Aliens

[stereologist]

Don't forget the old argument that:

1. We are close to discovering how to make a self replicating machine

2. Such a machine could be built to explore the nearest stars

3. When it gets to a planetary system it builds replicas of itself

4. One or more replicas are sent home and others are sent to other stars

5. In a few tens or hundreds of millions of years many stars are covered in our galaxy

 

This begs the question, where are the probes sent by other civilizations?

[Jethro Tull]

In my opinion, there are many, many planets capable of supporting life, even in our own galaxy. As far as aliens visiting Earth; I don't know. I'd say either we are known by other life and they just don't want to deal with us because we're still killing each other, or that other life is asking the same questions we are.

 

A David Bowie song comes to mind..."There's a starman waiting in the sky. He'd like to come and meet us, but he thinks he'd blow our minds."

 

I certainly don't think we're alone, and that it is possible that there are alien lifeforms waiting to meet us when we wake up and start working together as one big organism - the human race. All this separation is just an illusion, a very costly one.

[lemit]

Thanks, Riper, for reviving this thread.

 

Thanks, Boerseun, for saying some things I'd been thinking for a long time but had been afraid to say because I have a weak science background.

 

The original proof of the advanced civilization on other worlds was the canals on Mars that were so carefully designed that they must have been created by intelligent beings.

 

Hold on . . . I'm being told we've discovered that what appeared to be canals on closer examination proved to be natural phenomena. Well, there's surely life on a planet two counties over.

 

UFOlogists have a strange theory of evolution. If there is life on other planets, it must not only be developed, it must be developed so much ahead of our civilization that it has solved many problems of physics that are insoluble to us right now.

 

How about using the theory of evolution that, no matter what a lot of people say, seems to be working better than the alternatives? Why not, before we posit civilizations advanced on quantum levels beyond ours, find a real live single-cell organism or two?

 

When we are positing those advanced civilizations, given the billions of possibilities, why not develop models of the ways our own development could have been side-tracked even more than it has? Why not consider the possibility of a world perfectly content in its primordial soupiness or one in which the reign of the dinosaurs is extended a few million more years, say until now?

 

If we examine all of the Goldilocks hypotheses, all the worlds too hot or too cold, too hard or too soft (the UFOlogists are not the only gasbags in the universe), we can come up with a few billion alternatives that are less advanced than ours. If we add the few billion who are around our level of advancement, in other words distracted by the shadows they think must have come from space, how many billions of the space-travelling planets are left?

 

And what ever happened to those Martians who were here a century ago? Now there's a government cover-up that's working!

 

--lemit

[Moontanman]

If the dinosaurs had indeed not become extinct, possibly we would be these guys....

 

File:Dinosauroid.jpg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[lemit]

Moon,

 

I've been distracted recently and didn't notice the picture until now.

 

Have you noticed how much the dinosauroid looks like those Martians of a century ago?

 

Makes you think, doesn't it?

 

--lemit

 

p.s. Makes you think maybe you're wasting your time on a bunch of nonsense, doesn't it? Makes you think there are probably a lot of better ways to spend your time, doesn't it? Makes you decide to turn your computer off and

[lemit]

I also just now discovered Maddog's reference to Drake's Equation. I did my own calculations and came up with 1.675 planets in our galaxy capable of communicating with other planets. In other words, we could very well be the best hope for the universe right now and maybe should act like it.

 

--lemit

 

p.s. How was I able to do this with the computer turned off? Makes you think, doesn't it? . . . .

[Moontanman]

Moon,

 

I've been distracted recently and didn't notice the picture until now.

 

Have you noticed how much the dinosauroid looks like those Martians of a century ago?

 

Makes you think, doesn't it?

 

--lemit

 

p.s. Makes you think maybe you're wasting your time on a bunch of nonsense, doesn't it? Makes you think there are probably a lot of better ways to spend your time, doesn't it? Makes you decide to turn your computer off and

 

It makes me wonder why the human mind seems to come up with theses big eyed short aliens over and over. could there be something in the human Psyche that causes us to imagine the same things independently?