Aliens and their rationale

[AKIRA]

I'm a firm believer in extra-terrestrial beings besides us out there in the universe. Not just microbes, but advanced aliens, like bugs and animals, even beings that are as advanced as we are.

Going beyond that, I also believe there are beings that are far more advanced than us. Could it be that the only reason we're not in contact with them is because they choose not to deal with us? Is it the same logic/reasoning as to why we don't go out of our way to explain ourselves to an ant? Or a tree?

Could it be that they're so far advanced from us that they have absolutely NO reason to for them to prove that they exist to us?

I'm leaning towards this theory after giving it some thought. I mean, we see ants as semi-intelligent and we can study them but they aren't aware that they are being studied. You don't see people trying to "communicate" with ants and showing off a cell-phone to an ant. Why? Because you know they're so far below us that they would never even come close to becoming aware of what we are and what technology is.


Thoughts on this matter?

 

[Dog--]

Maybe we are just a petri dish to aliens.. An experiment.

 

[Higlac]

Prime Directive.

 

[xcellerate]

maybe they're having trouble finding us, you know, in all that ... space.

 

[flamingdts]

I believe there are Aliens out there too, if you consider the ridiculous size of the universe, I'm sure there is at least another sentient species out there. The problem is, like us, they have no discovered long distance space travel.

Oh well, I doubt we will ever see Aliens. Earth will be dead by the time we even progress in long distance space travel.

 

[Sheepo]

maybe they're having trouble finding us, you know, in all that ... space.

Spoken like an infiltrator!

 

[staticprimer]

They probably realize that making contact with humans is like a welcome invitation to an ICBM up their ass.

 

[Warped]

it would be cool if we were the most evolved in our local group if not galaxy. it sucks being murdered by weapons of mass destruction

i for one believe there are smarter beings out there, but its probably best not to even notice them. the more we find out about them the worse life will become. plus right now we aren't even ready for world peace, could you imagine what life would be like if we went to war in space??

 

[15357]

Because they know that the combined might of the nations of Man will be more than enough to annihilate the Alien who seeks to disturb our peace. In the end, however, we'll be the ones visiting. We'll be the ones that will turn their homeworlds into nothing but radioactive ash. They shall fear the millions and millions of human beings, a tidal wave, a force of nature that sweeps across the galaxy in our rightful quest of total domination of this universe. They shall call us the Swarm, a Plague of Locusts. They shall fear us, because they realize there is nothing that they can do to stop us.

And at last, there will be no Alien, but only Man and his creations.

 

[Warped]

if no aliens exist, we should make them, leave them somewhere and come back every 50,000 years to harvest them

 

[AJ Rimmer]

I'm leaning towards this theory after giving it some thought. I mean, we see ants as semi-intelligent and we can study them but they aren't aware that they are being studied. You don't see people trying to "communicate" with ants and showing off a cell-phone to an ant. Why? Because you know they're so far below us that they would never even come close to becoming aware of what we are and what technology is.

What's this? Ah, an ant. I have just picked it up on the tip of my glove. If I put it down again and it asks another ant, "What was that?", how would it explain? There are things in the universe billions of years older than either of our races. They are vast, timeless. And if they are aware of us at all, it is as little more than ants…and we have as much chance of communicating with them as an ant has with us. We know. We've tried. And we've learned we can either stay out from underfoot, or be stepped on.

But, maybe they don't know how to communicate with us? Maybe the idea of a verbal language based on sequences of noises according to grammatical rules is so bizarre to them they've sent us hundreds of message that sound like little more than cosmic background noise to us. Maybe they don't use radio but have tried to communicate via infrared signals. Maybe they can't fathom the notion that they would need to send signals to Earth's continents and not our oceans? Or, perhaps, they know for a scientific fact that no life could be sustained on a planet with this little protection against the sun. Or that its composition is off, and will never be able to sustain silicon-based lifeforms.

Or, a tad more realistically- maybe the last message they sent off arrived in 1659 and went un-answered. And maybe a second signal is coming, crawling its way here at the speed of light...

 

[DEATH eVADER]

How about the WOW signal that hasn't been heard again. Could of been a distress signal. Some civilization wipe of the face of a planet

 

[The_Freeman]

How about the WOW signal that hasn't been heard again. Could of been a distress signal. Some civilization wipe of the face of a planet

The trouble is that the signal came from a star group that is over 220 lightyears away.So even if the Voager 2 probe started to head its way and never run out of battery it would take over 1 million years. The vastness of space is what stops us from discovering alien life

 

[KiplingsCat]

I'm doing a work placement next month which involves finding black holes or something. I'll keep an eye out for Lrrr.

 

[Sulkdodds]

Up until a certain point in your post I was excited that it might say something like

I'm doing a work placement next month with a race of sentient radio signals astrobiologists call 'cones', translating messages and making wet fart noises into a microphone for them to feed on

 

[Bad^Hat]

I know I'm going to get accused of being a killjoy for this, but I struggle to understand the thinking behind choosing to 'believe' in aliens. It seems like kind of fruitless endeavor...

Of course you're free to think whatever the hell you want, but I can't help notice that most of the 'arguments' for this seem to hinge on the same basic thing. "The universe is so big it's impossible for the human mind to fathom! If you consider this, it isn't difficult to fathom that alien life could exist!"

 

[MultiVaC]

Of course you're free to think whatever the hell you want, but I can't help notice that most of the 'arguments' for this seem to hinge on the same basic thing. "The universe is so big it's impossible for the human mind to fathom! If you consider this, it isn't difficult to fathom that alien life could exist!"

I think the argument is that the observable universe is so huge that life has almost certainly formed elsewhere. We know that life is possible because we exist, and the number of stars and planets that we know to exist is so vast that even what we consider the most improbable things are very likely to happen sometime, somewhere. The observable universe is gigantic, and there is almost certainly much, much more outside the boundaries of what we will ever be able to see due to the fact that the light from that stuff has yet to reach us. We don't fully understand how life comes to exist, so we can't really say for certain how frequently it should occur. But it's hard to argue that it's so improbable as to only happen once when faced with the size of the universe.

 

[Bad^Hat]

Still, saying something is probable is a bit different to believing in it (hey, beats believing something improbable I guess). Anyway, reading that back I was totally being a killjoy so I'll just leave it.

NEW THEORY aliens haven't made contact with us because they're afraid it will further delay Episode 3.

 

[Darkside55]

Aliens are aware of us and have the means to make contact, but will not do so until Will Smith dies.

 

[AKIRA]

But, maybe they don't know how to communicate with us? Maybe the idea of a verbal language based on sequences of noises according to grammatical rules is so bizarre to them they've sent us hundreds of message that sound like little more than cosmic background noise to us. Maybe they don't use radio but have tried to communicate via infrared signals. Maybe they can't fathom the notion that they would need to send signals to Earth's continents and not our oceans? Or, perhaps, they know for a scientific fact that no life could be sustained on a planet with this little protection against the sun. Or that its composition is off, and will never be able to sustain silicon-based lifeforms.

Or, a tad more realistically- maybe the last message they sent off arrived in 1659 and went un-answered. And maybe a second signal is coming, crawling its way here at the speed of light...

Good point. Maybe our current way of searching for aliens are about as effective as someone trying to get the attention of somebody on pluto with a smoke signal.

Thinking of these scenario's makes me mildly depressed since we'll probably never come into contact with aliens unless more advanced one's come to us.

But on the other hand, you never know what will happen even 3 seconds from now so:cheers:

 

[Tyguy]

it would be cool if we were the most evolved in our local group if not galaxy.

I think that would be depressing! I'd rather be the ants in this scenario. I refuse to accept the notion that a species who can't go a single day without killing each other is the upper tier of evolution.

i for one believe there are smarter beings out there, but its probably best not to even notice them. the more we find out about them the worse life will become. plus right now we aren't even ready for world peace, could you imagine what life would be like if we went to war in space??

I would easily risk the annihilation of our species to make contact. No question. It would be an honor.

 

[13LACKBISHOP]

I know I'm going to get accused of being a killjoy for this, but I struggle to understand the thinking behind choosing to 'believe' in aliens. It seems like kind of fruitless endeavor...

Of course you're free to think whatever the hell you want, but I can't help notice that most of the 'arguments' for this seem to hinge on the same basic thing. "The universe is so big it's impossible for the human mind to fathom! If you consider this, it isn't difficult to fathom that alien life could exist!"

Because we know it's possible. I don't believe in them to satisfy a fantasy but because there are simply so many planets that it is almost inevitable that a planet exists, maybe like ours, that is capable of harboring life of some kind simply by chance just given how many of them there actually are. I really do not know however if it is even possible to travel across the universe to meet each other. Maybe. Maybe not. Who knows?

I am not even sure if it is a good idea. There is no way of knowing what there intentions are. Even if good it could still work out bad. Is it really worth it? It is probably a fruitless endeavor given it is unlikely that they would come here (assuming that it is possible) in our lifetime but I acknowledge that somewhere, however primitive there is life.

Also here a philosophy by H.P Lovecraft that some of you may find depressing.

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

Something to consider.

but I can't help notice that most of the 'arguments' for this seem to hinge on the same basic thing. "The universe is so big it's impossible for the human mind to fathom!

I prefer to think of it as "there are so many planets our there that there is bound to be one like ours". There are more planets than grains of sand on a beach. I would be suprised if there was no life our there somewhere.

 

[Kaptain H]

It seems plausible that there is alien life in the universe. What I always found retarded, though, are UFO sightings. Why would an advanced race, which obviously wants to keep its existence on Earth unknown to us, cover its stealth aircraft with giant blinking lights?

 

[Neutrino]

I think what gets overlooked a lot in the debate on aliens is the sheer size and timescale of the universe. First, even if there were a million sentient species we could all very well be separated by millions of light years or perhaps not even in the same galaxies at all. And perhaps even more important what really are the chances that two species would meet in a similar evolutionary and technological time frame as to even make communication possible or desirable? I mean, we've had the ability to communicate with the electromagnetic spectrum for around a hundred years. That's less than an eye blink in a universe billions of years old. Statistically, finding two species that were even within 5 thousand years of each other in development is vanishingly small. Even if another intelligent race lived in the next solar system over from us it's entirely possible that we'll miss them because they developed, evolved, and went extinct a billion years before we stood upright.

Not to say that it's not entirely possible that we will one day make contact with another race. We don't know enough to really say one way or the other. But that contact is hardly likely to be anything like what hollywood has imagined. What are we going to say to each other if we're separated by ten thousand years or so? And that's if we're extremely lucky.

Another difficulty in finding another species is the method of communication. For example, we currently use radio waves to send and receive information. But who's to say another race would do that? Look at some of the research going on right now into communication systems using quantum entanglement. If some other species perfected that method and used it exclusively there wouldn't even be a way to find their signals (since they aren't even broadcast in the classical sense) or for them to read our primitive radio waves. And who know what other methods are possible?

 

[Krynn72]

What if aliens are wind and we just don't realize?

 

[Bad^Hat]

Because then they wouldn't technically be aliens.

 

[ktimekiller]

Even if there were aliens out in space, and had made contact, I don't think the world's governments would think of it as a grand ole idea to tell everyone about it.

If it happened, we wouldn't know anyways. If it didn't happen, we still wouldn't know.

Why bother thinking about it