113 réponses à ce sujet

[mybudgee]

Crop circles have been largely debunked

[Inquisitor Recon]

Crop circles have been largely debunked

If anybody has observed us I don't see why the hell they'd bother making some strange shapes with our cornfields unless it's some alien form of trolling.

[Gravisanimi]

The few examples of crop circles that are hard to explain is that some of the plants have been hit with radiation.

 

The issue with looking for other civilizations among the stars is that we assume they use light-based communication, when they could do something like minutely vibrating space-time as a form of FTL communication.

[Fast Jimmy]

If you analyze a situation and the only answer you have left is totally unlikely but nothing else fits then the totally unlikely answer is the one until something better comes along.

...or someone is yanking your chain.

[mybudgee]

People are the worst. I can't blame E.T.s for avoiding us...

[Thallia_CroGun]

Okay, i think that most of these theories and opinions are of "human" perspective and very short sighted. I mean, just try to look at us objectively; we are divided into nations who compete for resources, influence and any kind of imaginary profit trought warring, propaganda and corporations and are ready to exploit and kill each other in milions for it. Imagine if we got to another planet, how long do you think it would take for us to decide it pays off to exploit them? How long until we stick our flag(s) into their soil? How long until we start, for example, cutting access to their water, start bottling it and then selling it back to them? How long until we drain all of their resources because our homeworld is in desperate need for them? If i were a member of an alien species, i woud definitely make sure that we are safely quarantined where we are before we start hurting anyone else.
And besides, if those aliens were truly "advanced" they would have still recognised earth as "our" planet and would leave us to sort things out by ourselves. They would have not interfered because the only real change is the one that comes from inside, by choice, experience and not force. You know, unlike the way we try to change others and other nations' regimes, and always end up doing more damage than progress, even if the intentions were sincere to begin with. Which they are not. Any smart alien species would quicky decide that we are more trouble than worth.
Simply put, we are not yet worthy of contact with advanced species. If there are any. Just my 2 cents.

[Eurypterid]

If there are aliens out there, there's no guarantee they even know we're here. We've only be broadcasting on radio frequencies (the most likely way we'd be discovered) for a little over a hundred years. That means our wavefront is only a little over a hundred light years out. Anything beyond that has virtually no hope of even knowing we're here yet.

 

As for sapcefaring civilizations, accepting that nothing can travel through space faster than light (and let's not get into hypotheticals here - as of yet nothing has been shown to be able to break Einstein's barrier), any spacefaring civilization will be travelling extremely slowly in comparison to the size of our galaxy. The Milky Way is 100,000 light years in diameter. Any spacefaring species that may have evolved out there is likely to be tens of thousands of light years from us. So where is everyone? If they're out there, they're probably still a helluva long way off yet.

 

As for the article quoted in the OP, I find many parts of it interesting, but I think there are some things that may have been overlooked. I need to get around to reading it in full though.

[Giant ambush beetle]

What if many of those planets that harbor sentient life don't have the minerals required (or the mineral deposits are inaccessible) to build complex machines? Take humanity and imagine what would have happened if earth had very little iron ore, aluminum and bronze. You can have all the intelligence in the world, you can't go space traveling with spaceships made of rock and wood. Its like being stranded on an island. A pretty horrible fate. 

 

Or water worlds. Without any land, its hard to get started. 

[metatheurgist]

And how do you know that Aliens are not doing the same to us?

I thought the wink said it all.
 

If anybody has observed us I don't see why the hell they'd bother making some strange shapes with our cornfields unless it's some alien form of trolling.

Crop circles are alien kids tagging our planet.

Fermi Paradox may be a good or bad situation.

Bad - it's so hard to get off the homeworld and spread out that the majority of sapient races have nuked themselves, destroyed their environment and killed themselves or they're stuck unable to leave and have to live in stasis on their original world. Humans better learn to live together and recycle.

Good - intelligent aliens are everywhere and they already know about us, they're just waiting to make contact.

[FlyingSquirrel]

If anybody has observed us I don't see why the hell they'd bother making some strange shapes with our cornfields unless it's some alien form of trolling.

 

Maybe the Beavises and Buttheads of the alien civilizations are responsible for those. "I'm bored, let's go make some crop circles." "Yeah, this is gonna be cool, huh-huh-huh-huh."

[FlyingSquirrel]

Okay, i think that most of these theories and opinions are of "human" perspective and very short sighted. I mean, just try to look at us objectively; we are divided into nations who compete for resources, influence and any kind of imaginary profit trought warring, propaganda and corporations and are ready to exploit and kill each other in milions for it. Imagine if we got to another planet, how long do you think it would take for us to decide it pays off to exploit them? How long until we stick our flag(s) into their soil? How long until we start, for example, cutting access to their water, start bottling it and then selling it back to them? How long until we drain all of their resources because our homeworld is in desperate need for them? If i were a member of an alien species, i woud definitely make sure that we are safely quarantined where we are before we start hurting anyone else.
And besides, if those aliens were truly "advanced" they would have still recognised earth as "our" planet and would leave us to sort things out by ourselves. They would have not interfered because the only real change is the one that comes from inside, by choice, experience and not force. You know, unlike the way we try to change others and other nations' regimes, and always end up doing more damage than progress, even if the intentions were sincere to begin with. Which they are not. Any smart alien species would quicky decide that we are more trouble than worth.
Simply put, we are not yet worthy of contact with advanced species. If there are any. Just my 2 cents.

 

Well, that's sort of what I was suggesting - that if there *are* advanced civilizations out there, they may have a protocol for keeping intelligent but relatively fractious and non-spacefaring species such as ours isolated in our own solar systems, and anyone who tried to contact us would therefore be breaking the law. I guess that leaves open the question of what would have stopped them from coming to our solar system and establishing a foothold before humanity or other intelligent species, but maybe they'd have no particular need to do that and can monitor our system via remote probes anyway. A civilization that advanced would have to have considerable resources at their disposal, so they wouldn't necessarily need to colonize every single system just because they *could* theoretically do it.

 

If, on the other hand, the galaxy is essentially the wild west, with only a small scattering of spacefaring species and no real authorities other than homeworld governments, then I'd say the paradox might be resolved by the simple fact of the massive resource requirements needed for interstellar travel - it *can* be done, but it isn't done often, and long-term interstellar societies just haven't been attempted or failed in the early phases. As a result, the aliens simply don't know we're here or, if they do, contacting us isn't a priority for them. It's also conceivable that a small exploration mission might have reached our solar system in the distant past and either just moved on, stayed for a while and then left, or stayed and died out. I mentioned this earlier, but I'm not sure that the exploration we've done so far would necessarily have picked up, for example, a small, abandoned underground base on an outer planet moon.

[Beerfish]

...or someone is yanking your chain.

If someone claims to yank your chain in a forest with no one else around are they really yankin your chain?

[Fast Jimmy]

If someone claims to yank your chain in a forest with no one else around are they really yankin your chain?

I yank, therefore I am.

[Thallia_CroGun]

If someone claims to yank your chain in a forest with no one else around are they really yankin your chain?

 

 

I yank, therefore I am.

 

[mybudgee]

http://www.cracked.c...rom-future.html

[Reorte]

If there are aliens out there, there's no guarantee they even know we're here. We've only be broadcasting on radio frequencies (the most likely way we'd be discovered) for a little over a hundred years. That means our wavefront is only a little over a hundred light years out. Anything beyond that has virtually no hope of even knowing we're here yet.

Signs of civilisation aren't obvious, but signs of life in general may be (at least of some sort of life). The atmospheric composition of Earth could be detectable from a much greater distance. We're having the first stabs at doing that to other planets now, albeit great big large ones, but that technology will certainly advance. We almost certainly don't know enough about life and the universe in general to say that it must indicate life, and that other forms of life couldn't exist that would result in a different atmosphere, but we do know enough to say that it would mark the Earth as a good candidate for a living world.

As for sapcefaring civilizations, accepting that nothing can travel through space faster than light (and let's not get into hypotheticals here - as of yet nothing has been shown to be able to break Einstein's barrier), any spacefaring civilization will be travelling extremely slowly in comparison to the size of our galaxy. The Milky Way is 100,000 light years in diameter. Any spacefaring species that may have evolved out there is likely to be tens of thousands of light years from us. So where is everyone? If they're out there, they're probably still a helluva long way off yet.

If anyone is keen enough to bother trying the vast size of the galaxy isn't really that vast. On a human life timescale it would take forever but on a geological timescale the whole galaxy could be colonised pretty quickly by any advanced civilisation prepared to put in the effort.
 
If we found an inhabitable planet within a few tens of light years I'm pretty sure people would end up on it eventually, although that wouldn't be for a great many centuries. Interstellar probes almost certainly will be launched within the next few hundred years though (if we find any signs of anything near enough that looks like it might be worth the effort, at any rate).

[Fast Jimmy]

Reorte, on 26 Jun 2014 - 7:44 PM, said:

Signs of civilisation aren't obvious, but signs of life in general may be (at least of some sort of life). The atmospheric composition of Earth could be detectable from a much greater distance. We're having the first stabs at doing that to other planets now, albeit great big large ones, but that technology will certainly advance. We almost certainly don't know enough about life and the universe in general to say that it must indicate life, and that other forms of life couldn't exist that would result in a different atmosphere, but we do know enough to say that it would mark the Earth as a good candidate for a living world.

 

If anyone is keen enough to bother trying the vast size of the galaxy isn't really that vast. On a human life timescale it would take forever but on a geological timescale the whole galaxy could be colonised pretty quickly by any advanced civilisation prepared to put in the effort.

 

This is an interesting point. We can't fathom being a long-lived civilization, let alone a long-lived species. To us, a thousand years is an insane amount of time. After all, it's roughly 10% of our history as a society-based world. Yet a thousand years is a blink of an eye to the Earth, less than a blink of an eye to the Sun, and barely even a twitch of the eye compared to galaxy and universe. 

 

Our challenge if FTL travel is off the table is basically finding a way to travel long distances and being able to sustain life (through some type of simulated eco system space craft) or being able to store bodies in some type of suspended animation to make the trip hundreds or thousands of years. And, of course, finding a planet to go to. "Habitable" is a very wide term in the cosmos, and may require lots of additional life support or even terraforming for humans to survive.

 

If we found an inhabitable planet within a few tens of light years I'm pretty sure people would end up on it eventually, although that wouldn't be for a great many centuries. Interstellar probes almost certainly will be launched within the next few hundred years though (if we find any signs of anything near enough that looks like it might be worth the effort, at any rate).

 

The effort is truly the question at hand. We'd likely be talking about a planetary-wide effort here, spanning decades if not centuries worth of work. Think the pyramids, but with today's scale of manpower, technology and mechanical advancements. I don't think mankind has ever had a project that truly ushered all of its resources together in such a manner over such a long period of time. I honestly think we could accomplish anything given the amount of cooperation, shared resources and commitment of that magnitude, regardless of the project.

 

The real tragedy is that the only way that level of cooperation and diligence could happen is if we were faced with the undeniable dilemma that our planet and life on this planet was 100% doomed. 

[Eurypterid]

Signs of civilisation aren't obvious, but signs of life in general may be (at least of some sort of life). The atmospheric composition of Earth could be detectable from a much greater distance. We're having the first stabs at doing that to other planets now, albeit great big large ones, but that technology will certainly advance. We almost certainly don't know enough about life and the universe in general to say that it must indicate life, and that other forms of life couldn't exist that would result in a different atmosphere, but we do know enough to say that it would mark the Earth as a good candidate for a living world.

 

 

Oh, no question it would be far easier to detect a planet that could be hospitable to life than it would be to detect a civilization. That wasn't my point.

 

If anyone is keen enough to bother trying the vast size of the galaxy isn't really that vast. On a human life timescale it would take forever but on a geological timescale the whole galaxy could be colonised pretty quickly by any advanced civilisation prepared to put in the effort.
 
If we found an inhabitable planet within a few tens of light years I'm pretty sure people would end up on it eventually, although that wouldn't be for a great many centuries. Interstellar probes almost certainly will be launched within the next few hundred years though (if we find any signs of anything near enough that looks like it might be worth the effort, at any rate).

Considering the limitations imposed by the speed of light, the galaxy is still that vast. Of course, on a geological timescale, it could be colonized rather quickly, but there's the whole question of how long it takes life to arise and how long it takes intelligent life to appear. I read a couple of articles dealing with that some time ago. Can't recall by whom, and don't have a link, but I'm sure you can find it if you're interested in digging around a bit. Anyway, the gist of it is there's only been a short amount of time (geologically/cosmologically speaking) for intelligent life to have arisen (again we're talking life as we understand it) since conditions in the first part of the universe's existence weren't favorable. This translates into a lower probability that there are civilizations that are much older than ours, meaning they haven't had that long time stretch to populate the galaxy. So, again, where is everybody? If they're out there, they're likely not very close to us (yet).

 

Again, this is a simplification, but the principle is basically what I've outlined.

 

 

 

A physics teacher in New Mexico has a mathematic formula for FTL travel that doesn't violate the laws of physics. Sadly it relies on a Particle X(placeholder) that has yet to be discovered and may not exist in the first place. But hey if tachyons(or was it neutrinos I can't remember) are able to age in reverse, old to young who knows what's out there or what we could be capable of in two hundred years. I am not a Physics teacher nor a NASA scientist if I got something wrong please don't bash my head in lol.

Tachyons themselves are only hypothetical though.

[FlyingSquirrel]

The effort is truly the question at hand. We'd likely be talking about a planetary-wide effort here, spanning decades if not centuries worth of work. Think the pyramids, but with today's scale of manpower, technology and mechanical advancements. I don't think mankind has ever had a project that truly ushered all of its resources together in such a manner over such a long period of time. I honestly think we could accomplish anything given the amount of cooperation, shared resources and commitment of that magnitude, regardless of the project.

 

The real tragedy is that the only way that level of cooperation and diligence could happen is if we were faced with the undeniable dilemma that our planet and life on this planet was 100% doomed. 

 

I'd also tend to think that if we *did* manage to muster that level of cooperation, dedication, and resource allocation outside of a doomsday scenario, we might still decide that we're better off marshalling it towards solving other non-doomsday but nevertheless serious problems here on earth. As great as space exploration and colonization would be, I'd have a hard time justifying pouring too much into it when so many humans are still struggling with basic necessities.

[caradoc2000]

We are alone.

 

Hence, no Reapers   and no Asari

[Gravisanimi]

We are alone.

 

Hence, no Reapers   and no Asari

 

What's more amazing? That we aren't alone, or that we are?