.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_canal

...Some people went so far as to propose the idea that the canals were irrigation canals built by a supposed intelligent civilization on Mars. Percival Lowell was a strong proponent of this view, pushing the idea much further than Giovanni Schiaparelli, who for his part considered much of the detail on Lowell's drawings to be imaginary. ...

 

from then on, the sky was, and remains, the limit on speculation of the nature & form of extra-terrrestrial intelligent beings.

[Turtle]

carrying this alien history a bit further beyond Lowell, and tying it to the Urantia Book, is the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs and specifically his exhibit at the Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago. you see, the primary author of the Urantia Book, one Mr. Sadler, lived in Chicago, moved with movers & shakers, and undoubtably visited the Exposition. go figure.

 

ERBzine 1275: Remarkable Summer of '93 ~ Part I

 

William S. Sadler - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Turtle]

curioser & curioser. :Alien: :Alien: i admit to only a casual knowledge of mr. burroughs and his works, however even a smidgeon of association with Urantia puts me on high alert. phi phi pho phum, i smelt blood and tracked down some. :dog: :evil: :D seems ol' burroughs was born in chicago only 2 years before sadler. indeed. :Alien: while he left for a number of years, lo the native son returned.

 

Edgar Rice Burroughs - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Following a period of drifting and ranch work in Idaho, Burroughs found work at his father's firm in 1899. He married Emma Centennia Hulbert in 1900. In 1904 he left his job and found less regular work, initially in Idaho but soon back in Chicago.[2]

By 1911, after seven years of low wages, he was working as a pencil sharpener wholesaler and began to write fiction. By this time Burroughs and Emma had two children, Joan and Hulbert.[3] During this period, he had copious spare time and he began reading many pulp fiction magazines and has since claimed:

 

"...if people were paid for writing rot such as I read in some of those magazines, that I could write stories just as rotten. As a matter of fact, although I had never written a story, I knew absolutely that I could write stories just as entertaining and probably a whole lot more so than any I chanced to read in those magazines."

 

Aiming his work at these pulp fiction magazines, his first story "Under the Moons of Mars" was serialized in The All-Story magazine in 1912[4][5] and earned Burroughs US$400 (roughly the equivalent of US$7600 in 2004). ...

 

as i say, i'm not very familiar with burrough's fiction, but i think a close inspection of his work and comparison to Sadler's Urantia book is in order, with a particular eye to their descriptions of alien races. if that is not appropriate here for you all, then i'll pick it up in the Who Hoaxed the Urantia Book thread where we last left off with the nazi connection.

:Alien: mmmmmm...tastes like chicken.

[TheBigDog]

Thanks Turtle, I think, is it really worth reading all that ?

No. Turtle is an Nth Katabatak Cleric of Uratia. You can simply rely upon his interpretations. Unless you are looking for the Post-Reformation version, then I would stick with the Wiki summary. Then again you can go Canadian Orthodox...

 

Bill

[Moontanman]

I think the poll left off an important possibility.....

 

There is no intelligent life in the Universe......

[TheBigDog]

I think the poll left off an important possibility.....

 

There is no intelligent life in the Universe......

Speak for yourself! :dog:

[tedrick79]

We are alone in the universe. Because if anyone else was out there they would be here already.

 

Note; I am going to stick with the evolutionary theory and the big bang theory for this - 14 billion year universe and such - not that I subscribe to either but - here goes.

 

 

 

Life is a hard thing. It is hard to get to line up correctly. Suffice to say that the conditions are a rarity and it has been KNOWN to occur just once ever. On Earth.

 

Now say stellar time is rocketing forward at 1 million years a click.. No life - No need to slow it down any - Let say a technological civilization evolved in Andromeda 14 million years ago. Where would the be 14 million years into technology?

 

Where will we be? Now barring any space bending technology - space colonization is going to be slow. They say we could hit 10PSOl with current technology - That means Alpha Centari in 43 years. Better bring the kids.

 

Now space faring will get quicker, but it can only get so fast - after we start pushing 1g or so in acceleration it will get uncomfortable (because you will be accelerating for years and decelerating for years) because any faster would cause severe problems to humans. So it will always be slow. (barring all that high nonsense science like wormholes blackholes and warp coils)

 

Point is in 1,000,000 years in the year 1,002,009 where will mankind be?

Answer all over the place - we will be all over this arm of the Milky way. In 5 million years we will have the galaxy filled and Canis major well underway. Even with CURRENT technology.

 

Closest Galaxy to the Milky Way

 

 

Getting to the next galaxy over. Andromeda is 2 million light years off. Simply put we cannot bride that distance in anything we can build or fuel. I will leave that to sci-fi.

 

 

 

 

Point is that unless alien species evolves preciesly when we did - they are just not there. Or we will pave over them in the next million years.

 

 

 

 

 

There are no aliens out there - we would hear them -- and we would be overrun by them. You can hope and wish upon a star. Won't make it so.

 

 

P.S. lights in the sky are just that - lights --- you think ET flew 4.3 lightyears with his landing lights on?

[Buffy]

Life is a hard thing. It is hard to get to line up correctly. Suffice to say that the conditions are a rarity and it has been KNOWN to occur just once ever. On Earth.

 

Let's fiddle with some numbers: We've only really been able to inspect 5 other planets and a few dozen moons. Although we can certainly say that there's no "intelligent" life on those planets or moons, we can only really show that no life at all ever existed on Mercury and our own moon. Every other planet we've visited is still inconclusive.

 

And in the case of mercury and our own moon, its really more based on the notion that we know that they have never had the ability to sustain life because they have little or no atmosphere.

 

SO if we keep things simple by really just looking at the planets we've been able to inspect reasonably well, using basic statistics we can say that that one planet out of 6 has intelligent life.

 

1:6 is pretty good odds in my book!

 

If you disagree with this statistical analysis, I'd encourage you to refute it with your own.

Now say stellar time is rocketing forward at 1 million years a click.. No life - No need to slow it down any - Let say a technological civilization evolved in Andromeda 14 million years ago. Where would the be 14 million years into technology?

I don't know. Do you have any facts upon which to base any such conjecture?

 

Now barring any space bending technology - space colonization is going to be slow. They say we could hit 10PSOl with current technology - That means Alpha Centari in 43 years. Better bring the kids.

There's a number! Now Alpha Centari is about 4 light years away, so we're talking about 10 years per light year, or about 1 million years just to get across our galaxy.

 

And that's assuming we don't bother to stop anywhere to smell the roses.

 

Now what you've missed here is the *cost* of such travels. Ability to travel such distances does not translate into actually doing it. We certainly could have been colonizing Mars 10 years ago, but we haven't yet, largely due to the enormous costs of getting there, but more than anything the lack of any motivation to launch such a daunting venture: there's no profit in it!

 

It's hard to *assume* that all civilizations will somehow expend more than all of their available resources to get to such a level of colonization?

 

To see why, you might take some time to look at not just the time required, but the *energy* required to actually get to Alpha Centauri, even under the rosiest assumptions of fuel efficiency.

 

The more interesting issue that you ignore is the issue of survival. Considering what we've done--even if you want to argue that the world is only 5000-odd years old--in our history, coming very close to anhilating the planet ourselves, in addition to the many other forms of natural extermination out there (very large comets created by hydroplate squiring if you'd like), it will be a miracle if we're able to get ourselves to a--hopefully habitable--planet orbiting Alpha Centauri (which is possible, but by no means certain) before we disappear.

 

If you do grant evolution and the fact that most species transform rather dramatically in time spans measured in millions of years, and that's assuming that we're in one of those branches that doesn't simply become extinct. But if we did we might not recognize ourselves, or be able to necessarily assume that we'd be more intelligent then than now.

 

Point is that unless alien species evolves preciesly when we did - they are just not there. Or we will pave over them in the next million years.

So this conclusion isn't in fact really reasonable based on the limitations you've ignored, but why don't we just add a few more orders of magnitude and consider some of the limitations on creation of life.

 

As Carl Sagan said, "we are star stuff": the carbon we are built from and the higher elements that are necessary to construct "terrestrial planets" are all the result of many generations of stars going from mostly hydrogen and helium and transforming it through stellar fusion into higher elements such as carbon and oxygen and uranium and all the other denizens of the Periodic Table, and then exploding to litter their viscinity with matter that could at some point become life and ultimately intelligent.

 

It can be shown that it takes a *lot* of generations to do that, and with "typical" stars like the sun having life times on the order of 10 billion years, its not too difficult to do the math and see that yes, indeed, it's likely we're one of the "earlier" denizens of this galaxy.

 

The last point I'll bring up is the whole idea that if there are others out there, that they've gone out of their way to even make themselves known. As has been discussed earlier in this and other threads, if you subscribe to the notion that you can't really count on those aliens being benevolent, do you really *want* to be broadcasting your existence? I know I don't want to get to know Species 8472 well any time soon....

 

For further reading, I'd suggest you might want to look into the Drake Equation which deals directly with this topic, bringing in many concepts that you have not mentioned but which are quite important. We've also discussed it in many threads here.

 

There are no aliens out there - we would hear them -- and we would be overrun by them. You can hope and wish upon a star. Won't make it so.

 

P.S. lights in the sky are just that - lights --- you think ET flew 4.3 lightyears with his landing lights on?

Well, that's not venom, but it is disdain...

 

Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day, :hihi:

Buffy

[Boerseun]

Tedrick, much of what you say is true.

 

The chance that any two intelligences will arise in lockstep is remote - the one must be a few million years ahead or behind the other. In human development terms, even a hundred years is a lot. Think about the difference between early 20th century Europe and modern-day Europe. Today's world (a mere hundred years after 1909) would be utterly alien to them.

 

But then again, in the entire world, considering all ancient civilizations, ONE must have been the first to discover the wheel. In the same vein, considering all possible intelligences in the Milky Way Galaxy, ONE must be the first to discover radio astronomy and spaceflight. It might as well have been us. It could very well be that the galaxy is teeming with societies on the very threshold of discovering means by which we could become aware of their existence. But the principle of mediocrity holds against it. Out of millions of possible civilizations, we should be somewhere in the middle - not too advanced and not too backwards. There is nothing special about our place in the galaxy, and there is nothing special about the conditions that formed us. All chemicals in the primordial soup is freely available all over the galaxy. There is nothing special about our time, either. A middle-aged planet orbiting a mediocre middle-aged star.

 

The very first problem that is encountered with your argument, however, is the mere number of stars. In a sphere of 100 light years centered on the sun, there are thousands upon thousands of stars. Which one to visit? Remember, if what you say holds true that if there are any aliens they would have been here already, why would they have picked our star amongst the thousands in their 100 light-year sphere? Only for the last seventy-odd years have we been beaming our presence to space. For the entire history of mankind before that, no alien civilization would have detected anything out of the ordinary regarding our solar system. It could be that in 1935 the solar system was visited by an advanced species that detected a methane imbalance in Earth's atmosphere and, given the vast oceans on this planet, put it down to blue-green algae that is a common occurrence throughout the galaxy and not worth spending the energy to land, sample and take off again. They've seen it before. And then in 1936, a year later, when they've already committed to accellerating to the next star, the first television broadcast goes live with enough power to be detected by an alien civilization. They all slap their foreheads with their slimy green tentacles and say "doh!"

 

It could very well be that we are the first sentient beings in the entire galaxy. The odds against it, however, is pretty high. It could also very well be that what and who we are, intelligent meat-sacks, is merely what hydrogen, carbon, calcium, nitrogen and a host of other commonly available elements get up to given four billion years.

 

But the biggest problem, in my view, is synchronicity. Using Earth as an example, a civilization a thousand years ahead or behind another, is very far ahead, or behind. When talking about alien civilizations, the technological difference will be tallied in millions of years. It could very well be that there are aliens on Earth right now, and they (from their perspective) can't tell the difference between a human, a tree, and a cow. It's all "Earthlife" to them, biologically and genetically almost identical, and not worth bothering with. Our technological pretensions might be as interesting to them as the ability of chlorophyll to synthesize energy from sunlight might be to us. I am yet to hear of scientists seriously trying to communicate with a leaf. The ability to split atoms might be as primitive and interesting in their view as an otter using a rock to crack open a shell might be to us.

 

The mere fact that they aren't currently knocking on your front door in expectation of a cup of tea does not mean that they're not out there, somewhere. Our sample size (on civilization on one planet) is just to small to draw any valid conclusions from, and the number of stars and planets out there is simply too large to exclude the possibility.

 

I do fear, however, that if we were to discover an alien presence in space, we would have very little to say to them, and they might not even be interested.

 

Also, if we were to meet an alien, it would be utterly alien. Having evolved on a strange planet under strange conditions, chances are very good that we won't even recognize it as such. Chances are very good that amongst Earthlife, there would be no analogous species to draw comparisons from, and we (with our penchant for drawing parallels and see patterns etc.) will be totally lost as to how to communicate with them, if we can even recognize them for being a species in own right.

 

Sorry for the long-winded reply, but I find this topic eternally interesting.

[Moontanman]

Another idea that has been largely ignored is that even though we have been broadcasting for about 100 years it is now thought that our "signals" are washed out by interstellar interference after just a couple light years so even if Alpha Centauri has an advanced civilization they might be blissfully unaware of us. Most of what SETI does is based on aliens wanting to be found, listening in on an alien planet by detecting their everyday transmissions is unlikely.

[Buffy]

A very old thread worthy of a because now Stephen Hawking has weighed in on the subject....

 

To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational...The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.

 

We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.

 

[trying to make contact with alien races is] a little too risky. If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn't turn out very well for the Native Americans.

 

YouTube - Charlie Rose - Stephen Hawking http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dr5MCbIPPsA

 

So it turns out there's life on other planets. Boy, this is really going to change the Miss Universe contest, you know what I mean? :shrug:

Buffy

[alexander]

have they visited?

I have... but you'll never prove it :confused:

[JMJones0424]

And exactly 143 angels can dance on the head of a pin.

 

Until proof exists, all is conjecture.

 

Off topic(?) edit: My lotto numbers are 13,14,15,16,17,18. I don't actually play the lotto, which means I win every time I play.

[Moontanman]

I doubt any star traveling aliens would have any interest in us past some worry we might go out into space and interfere with their operations of colonizing the solar system to use it's resources to make more interstellar generation ships to send out to colonize even more planetary systems. planets would be avoided as places where ships go but do hot come back, deep gravity wells would be places to be avoided.

[Buffy]

What's the point of traveling if you don't stop anywhere along the way? :shrug:

 

I think our concern would be we're potentially:

1. A good source of relatively rare resources.
   
2. Food.
   
3. Fun to hunt on a safari
   

 

I wish "V" would get around to telling us *why* they want people to join the "live aboard" program... :bouquet:

 

You sure don't look like an iguana, :P

Buffy

[Moontanman]

What's the point of traveling if you don't stop anywhere along the way? :shrug:

 

My point would be they do stop along the way, they stop and exploit the resources of the materials in orbit around stars to increase their numbers and when they numbers are big enough they begin to send out more ships to new nearby stars. While the original aliens continue to exploit the stars orbiting material. This could go on for many millions of years. They could use the materials of our solar system to build artificial colonies by the billions.

 

If they were here in our solar system doing this they could have been here for thousands or even millions of years. With no need to visit the Earth other than idle curiosity the discovery of intelligent life on the Earth might be cause for them to interact with us on a limited basis possibly causing our beliefs of gods from the sky and in modern times UFOs. Their concern by now it probably wondering how we will react to finding them in our solar system.

 

Even with technology not far removed from our own aliens could have been able to colonize most if not all of the galaxy within a few million years. Planets not only require huge amounts of energy to visit they are also highly unlikely to be useful. Life on the Earth contains many examples of life forms that if they had dominated life on earth the earth would at the very best be worthless and at the very worst be a poisonous dangerous world to visit.

 

I think our concern would be we're potentially:

1. A good source of relatively rare resources.
   
2. Food.
   
3. Fun to hunt on a safari
   

 

I think those concerns ignores a lot of biology, even on the earth the simply replacement of arsenic for phosphorous would make the earth useless for us if we were alien visitor. mercury levels would only require a small tweak upward to ruin the earths usefulness to us. Reverse the chiral nature of biology and the earth is again useless. Far to many trace elements could be drastically different at the very least to make finding a useful earth like planet really unlikely.

 

The fact that resources on the earth are also spread among the asteroids and other much smaller bodies in our solar system so they are much easier to harvest there out side of deep gravity wells.

 

I wish "V" would get around to telling us *why* they want people to join the "live aboard" program... :bouquet:

 

You sure don't look like an iguana, :P

Buffy

 

Me too!

 

Hypothetical types of biochemistry - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Chirality

Perhaps the least unusual alternative biochemistry would be one with differing chirality of its biomolecules. In known Earth-based life, amino acids are almost universally of the L form and sugars are of the D form. Molecules of opposite chirality have identical chemical properties to their mirrored forms, so life that used D amino acids and/or L sugars may be possible; molecules of such a chirality, however, would be incompatible with organisms using the opposing chirality molecules. It is questionable, however, whether such a biochemistry would be truly alien; while it is certainly an alternative stereochemistry, molecules that are overwhelmingly found in one enantiomer throughout the vast majority of organisms can nonetheless often be found in another enantiomer in different (often basal) organisms such as in comparisons between members of Archea and other domains, making it an open topic whether an alternative stereochemistry is truly novel.

 

 

Arsenic, which is chemically similar to phosphorus, while poisonous for most Earth life, is incorporated into the biochemistry of some organisms.[5] Some marine algae incorporate arsenic into complex organic molecules such as arsenosugars and arsenobetaines. Fungi and bacteria can produce volatile methylated arsenic compounds. Arsenate reduction and arsenite oxidation have been observed in microbes (Chrysiogenes arsenatis).[6] Additionally, some prokaryotes can use arsenate as a terminal electron acceptor during anaerobic growth and some can utilize arsenite as an electron donor to generate energy. It has been speculated that the earliest life on Earth may have used arsenic in place of phosphorus in the backbone of its DNA.[7]

[sanctus]

What/who is this "V"?