# Aliens? Fact or Fiction?



## PERCON

I want to start off one of the most random threads I've been a part of.
Aliens, I know what you're thinking, this guy's lost it.
Well personally I don't think aliens could find our lil' planet Earth, even if they did they'd have to travel for one heck of a long time to get here.

Bring your thoughts to the table people...


One weirdo here -->PERCON


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## Tsujigiri

All my neighbours are aliens....it's like central Europe here


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## Amber

Definitly fact...  seeing some of my classmates...


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## Michael

Universe is too big.  Must be someone out there.  Yes, I think that any significantly advanced life can find us.  If they have long lifespans, some of the the distance becomes negligible.  If they do not, they might have ships that can support several or more generations of their descendents.  If they have FTL, the chances that they'll find us are even higher.

I think we can, right now, travel to the nearest solar system and back, if anyone is willing to spend an entire lifetime doing it.  At the very least, we should be zipping back and forth between here and Pluto with our current tech.  On another thread, I quoted Carl Sagan's Cosmos about the U.S. plans to build a ship with a nuclear drive.  They scrapped the project because of the treaty that bans nuclear explosions in space.

If we can do it, somewhere some alien species might be doing it right now.


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## lucifer_principle

There have been reports of sightings in several parts of the world but all yet to be verified. The people with these sightings are never properly evaluated and this theory usually just fades away at the end of the day. If the universe looks anything like sci-fi movies then there is bound to be someone or something lurking around; creepy but arguably true. Isn't God supposed to be some sort of alien; at least scientifically he is not part of this socio-economic system. Frankly life in outer space will be beautiful just like the one we have here and I really hope we do have aliens because I certainly don't want to be the only ones here; now that’s creepy


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## Maryjane

*Yes it would be pretty arogent of us to think that this one tiny little dust mote in the universe is the only one containing inteligent life and yes how lonely and frightening that thought is. Alone on a tiny dust mot floating  in intfinity, in how many other dimentions, how many other parallel universes, how many alternate realities or quantum realeties? Infinity is full yet not. Is mass truly solid mater? Wether it be from the most massive to the subatomic where once more the most massive to subatomic repetitively within the realm of each subatomic realetywithin yet another the subatomic into infinitly. What is a solid particle for not even the nucleii of an atom, that is known as the dencest substance is not realy solid but it in itself is made up of separate particles that can fluctuate  in and out of our realety into other dimentions. Energy impulses that  apear to have more the charactweristics of a combination of collective thoughts like exponencialy projected holograms. Be back with an interesting link. Love*

*Maryjane*


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## Maryjane

THE UNIVERSE AS A HOLOGRAM... DOES OBJECTIVE REALITY EXIST... 
OR IS THE UNIVERSE A PHANTASM? 

In 1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. You did not hear about it on the evening news. In fact, unless you are in the habit of reading scientific journals you probably have never even heard Aspect's name, though there are some who believe his discovery may change the face of science. Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart. 
Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein's long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. Since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try to come up with elaborate ways to explain away Aspect's findings. But it has inspired others to offer even more radical explanations. 
University of London physicist David Bohm, for example, believes Aspect's findings imply that objective reality does not exist, that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram. 
To understand why Bohm makes this startling assertion, one must first understand a little about holograms. A hologram is a three- dimensional photograph made with the aid of a laser. 
To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed in the light of a laser beam. Then a second laser beam is bounced off the reflected light of the first and the resulting interference pattern (the area where the two laser beams commingle) is captured on film. 
When the film is developed, it looks like a meaningless swirl of light and dark lines. But as soon as the developed film is illuminated by another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original object appears. The three-dimensionality of such images is not the only remarkable characteristic of holograms. If a hologram of a rose is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of the rose. 
Indeed, even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of film will always be found to contain a smaller but intact version of the original image. Unlike normal photographs, every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole. 
The "whole in every part" nature of a hologram provides us with an entirely new way of understanding organization and order. For most of its history, Western science has labored under the bias that the best way to understand a physical phenomenon, whether a frog or an atom, is to dissect it and study its respective parts. 
A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lend themselves to this approach. If we try to take apart something constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made; we will only get smaller wholes. 
This insight suggested to Bohm another way of understanding Aspect's discovery. Bohm believes the reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because their separateness is an illusion. He argues that at some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something. To enable people to better visualize what he means, Bohm offers the following illustration. 
Imagine an aquarium containing a fish. Imagine also that you are unable to see the aquarium directly and your knowledge about it and what it contains comes from two television cameras, one directed at the aquarium's front and the other directed at its side. 
As you stare at the two television monitors, you might assume that the fish on each of the screens are separate entities. After all, because the cameras are set at different angles, each of the images will be slightly different. But as you continue to watch the two fish, you will eventually become aware that there is a certain relationship between them. 
When one turns, the other also makes a slightly different but corresponding turn; when one faces the front, the other always faces toward the side. If you remain unaware of the full scope of the situation, you might even conclude that the fish must be instantaneously communicating with one another, but this is clearly not the case. 
This, says Bohm, is precisely what is going on between the subatomic particles in Aspect's experiment. 
According to Bohm, the apparent faster-than-light connection between subatomic particles is really telling us that there is a deeper level of reality we are not privy to, a more complex dimension beyond our own that is analogous to the aquarium. And, he adds, we view objects such as subatomic particles as separate from one another because we are seeing only a portion of their reality. 
Such particles are not separate "parts", but facets of a deeper and more underlying unity that is ultimately as holographic and indivisible as the previously mentioned rose. And since everything in physical reality is comprised of these "eidolons", the universe is itself a projection, a hologram. In addition to its phantomlike nature, such a universe would possess other rather startling features. If the apparent separateness of subatomic particles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of reality all things in the universe are infinitely interconnected. 
The electrons in a carbon atom in the human brain are connected to the subatomic particles that comprise every salmon that swims, every heart that beats, and every star that shimmers in the sky. 
Everything interpenetrates everything, and although human nature may seek to categorize and pigeonhole and subdivide, the various phenomena of the universe, all apportionments are of necessity artificial and all of nature is ultimately a seamless web. 
In a holographic universe, even time and space could no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else, time and three-dimensional space, like the images of the fish on the TV monitors, would also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order. 
At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. This suggests that given the proper tools it might even be possible to someday reach into the superholographic level of reality and pluck out scenes from the long-forgotten past. 
What else the superhologram contains is an open-ended question. Allowing, for the sake of argument, that the superhologram is the matrix that has given birth to everything in our universe, at the very least it contains every subatomic particle that has been or will be-- every configuration of matter and energy that is possible, from snowflakes to quasars, from blue whales to gamma rays. It must be seen as a sort of cosmic storehouse of "All That Is." 
Although Bohm concedes that we have no way of knowing what else might lie hidden in the superhologram, he does venture to say that we have no reason to assume it does not contain more. Or as he puts it, perhaps the superholographic level of reality is a "mere stage" beyond which lies "an infinity of further development". 
Bohm is not the only researcher who has found evidence that the universe is a hologram. Working independently in the field of brain research, Stanford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram has also become persuaded of the holographic nature of reality. 
Pribram was drawn to the holographic model by the puzzle of how and where memories are stored in the brain. For decades numerous studies have shown that rather than being confined to a specific location, memories are dispersed throughout the brain. 
In a series of landmark experiments in the 1920s, brain scientist Karl Lashley found that no matter what portion of a rat's brain he removed he was unable to eradicate its memory of how to perform complex tasks it had learned prior to surgery. The only problem was that no one was able to come up with a mechanism that might explain this curious "whole in every part" nature of memory storage. 
Then in the 1960s Pribram encountered the concept of holography and realized he had found the explanation brain scientists had been looking for. Pribram believes memories are encoded not in neurons, or small groupings of neurons, but in patterns of nerve impulses that crisscross the entire brain in the same way that patterns of laser light interference crisscross the entire area of a piece of film containing a holographic image. In other words, Pribram believes the brain is itself a hologram. 
Pribram's theory also explains how the human brain can store so many memories in so little space. It has been estimated that the human brain has the capacity to memorize something on the order of 10 billion bits of information during the average human lifetime (or roughly the same amount of information contained in five sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica). Similarly, it has been discovered that in addition to their other capabilities, holograms possess an astounding capacity for information storagesimply by changing the angle at which the two lasers strike a piece of photographic film, it is possible to record many different images on the same surface. It has been demonstrated that one cubic centimeter of film can hold as many as 10 billion bits of information. 
Our uncanny ability to quickly retrieve whatever information we need from the enormous store of our memories becomes more understandable if the brain functions according to holographic principles. If a friend asks you to tell him what comes to mind when he says the word "zebra", you do not have to clumsily sort back through some gigantic and cerebral alphabetic file to arrive at an answer. Instead, associations like "striped", "horselike", and "animal native to Africa" all pop into your head instantly. 
Indeed, one of the most amazing things about the human thinking process is that every piece of information seems instantly cross- correlated with every other piece of information; another feature intrinsic to the hologram. Because every portion of a hologram is infinitely interconnected with ever other portion, it is perhaps nature's supreme example of a cross-correlated system. 
The storage of memory is not the only neurophysiological puzzle that becomes more tractable in light of Pribram's holographic model of the brain. Another is how the brain is able to translate the avalanche of frequencies it receives via the senses (light frequencies, sound frequencies, and so on) into the concrete world of our perceptions. 
Encoding and decoding frequencies is precisely what a hologram does best. Just as a hologram functions as a sort of lens, a translating device able to convert an apparently meaningless blur of frequencies into a coherent image, Pribram believes the brain also comprises a lens and uses holographic principles to mathematically convert the frequencies it receives through he senses into the inner world of our perceptions. 
An impressive body of evidence suggests that the brain uses holographic principles to perform its operations. Pribram's theory, in fact, has gained increasing support among neurophysiologists. 
Argentinian-Italian researcher Hugo Zucarelli recently extended the holographic model into the world of acoustic phenomena. Puzzled by the fact that humans can locate the source of sounds without moving their heads, even if they only possess hearing in one ear, Zucarelli discovered that holographic principles can explain this ability. 
Zucarelli has also developed the technology of holophonic sound, a recording technique able to reproduce acoustic situations with an almost uncanny realism. 
Pribram's belief that our brains mathematically construct "hard" reality by relying on input from a frequency domain has also received a good deal of experimental support. 
It has been found that each of our senses is sensitive to a much broader range of frequencies than was previously suspected. 
Researchers have discovered, for instance, that our visual systems are sensitive to sound frequencies, that our sense of smell is in part dependent on what are now called "osmic frequencies", and that even the cells in our bodies are sensitive to a broad range of frequencies. Such findings suggest that it is only in the holographic domain of consciousness that such frequencies are sorted out and divided up into conventional perceptions. But the most mind-boggling aspect of Pribram's holographic model of the brain is what happens when it is put together with Bohm's theory. For if the concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is "there" is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram and only selects some of the frequencies out of this blur and mathematically transforms them into sensory perceptions, what becomes of objective reality? 
*Maryjane*
*"Continued"*


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## Maryjane

Put quite simply, it ceases to exist. As the religions of the East have long upheld, the material world is Maya, an illusion, and although we may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this too is an illusion. 
We are really "receivers" floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the superhologram. This striking new picture of reality, the synthesis of Bohm and Pribram's views, has come to be called the holographic paradigm, and although many scientists have greeted it with skepticism, it has galvanized others. A small but growing group of researchers believe it may be the most accurate model of reality science has arrived at thus far. More than that, some believe it may solve some mysteries that have never before been explainable by science and even establish the paranormal as a part of nature. Numerous researchers, including Bohm and Pribram, have noted that many para-psychological phenomena become much more understandable in terms of the holographic paradigm. 
In a universe in which individual brains are actually indivisible portions of the greater hologram and everything is infinitely interconnected, telepathy may merely be the accessing of the holographic level. 
It is obviously much easier to understand how information can travel from the mind of individual-- to that of individual-- at a far distance point and helps to understand a number of unsolved puzzles in psychology. In particular, Grof feels the holographic paradigm offers a model for understanding many of the baffling phenomena experienced by individuals during altered states of consciousness. 
In the 1950s, while conducting research into the beliefs of LSD as a psychotherapeutic tool, Grof had one female patient who suddenly became convinced she had assumed the identity of a female of a species of prehistoric reptile. During the course of her hallucination, she not only gave a richly detailed description of what it felt like to be encapsuled in such a form, but noted that the portion of the male of the species’ anatomy was a patch of colored scales on the side of its head. 
What was startling to Grof was that although the woman had no prior knowledge about such things, a conversation with a zoologist later confirmed that in certain species of reptiles colored areas on the head do indeed play an important role as triggers of sexual arousal. 
The woman's experience was not unique. During the course of his research, Grof encountered examples of patients regressing and identifying with virtually every species on the evolutionary tree (research findings which helped influence the man-into-ape scene in the movie Altered States). Moreover, he found that such experiences frequently contained obscure zoological details, which turned out to be accurate. 
Regressions into the animal kingdom were not the only puzzling psychological phenomena Grof encountered. He also had patients who appeared to tap into some sort of collective or racial unconscious. Individuals with little or no education suddenly gave detailed descriptions of Zoroastrian funerary practices and scenes from Hindu mythology. In other categories of experience, individuals gave persuasive accounts of out-of-body journeys, o= f precognitive glimpses of the future, of regressions into apparent past-life incarnations. 
In later research, Grof found the same range of phenomena manifested in therapy sessions, which did not involve the use of drugs. Because the common element in such experiences appeared to be the transcending of an individual's consciousness beyond the usual boundaries of ego and/or limitations of space and time, Grof called such manifestations "transpersonal experiences", and in the late '60s he helped found a branch of psychology called "transpersonal psychology" devoted entirely to their study. 
Although Grof's newly founded Association of Transpersonal Psychology garnered a rapidly growing group of like-minded professionals and has become a respected branch of psychology, for years neither Grof nor any of his colleagues were able to offer a mechanism for explaining the bizarre psychological phenomena they were witnessing. But that has changed with the advent of the holographic paradigm. 
As Grof recently noted, if the mind is actually part of a continuum, a labyrinth that is connected not only to every other mind that exists or has existed, but to every atom, organism, and region in the vastness of space and time itself, the fact that it is able to occasionally make forays into the labyrinth and have transpersonal experiences no longer seems so strange. 
The holographic paradigm also has implications for so-called hard sciences like biology. Keith Floyd, a psychologist at Virginia Intermont College, has pointed out that if the concreteness of reality is but a holographic illusion, it would no longer be true to say the brain produces consciousness. Rather, it is consciousness that creates the appearance of the brain as well as the body and everything else around us we interpret as physical. 
Such a turnabout in the way we view biological structures has caused researchers to point out that medicine and our understanding of the healing process could also be transformed by the holographic paradigm. If the apparent physical structure of the body is but a holographic projection of consciousness, it becomes clear that each of us is much more responsible for our health than current medical wisdom allows. What we now view as miraculous remissions of disease may actually be due to changes in consciousness, which in turn effect changes in the hologram of the body. Similarly, controversial new healing techniques such as visualization may work so well because in the holographic domain of thought images are ultimately as real as "reality". 
Even visions and experiences involving "non-ordinary" reality become explainable under the holographic paradigm. In his book "Gifts of Unknown Things," biologist Lyall Watson describes his encounter with an Indonesian shaman woman who, by performing a ritual dance, was able to make an entire grove of trees instantly vanish into thin air. Watson relates that as he an= d another astonished onlooker continued to watch the woman, she caused the trees to reappear, then "click" off again and on again several times in succession. 
Although current scientific understanding is incapable of explaining such events, experiences like this become more tenable if "hard" reality is only a holographic projection. 
Perhaps we agree on what is "there" or "not there" because what we call consensus reality is formulated and ratified at the level of the human unconscious at which all minds are infinitely interconnected. If this is true, it is the most profound implication of the holographic paradigm of all, for it means that experiences such as Watson's are not commonplace only because we have not programmed our minds with the beliefs that would make them so. In a holographic universe there are no limits to the extent to which we can alter the fabric of reality. 
What we perceive as reality is only a canvas waiting for us to draw upon it any picture we want. Anything is possible, from bending spoons with the power of the mind to the phantasmagoric events experienced by Castaneda during his encounters with the Yaqui brujo don Juan, for magic is our birthright, no more or less miraculous than our ability to compute the reality we want when we are in our dreams. 
Indeed, even our most fundamental notions about reality become suspect, for in a holographic universe, as Pribram has pointed out, even random events would have to be seen as based on holographic principles and therefore determined. Synchronicities or meaningful coincidences suddenly makes sense, and everything in reality would have to be seen as a metaphor, for even the most haphazard events would express some underlying symmetry. Whether Bohm and Pribram's holographic paradigm becomes accepted in science or dies an ignoble death remains to be seen, but it is safe to say that it has already had an influence on the thinking of many scientists. And even if it is found that the holographic model does not provide the best explanation for the instantaneous communications that seem to be passing back and forth between subatomic particles, at the very least, as noted by Basil Hiley, a physicist at Birbeck College in London, Aspect's findings "indicate that we must be prepared to consider radically new views of reality". 

This article with additional hyperlinks can be found at http://twm.co.nz/hologram.html *Also take a look at this link and I recomend you see the moovie http://www.whatthebleep.com/*


*Then come back and tell me if this is the only dust mot in the universe that harbors inteligent life*

*Love Maryjane*


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## Maryjane

*I also recomend  "Indigo, the movie" and see if there are not any corelations with these three subjects. *
*Love*

*Maryjane*


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## lucifer_principle

This is not particularly new. Quantum mechs have stated that there is no reality for years, aspects of this are Copahagen interpretation of Heisenbergs uncertainty principle and the atom-wave duality. According to QM causality is not universaly true and thus cause and effect are not fundamental laws of nature. Nevertheless QM is a crazy subject, I try to stay away from it as much as I can myself.


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## PERCON

Me again, the loony one.  

I have reason to believe that we are very poor receivers. We can only see a very small portion of light, this being our visible light, of course stars out there in the universe exist which we cannot see because they are sending out light with big wavelengths which aren't in our visible range. Therefore, (Takes a deep breath), if there are stars we cannot see, sounds we cannot hear and very important things we can't understand then we aren't exactly the best beings to look for alien life. I'd leave the alien thing as a very promising reality for those living in the next century, not today. 

The alien sightings are very intriguing, I still believe they are all wrong, the term alien 'sightings' to me is completely wrong. Aliens will most likely 'observe' not interact, they will be one of two things, either scientists or rebels, scientists would build the spaceships and have the internal instinct to look for answers and other life, rebels would steal the spaceship to escape from something on the planet blahdy blah... 

In my opinion if you were captured by aliens you will NOT survive, scientists are usually scared of what they don't understand or can't compare to something else so the aliens WOULD disect you and see how humans work. Of course the aliens may not even go that far and may just observe from a distance and marvel at how self-centered human beings are, each one thinking that in their lifetime something amazing will happen even though there are billions of years in which life could have existed and could possibly find this planet.

Of course we might all be so self centered that we've completely missed the point. Earth may not be the first place that Humanity has existed on, what if life was sent on a meteor that crashed 'coincidently' into Earth, both killing off the dinosaurs and giving life to many primate like creatures, humanity being one of them. Aliens may have already travelled to Earth. They may never travel back here again, and for that reason alone I say "Let's not wait for aliens to find us, let's go find the aliens ourselves"

The weird one is now leaving again ("Phew" says everyone reading)...

_PERCON_


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## Wanderer

I think that someone/something is there. As someone already said the Universe is too big.


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## LadyFel

And as someone else also said, it would be totally arrogant to think we're alone in the universe...and that we're the best it could dredge up...Sorry, fellow humans, but I have a pretty low opinion of our race


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## PERCON

I agree with both of you. The universe IS too big for there to be just us, alone as the only intelligent beings (I say 'intelligent' with some doubts there). Yet, the lifespan of the universe is so big that the possibility of aliens existing at the same time we do is very unlikely. I'd love it to be true but I just can't see it happening. I could be wrong. 
Hey, we could all be wrong, we may all be living in someone's garage on a model of the universe with us, like ants, living on a blue bouncy ball with green moss growing on it. But that's also very unlikely isn't it  


_PERCON - "SAVE THE TREES"_


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## Maryjane

*Ya I like the theory on diferent light frequencies, also think about energy at diferent densities. **I think everyone has hit on some of the truth and ya if they were malevolent beings and found this world and had any interest in it at all I think they would have wiped us out long ago. As to how long they have been here if they are indeed here watching and studying from a distance they may have been here for a very long time. The further out one goes towards the outermost part of the universe the older the stars are, so anyone of those older stars may have harbored inteligent life that could be billions of years older and more advanced then us and traveling interdimentionally in energy form they could have reached this planet maybe even before it had any life on it, at the time when maybe Mars was more favorable for life. Maybe just maybe, using a bit of imagination, these beings had a hand in creating life on earth from manipulating the DNA in existing simple life forms already existing on Mars and splicing the DNA of this life form with samples of their own. Another question is, what sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom? I mean our internal oragans are similar and all have the same functions then why did our brains evolve diferently then the rest of the animal kingdom? What if those beings, I chose to name, "the watchers were still here" observing and watching over their little experiment.    Love*

*Maryjane*


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## Maryjane

PERCON said:
			
		

> Me again, the loony one.
> 
> I have reason to believe that we are very poor receivers. We can only see a very small portion of light, this being our visible light, of course stars out there in the universe exist which we cannot see because they are sending out light with big wavelengths which aren't in our visible range. Therefore, (Takes a deep breath), if there are stars we cannot see, sounds we cannot hear and very important things we can't understand then we aren't exactly the best beings to look for alien life. I'd leave the alien thing as a very promising reality for those living in the next century, not today.
> 
> The alien sightings are very intriguing, I still believe they are all wrong, the term alien 'sightings' to me is completely wrong. Aliens will most likely 'observe' not interact, they will be one of two things, either scientists or rebels, scientists would build the spaceships and have the internal instinct to look for answers and other life, rebels would steal the spaceship to escape from something on the planet blahdy blah...
> 
> In my opinion if you were captured by aliens you will NOT survive, scientists are usually scared of what they don't understand or can't compare to something else so the aliens WOULD disect you and see how humans work. Of course the aliens may not even go that far and may just observe from a distance and marvel at how self-centered human beings are, each one thinking that in their lifetime something amazing will happen even though there are billions of years in which life could have existed and could possibly find this planet.
> 
> Of course we might all be so self centered that we've completely missed the point. Earth may not be the first place that Humanity has existed on, what if life was sent on a meteor that crashed 'coincidently' into Earth, both killing off the dinosaurs and giving life to many primate like creatures, humanity being one of them. Aliens may have already travelled to Earth. They may never travel back here again, and for that reason alone I say "Let's not wait for aliens to find us, let's go find the aliens ourselves"
> 
> The weird one is now leaving again ("Phew" says everyone reading)...
> 
> _PERCON_


 
Hi, this is Paula, a sometime contributor, riding in on Maryjane's coattails.

Looney?  Not hardly.

The visible spectrum of light is indeed narrow, as is the "Earth-centered" mind.

There are telescopes in orbit that can see infrared and ultraviolet and what they are seeing is phenomenal, everything from dying stars to stars being born of dust and gas and a star that appears to be going in a straight line, instead of a discernable orbit, heading out of the Milky Way.  I've seen the photos on the NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems websites and in the New York Times.

What wonders we see when we open our eyes, and our minds.

Some years ago the U.S. put a satellite into a wide orbit to take it out of the solar system in the hope that other life will find it and contact us.

Aside from the usual electronics it has a gold plate on its side with words, mathematical expressions, and engravings of a human male and a female, anatomically approximate.

So far no other life has taken the bait.

As for quantam mechanics, I know that they explain huge thngs without any certainty.

Thanks for writing.  Your looney like a fox.

Paula


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## PERCON

*



			Another question is, what sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom? I mean our internal oragans are similar and all have the same functions then why did our brains evolve diferently then the rest of the animal kingdom? What if those beings, I chose to name, "the watchers were still here" observing and watching over their little experiment.
		
Click to expand...


I agree completely, the universe is so vast and from what I've already seen it is also very bizarre. There are planets which orbit their stars so quickly that the star moves aswell, the most recently located was a solar system made up of one star and a planet very much like jupiter in which the planet completed the orbit in a week, pulling the star around. If the universe can be so different from what we experience on Earth then life could even be here on our planet, like you said, watching over their experiment. Since creating life and having that power of creation is something all species look for, maybe the watchers have that power. 

Now on to why we have specially developed brains. As we have evolved we have needed to learn different things, like how rocks can be turned into good instruments for hunting, how guns are more powerful than swords, how to create an atomic bomb, or the most recent understanding of how to clone stem cells. Our brains have developed because they needed to. We wouldn't be where we are today if they hadn't. 

I leave you with one point said somewhere by someone I can't quite remember in someplace I know:

"Evolution isn't coincidental, for if we hadn't evolved we wouldn't exist, if we had evolved differently we may not be human, but we would still have evolved and therefore neither life nor evolution are coincidental, they are expected."

PERCON - "Now where did I put that nuclear device? Hmmmm...."*


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## Cricket

PERCON said:
			
		

> I want to start off one of the most random threads I've been a part of.
> Aliens, I know what you're thinking, this guy's lost it.
> Well personally I don't think aliens could find our lil' planet Earth, even if they did they'd have to travel for one heck of a long time to get here.
> 
> Bring your thoughts to the table people...
> 
> 
> One weirdo here -->PERCON


 
I will get back with you on this one. I have to ask the little grey man that lives in the top loft of our barn what he thinks.


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## Amber

Aliens... I think there's something there.




> I have to ask the little grey man that lives in the top loft of our barn what he thinks.


 
I'll go see my green man


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## Tsujigiri

Will you do it at the summer solstice?


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## Amber

Depends on how hot it is. When it gets hot I get irritable  When it swelters- you remember that story by Ray Bradbury about 91 Fahrenheit being the perfect temperature at which murders happen?


I'm that story come to life


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## Tsujigiri

Ah well, I was hoping you'd get the Solstice & Green Man referance......


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## Amber

Let's not forget people that I'm thick


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## PERCON

You sure about that? In my opinion no one's thick.


Then again I am cwazy!


Believe what you want.


p.s i think aliens exist. Change of opinion on my part  .


_PERCON_


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## Maryjane

*They sure do I have a hot buisness going selling hair pieces and sunglasses to the little grey guys for discuises and I get to pilot their ship. How do you think Valismarineries on Mars got there? Couldn't make that left turn around Saturn fast enough.  *

*Love*
*Maryjane*


----------



## Maryjane

* Hi Cricket, how ya doin dear? Been a while since I seen ya. Well been a while since I been here to. *

*Love*
*Maryjane*


----------



## PERCON

Wow I'd love a new spaceship  

_PERCON_


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## Stalker

Now I prefer not to dwell on it. On the other hand, it would be too antropocentric to think that we are something unique in the Universe.
Mind is what unites reality. Until we prove the existence of a particular Alien life, it is as if it never existed in the Universe. We seem to be living in different temporal or reality frows. When this separation ends, we suddently realise that we need to closer look at our history because even before the point of convergence of two realities humankind appears to have lived in this shared reality with the Alien race and otherwise. 
Too vague?


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## Maryjane

*Nope, makes sense, parallel realities or dimensions in other words realities only separated by a very thin veil "or membrane" they call it. Like the pages in an infinite telephone book. Many different  realities existing inside the same space. A holographic universes read this link. *http://twm.co.nz/hologram.html *And this one may be of interest as well.*
http://www.thegreatillusion.com/ 
*Also check out this link out of the movie "What the bleep do we know?"*
*http://noosphere.princeton.edu/*

* Love*

*Brighteyes*
*Namaste*


----------



## PERCON

Alien life does exist. We don't know what it looks like, how it thinks or even where it is, but we shouldn't judge what the alien's are like until we know what they're like. We shouldn't judge what we do not fully understand. It's like having a court case and the judge giving the final verdict as soon as everyone sits down before any evidence is looked upon. Stick to our simplistic lives and help to increase the scientific knowledge of humanity until we can get somewhere out there in the glorious space, hopefully beyond this solar system...

_PERCON_


----------



## Stalker

On the other hand, we (humankind) may seem to have had contacts with alien races. 

Put the pyramids aside what the artifact could have the Alien civilisation left behind as the reminder of its visit? Something that could survive eons to come.
You need do nothing but just look up in the evening skies. What do you see?
Correct! The Moon.
You see, *the Earth as the internal planet simply shouldn't have such a huge sattelite!* In fact this is a double planet Earth-Moon. Add to this solar eclipse and solar crown that surrounds the edges of the Moon when the eclipse is full. What an amazing fenomenon, what a grendeur! Do you also know that if the Moon were closer, it would be too ruining tectonically and ther would not have been any crown. If it moved its orbit farther away of the Earth, anybody would hardly notice its crossin the solar disk without dark glass. I observed the eclipce covering the disk at 78% of total area. The light barely changed, even in the fase of most covering I could barely look at the sun - it still shone brightly! But for the darkened glass, I couldn't have noticed the changes at all!
Why am I saying ll this? Think hard, calculate if you can, refer to probability theory, what is the chance of positioning the Moon in such a way that of such an amazing astronomic event as *eclipse with the solar crown* were possible?


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## Eradius Lore

i think you would have to be a narrow-minded fool to believe that we are alone in this universe. even without proof its still a possibility. in an infinite universe there is a infinite possibility that means that somewhere out there is most definitely a world oppressed by a matrix or a Correlian corvette being perused by a Imperial Star destroyer


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## Calis

Stalker said:
			
		

> You see, *the Earth as the internal planet simply shouldn't have such a huge sattelite!*



The moon isnt that big. Neither is Earth.

And even pluto has a moon.

Other proof is the Crop Circles.

Onto the subject - I agree to think we are a lone is narrow minded. The universe is infinite how can we be the only living species in it? 
I'd be so excited to meet another living, breathing species to communicate with from another planet/galaxy.


----------



## Stalker

What pertains the infinity of the universe, we don't have a ready-made answer here. It's rather the question of belief.
Still, being an agnostic, I believe that the universe and our ability to learn all its laws is limited, at least while we are humans in shape and spirit.
Concerning Crop Circles, some scholars, especially those who propagate the idea of genetic information spreading immediately (that correlates with the idea of golographic universe or with the string theory) took some aspects of these appearances on the crops pretty seriously especially when the face of the ET and certain information appearted almost in the way as it was sent from Aresibo in the framework of the SETI programme. Radioastronomers still try to searh H-band (21 cm) but there seem to be far more efficient ways of transmitting information.


----------



## Calis

Stalker said:
			
		

> What pertains the infinity of the universe, we don't have a ready-made answer here. It's rather the question of belief.



Well based on the Big Bang theory and what we know it is infinite.

Though of course the Earth was flat at one stage and the center of the universe.


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## Stalker

Calis said:
			
		

> Well based on the Big Bang theory and what we know it is infinite.


Big Bang theory doesn't insist on universe being infinite. One exmple: if Big Bang happened 19 billion years ago, take the speed of new matter expanding and multiply time. You'll get finite size however big it were. On the other hand, the astrophysicists do not observe any proof or tendency of the reverse motion (collapse) of our universe. That gives them the ground to insist on so called lack of mass and probably the process of the expansion will go on and go on...



			
				Calis said:
			
		

> Though of course the Earth was flat at one stage and the center of the universe.


That was also my point.


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## Calis

I wasnt trying to disprove you.


----------



## Stalker

Calis said:
			
		

> The moon isnt that big. Neither is Earth.
> 
> And even pluto has a moon.


You are both wrong and right. Wrong in that aspect that 8-fold difference in diameter, judging by the objects of our solar system is already an extremely rare case ESPECIALLY FOR AN INTERNAL PLANET! What a precise calculation could put the Moon into gravitational well of the Earth! You only think about this!Mercury and Venus both have no sattelites. Mars has two - both are little rocks miserable with the sizes of Mars. All Giants have sattelites miserable when compared with their mother planets.
And you are right saying that the phenomenon of a double planet repeats with the pair Pluto-Charon. And here the chances of capturing Charon by the gravity of Pluto increase hugely! This is the outer planet, and it often visits the vast realm of Keuper belt Oort cloud full of space chunks of various sizes and orbits. No wonder! 

To continue with the Moon topic, I suggest you several links on the topic. You might find them interesting. 

http://www.varchive.org/itb/sansmoon.htm
http://english.pravda.ru/main/2002/10/10/38008.html


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## Stormflame

Anything is possible.


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## Eldo

Try to keep your info to short, quickly readable paragraphs. Too many words . . . .ahhh . . . . aaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh!!!!


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## Eldo

Aliens do not exist. If they did why don't they visit a shopping mall, full of people on a friday night. Why are the sightings always in a secluded part of the country. I cannot believe that they visit a planet full of people and not want to be seen. Anyway all the evidence that has at one point proved they exist has been found to be fabricated.
This could be another topic for discussion, why don't want to be seen?


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## Marky Lazer

The best proove that aliens do exist, is that they won't bother to visit earth, because they see what a horrible mess the humans make of it.


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## Rosemary

Marky Lazer said:
			
		

> The best proove that aliens do exist, is that they won't bother to visit earth, because they see what a horrible mess the humans make of it.


I guess that is one way of looking at it Marky.

Too many sightings seem to prove the fact that they do exist.  Also that we here on earth cannot be the only ones around.


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## littlemissattitude

Eldo said:
			
		

> If they did why don't they visit a shopping mall, full of people on a friday night. Why are the sightings always in a secluded part of the country. I cannot believe that they visit a planet full of people and not want to be seen.


 
You're joking, right? There are any number of reasons why visiting aliens would not want to be known to be visiting. Would you want to deal with the (oops, I almost said "idiots") individuals who run most nations and who would probably bring out the military to shoot first and ask questions later if you were part of a group of aliens and appeared openly? Alternately, if you were heading an expedition that was studying a planet that was much less advanced than your own (and _if_ there _are_ aliens visiting, they must be significantly more advanced than we are, at least technologically), would you even think it was important to make yourself known? I'd guess that in a lot of circumstances, you wouldn't.



			
				Eldo said:
			
		

> Anyway all the evidence that has at one point proved they exist has been found to be fabricated.


 
That is certainly an unsupported overstatement. While many of the cases and much of the evidence for extraterrestrial visition (or interdimensional visitiation, or whatever it might be) has been shown to be misidentification or fabrication, that is certainly not true of _all_ the evidence. Certainly, there are a particular group of nutcases out there promoting all kinds of silly things, but there are also some serious scholars looking at the UFO phenomenon. Not nearly as many as will be necessary, however, to make a legitimate determination of whether or not intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe (and some of us are still not quite sure it exists very widely on this planet ) or whether, if they do, any representatives are visiting this particular speck in the universe.

This is a field of inquiry that I have read about and studied for years and years. I don't know if there are "aliens", or if there is something to some of the reports, where they might be from. The extraterrestrial hypothesis is far from the only one. But I'm not ready, either, to issue a blanket statement that they aren't here and never have been. Because the evidence thus far is inconclusive.


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## Foxbat

A few years ago, I was 'challenged' because of my cynicism to go to a meeting and press palms with some abductees. I took up the gauntlet and went. And was extremely alarmed by what I saw. These people introduced ideas like 'guardians to the interdimensional gateways'  bloodsucking aliens with laser beam eyes, and an alien/human hybrid. The 'guardian' was a weather balloon, the vampire alien was a drawing and the hybrid was a photo of a woman that looked as if she had anorexia (oh yes, the entrance to a secret American base in South America consisted of two oil drums and a plank of wood). One man (an abductee...allegedly) stood up and proclaimed that it was 'all over bar the landings'.

My point? I've always believed that there is life somewhere else. I've also never encountered anything to convince me they have been to Earth. The problem is that as long as fruitcakes keep trying to grab centre stage, anybody with any real evidence would likely be ignored. 

Before we get to 'the truth' we need to get past the nutters.


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## littlemissattitude

And the fruitcakes get all the press because a) they make the most noise, and b) because the conventional wisdom is that _anyone_ who admits to thinking that UFOs or aliens have been here are fruitcakes and the press likes to laugh at them.  There is also the factor that legitimate scientists who would like to look at the problem objectively often don't because _they_ would be seen as fruitcakes and probably lose all their credibility in their fields simply because they don't reject the idea out of hand.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again.  I have no earthly idea (oops, no pun intended) if we have been visited in the past, are being visited now, or will be visited in the future, or whether or not anyone else is even out there (although it kind of frightens me to think that we're the best the universe can do).  Still, I think it is silly to reject the idea out of hand just because there are a few idiots out there who have latched on to the idea of the "space brothers" or whatever as their own personal substitute for god.


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## Gwydion

no life. I sure wish there was, but there isnt. And the universe is a hologram. its corrupted and evil, far fallen from its once glorious start. a shadow is all that remains.


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## HieroGlyph

Fact or fiction? (was that to answer 'in' fact or 'in' fiction...?)
Anyway, wheres PERCON?
Pardon?
Abducted as well?

...

I do think... that SETI has a _chance_ of success - given a great enough amount of time... As to 'life' elsewhere? Certainly! What makes anyone here believe that this planet is _that_ special? Stability, sunlight, water, time..... I'd be horrified if most of you readers (of this forum, I mean) seriously objected to this view... Im willing to bear the brunt of those handful of detractors, sure...


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## PERCON

I'm back, last time I was here it was Christmas Eve I think. 

After seeing a program recently about how big the universe actually is and how much we don't know about it I now know that there must be other forms of life out there in the ever expanding universe. We only know about 4% of the 'stuff' that makes up the Universe and I've come to realise how technologically advanced any aliens would be that actually get here in the first place. I'm sure that within the next century, possible even the next few decades, we'll make contact with another form of life through a type of long wavelength kind of electromagnetic wave transmission (e.g A radiowave signal picked up by the special scientific stations around the world) from thousands of years ago. The future shrouds many things, people should start questioning the things their brains can't quite understand rather than simply dismissing them as being ridiculous and crazy ideas.

*PERCON*


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## Gwydion

if there are aliens, weres are spacefleet? Orbital battle stations? space marines? Master Cheif? wheres are protection!?


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## littlemissattitude

You do understand, don't you, Gwydion, that absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence?

_If_ these things exist, (and I'm not saying they do, understand, because I don't know) there are a number of explanations of why we don't see them.  To begin with, I suspect that if there is a civilization capable of creating these things - spacefleets, etc. - then they very likely have pretty darn good stealth capabilities.  Or, they might have sent out scouts, perhaps even just automated ships, but turned and ran like hell when they saw the mess we've got here.  Or, they might not have gotten here yet - it's pretty self-centered of us to think that we would be the first stop on any survey of the galaxy or the universe, or even the first target for takeover, by another civilization.

So, the fact that we don't see them doesn't mean they aren't out there.  Doesn't mean they are, either, but I think it's kind of silly to say that just because we don't see them, that means they don't exist.  I've never seen the White House - not in person, only in photos that, after all, could have been faked - but that doesn't mean I've come to the conclusion that it doesn't exist.


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## Gwydion

i know, but i was talking about were is earths spacefleet and wat-not. thats why i have taken the time to design them, using halo 2 as inspiration. and why shouldnt we be observed? we are a very intreging race.


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## littlemissattitude

Oh, but we are observable, at least as far out as radio and television signals have been able to travel since we've been producing them.

In the case of radio, the first broadcast came on Christmas Eve of 1906.  By the 1920s signals going out would have stepped up noticeably, as the first broadcast of a radio news program went out on 31 August 1920, followed by the first entertainment broadcasts on radio in 1922.  Radio was also first used to transmit pictures (as television) in the 1920s.

The first regularly scheduled television service in the US began 2 July 1928.  The first regular, 7 day per week tv schedule began broadcasting on 21 July 1931 and lasted until 1933.  After some other experiments in broadcasting, regularly scheduled television broadcasts were available in New York City and in Los Angeles by April 1939.  And then the deluge of signals began.

So, you see that first radio broadcast is now nearing 100 light years out, and television pictures are not that far behind.  We are definitely observable, although I sometimes worry about what impression we might be giving if anyone has picked up on any of those broadcasts.  Especially on those that were going out during the period of about 1939 to 1945.  What might any civilizations that are between 61 and 67 light years out that could be receiving and decoding those signals right about now be thinking about us?


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## Gwydion

oh no! the 80's!


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## littlemissattitude

Well, Gwydion, I wasn't that thrilled with the 80s either, especially as I never was a huge Reagan fan.  However, I certainly believe that World War II trumps the decade of the 80s for evil things done by evil people.


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## Gwydion

yea, but the 80's were just awfull music and tv wise.


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## PERCON

Scary stuff. We are a very noisy race, sending out radiowaves left right and centre. I wouldn't be surprised if any alien beings just ignored our planet altogether because of humanity producing some very weird TV programmes.

_*PERCON*_


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## Gwydion

like desperate housewives


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## mosaix

My own view is that statistically aliens probably do exist, but not on Earth.

What do we know about them? 

1) Well the elements that we know about are the same elements everywhere in the Universe. Elements combine in certain ways to make molecules and they do that everywhere in the Universe.

2) We are carbon based because carbon combines in more ways than other elements to make organic molecules. The only other element that comes close is silicon.

3) Therefore it is likely that aliens are probably carbon based or maybe silicon based.

4) Other elements just don't have the properties to make complex molecules that are required.

We also know that mathematics is the same throughout the Universe. 1 + 1 = 2, no matter where you are. So the elements and molecules follow the same mathematical laws.

So, if Einstein is right about the speed of light (and he has been so far) then faster than light travel is not possible. As an avid Science Fiction I hate to say this.

No faster than light travel = no visit by aliens.

Every single test of Einstein's theories have so far proved that he was right.  As soon as one of them is shown to be wrong (and they keep trying) then I'll think again.

As for crop circles, well guys have admitted making them and demonstrated exactly how it is done. If it's easy enough for people to do some why on Earth do we imagine that Aliens are responsible for the others.

UFO's? Interesting that they only became common once WE learnt to put Flying Objects in the air.


----------



## littlemissattitude

mosaix said:
			
		

> No faster than light travel = no visit by aliens.



Not necessarily.  Even absent ftl travel and things like harnessed wormholes, it isn't out of the question that some civilization launched generational ships that have been travelling the universe for very long periods of time.

Not saying that this is probable, or that any civilization doing that would have headed straight for here - that's a little over the top even for an egocentric species such as ours - but it isn't out of the question, either.



			
				mosaix said:
			
		

> UFO's? Interesting that they only became common once WE learnt to put Flying Objects in the air.


.

This is not actually the case - flying objects in the sky have been reported since long before humans took to the skies.  They were often interpreted in other ways - for example as religious apparitions - depending on the culture and the time in history when they were seen, but the record of sightings are there.  How many were attributable to natural phenomena and how many to hallucination is debatable, but even the Condon Report out of the University of Colorado (1966 - 1968), which was biased toward finding natural explanations for sightings found in the analyses that a certain percentage of them could not be explained, even though the reports conclusions said that they could all be explained away.  Now, the Condon Report became very controversial, but the same was true of Project Grudge, which became Project Blue Book - while it was found that there were mundane explanations for most sightings, a certain percentage just could not be explained by natural events or explained away as misidentifications, hallucinations, or hoaxes.

All this is enough, I think, to keep an open mind about the subject of UFOs, as long as one doesn't just swallow every wacky UFO story and theory that comes along.


----------



## mosaix

Hi Littlemissattitiude

Regarding ftl travel. I take your point. But for a generational spaceship  to be here would mean that 

1) They had detected our presence 
2) And travelled here.

We have only been generating detectable signals for about 100 years. I don't think there is enough time for those signals to have travelled far enough for detection AND the generational spaceships to have travelled here. So for me it's a non-starter - no aliens here. 

Which more or less means no UFOs either. Not of the alien variety anyway. I'm quite prepared to believe that there are that there are Flying Objects that are Unidentified but there is also lots of crime that goes unsolved as well - and I don't think that's done by aliens - there's just insufficient evidence to locate the real culprit. 

How was the radio stolen from my car when the alarm was in good working order? I can't think of any reason why an alien would want it but I can't think of any reason why they would create crop circles either. I've yet to read a book (although I'm sure one WILL be written) claiming that Jack The Ripper was an alien.

The point that most people don't appreciate is that both humans and nature are capable of doing startling and amazing things - the pyramids, Nazca, lightning, earthquakes etc. And that some things are done by governments in secret (stealth bombers) that only become public knowledge years after the event. Also some people are capable of doing silly things (crop circles). It is part of the human psyche that when some of these things can't be immediately explained some people will fill in the blanks with what they most desire to be the truth - Gods and more recently aliens.

BTW I didn't say flying objects hadn't been reported since before humans took to the skies, I just said it wasn't common.


----------



## littlemissattitude

mosaix said:
			
		

> Regarding ftl travel. I take your point. But for a generational spaceship  to be here would mean that
> 
> 1) They had detected our presence
> 2) And travelled here.
> 
> We have only been generating detectable signals for about 100 years. I don't think there is enough time for those signals to have travelled far enough for detection AND the generational spaceships to have travelled here. So for me it's a non-starter - no aliens here.



That still assumes an awful lot, mosaix.  They could have happened on us. Yeah, the universe is a big place but if they do indeed exist, they had to go somewhere.  Why is it less likely that they would have come in our direction than in any other?

I also think you are leaning more heavily than is probably warranted on the idea that what people are reporting having seen are extraterrestrial in origin.  They could also be interdimensional.  They could be from other points in time.  There are probably other possibilities, but that is what I can come up with on the spur of the moment.



			
				mosaix said:
			
		

> The point that most people don't appreciate is that both humans and nature are capable of doing startling and amazing things - the pyramids, Nazca, lightning, earthquakes etc. And that some things are done by governments in secret (stealth bombers) that only become public knowledge years after the event. Also some people are capable of doing silly things (crop circles). It is part of the human psyche that when some of these things can't be immediately explained some people will fill in the blanks with what they most desire to be the truth - Gods and more recently aliens.



Of course, you are correct about both humans and nature.  And I think that the folks who insist that the Egyptian pyramids or Stonehenge or whatever could not possibly have been built without help from "beyond" are really barking up the wrong tree.  And, yes, some people are all too ready to believe that whatever they cannot explain immediately is somehow "supernatural" (a word I have rather major quibbles with, but that is for another post at another time) or whatever.  We've always had gullible people and we always will.

I'm fairly sure that some sightings of supposed UFOs can be explained by tests of advanced aircraft.  In fact, I'm pretty sure that is what I saw one time, considering that where I saw it was in close enough proximity to Edwards Air Force Base and the other secret development sites (Skunk Works, etc.) that it makes it likely that was what it was.  But, the thing is, that is what I assume that it was, and did so at the time.  I did not immediately think that I had seen something "alien".  And I don't think the _majority_ of people automatically assume that, either.  Maybe I'm giving people too much credit, but I hope not and choose to think not.

The thing is, I don't think that any of what you have said automatically means that all of the experiences people claim to have had, by defintion, cannot exist.  I've said this before, but I guess I'll have to say it again: I am not a "true believer" in UFOs or any other of what I call "the weird stuff".  That isn't what I'm trying to say here at all.  But I do not believe  we accomplish anything by keeping a closed mind on these subjects simply because we cannot explain right now how they could exist.


----------



## mosaix

Hi again Littlemissattitude.

I think we are very close in our thoughts on this.

I suppose that, in the final analysis, I think that the chances of alien visits (for the reasons I've explained) are so infinitely small that I don't give them credence.

There is a problem however in that in that giving credence to the possibilty of aliens does tend for a small minority to start the inevitable conspiracy theories - "The Government knows about them but is keeping it from us" etc. 

I would love humanity to make 'contact' during my lifetime, sadly I don't think it's going to happen.


----------



## littlemissattitude

mosaix said:
			
		

> There is a problem however in that in that giving credence to the possibilty of aliens does tend for a small minority to start the inevitable conspiracy theories - "The Government knows about them but is keeping it from us" etc.



  I don't actually see that as a problem.  Keeps the whackjobs busy at something fairly harmless and provides amusing headlines on the _Weekly World News_ and other tabloids of that ilk so that I have something to laugh at while I'm standing in line at the grocery store.

Although I think a good argument could be made that Dick Cheney is an alien. _Yes.  I'm kidding_.


----------



## mosaix

littlemissattitude said:
			
		

> I don't actually see that as a problem.  Keeps the whackjobs busy at something fairly harmless and provides amusing headlines on the _Weekly World News_ and other tabloids of that ilk so that I have something to laugh at while I'm standing in line at the grocery store.
> 
> Although I think a good argument could be made that Dick Cheney is an alien. _Yes.  I'm kidding_.


Although this might seem to be a strange thing to say on a 'fiction' board I think we should discourage the consipracy theorists. I think it tends to lead to 'bad science' and 'we didnt go to the moon etc.'  These things are ok in fiction but too many people are starting to regard them as reality. They do this by ignoring the real science and 'making up their own' so to speak.

I could go alot further with this but don't want to expand this thread into other areas.

The thing is that you laugh at these headlines - others take them as fact. I work in I.T. with other I.T. professionals - design and programming. About a year ago a group of about 8 were discussing 'Close Encounters'. One guy in his twenties said 'I thought that film was based on an actual event." Another guy said "So did I." That's 25% of a group of intelligent people can't tell fact from fiction, *when it's presented as fiction. *Imagine the problems we are going to face when *fiction is presented as fact*.


----------



## j d worthington

That's a sobering thought; though not exactly new, I suppose. (Anyone here remember Welles' broadcast of War of the Worlds?)

One thing about no aliens because of our signals only going out for such a limited time -- that's assuming that they had no other reason for heading this direction: exploration, lebensraum, what have you.

Now, I think the likelihood that we have a) been contacted or b) will contact alien races, given the size of the universe and the (most likely) scattered nature of habitable planets (what, by the way, would constitute a planet habitable by a silicon-based lifeform? And has anyone done serious scientific thought on what such a lifeform would most likely be like?) is extremely small, vanishingly small; enough that I, too, disregard it except when such a discussion is brought up. But it isn't necessarily impossible.

I do question, by the way, the idea that carbon and silicon are the only elements able to combine in multiple, complex ways enough to produce life. I lean in that direction, but then no one thought _anything_ could live at the mouth of a volcanic vent until a few years ago, yes? I'd make it in the nature of "highly improbable", but not necessarily impossible, for other elements to combine in such a way as to produce life, under certain conditions. The universe is a wild and wonderfully wacky place, and it's full of surprises. (Now if we could only get more people to seeing how much there is to learn, and how fun it can be, then maybe we could clean up some of this mess we've made.)

At least, it's a nice thought.....


----------



## littlemissattitude

Well, you know what they say, J.D. (and I say "they" because I can't remember who said it at the moment - anybody have an attribution?):  "The universe is not only stranger than we imagine; it is stranger than we _can_ imagine."  As is evidenced by the amazingly diverse environments in which researchers are finding life on Earth, as you mentioned.

I do have to say, mosiax, that your colleauges frighten me a little bit, and make me understand your disapproval of the conspiracy theorists.  I guess I just haven't met that many people who take any of that stuff seriously.  If it were here in the States, I'd say they were evidence of the seriously poor science education that most people get.  But I don't know the state of science education is where you are, so I can't make that kind of a blanket statement.

You would think that, with the sort of stuff that goes on in the world - lying politicians, "Punk'd" type television shows, and the ability to do just about anything to a picture in photoshop - more people would be more cynical about more things.  If your example is any indication, they just seem to be getting more gullible.

For instance, regarding _Close Encounters_ (which is one of my favorite films, by the way - one of the few I've ever stood in line to see on the first day of release), I can't think of anyone I've talked to who believed that it was based on an actual event.  However, I do remember hearing a rumor not long after it came out that the US government had put Steven Speilberg up to making it as a step toward announcing that the aliens are, in fact, here.  Or something like that.  I just laughed at that, and forgot it.  Perhaps more people than I realized did not laugh.


----------



## j d worthington

If I remember correctly, the quote is from Arthur C. Clarke.

And, yes, it's likely to do with poor science education, and the fact that (at least in the U.S.) we're again seeing creationism (or, to use the current(?) phrase, intelligent (?) design) posited as a real science; and far too few know enough to actually pick holes in _that_ argument. (Anybody here ever read H. L. Mencken on the subject? And they call the _current _media hostile!.... It's a wonder that man didn't get lynched!)

But even more than science _per se_, we simply aren't being taught to think critically! To actually examine the evidence with an open mind, and how to weigh evidence properly. In fact, in my experience, when one makes the difficult struggle to learn these things on one's own, it frequently makes them _persona non grata_.


----------



## littlemissattitude

And you know why we aren't taught, most of us, to think critically?  Government doesn't want it.  Some religion doesn't want it.  And the advertising industry _really_ doesn't want it.  Although, it is really interesting, I think, that one of the places where I learned to think critically was at university taking my upper division work.  It was a private Christian university, run by the Mennonite Brethren.  So I try to be very careful to point out that all religion isn't the problem all of the time.  But when it is a problem in this area, it is a very big problem.

For example, don't even get me started on the creation/"intelligent design" thing.  I could go on for hours.  Have done, on occcasion, in fact.


----------



## mosaix

Hi Jd, Littlemiss

Looks like I'm preaching to the converted here. I too 'could go on for hours'! 

I think the best we can do is confront ignorance when we meet it, with our friends, family and colleagues. This is a bit out of context but 'all it takes for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing'. 

I don't know if this has happened to you but sometimes I'll be sitting in my car screaming at some ignorant guy on the radio, and then I look round, realise I'm sitting in a traffic jam and being watched by half a dozen drivers around me!


----------



## heron

there already here, im watching them on big brother


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## littlemissattitude

mosaix said:
			
		

> I don't know if this has happened to you but sometimes I'll be sitting in my car screaming at some ignorant guy on the radio, and then I look round, realise I'm sitting in a traffic jam and being watched by half a dozen drivers around me!


Been there, done that.  I don't actually scream that much, although I do talk vigorously and extensively sometimes.  One would think that I actually believe the people on the radio can hear me.  I wish.


----------



## j d worthington

littlemissattitude said:
			
		

> Been there, done that.  I don't actually scream that much, although I do talk vigorously and extensively sometimes.  One would think that I actually believe the people on the radio can hear me.  I wish.


Actually, I'm rather glad they can't; they'd probably cart me away never to be seen again.....


----------



## argenianpoet

I think that maybe, just maybe, aliens are by far _new_ news if you will, and have been among us since man first stepped foot on the Earth.  Have you ever wondered about your neighbor, or that kid across the street that won't quit starring at you...LOL!


----------



## littlemissattitude

Well, I have known a few people...well, it would explain a _whole_ lot if it turned out that they were aliens.  Not counting on it, though.


----------



## jackokent

It seems a little far fetched to think we are the only life form so on the basis of it I would have to conclude that I probably believe aliens exist in some form, somewhere.

Are they here - or have they been and gone leaving some undescovered legacy in mankind?  It's a very exciting thought and for me gives us a kind of conectivity with the universe.  However, I am a bit of a sceptic.  Having flown over the Nazca lines just 2 weeks ago (I just can't resist giving my holiday another mention) you can see why people think they needed alien help for this sort of thing.  But as with crop cirlces, whilst I don't pretend to have any incite into the Alien mind, it all seems a bit trivial.  Why come all the way here to draw pretty lines or pictures.  Can't they do that at home.  Or maybe it's some for of Alien graffeti an extra terrestial "I was here" or "Sharon loves John".

My main thought would be if they did come they can't be half as scarey as people are surely.  I hope I'm not proved wrong.


----------



## argenianpoet

littlemissattitude said:
			
		

> Well, I have known a few people...well, it would explain a _whole_ lot if it turned out that they were aliens. Not counting on it, though.


 
Just kidding.  I have always heard the stories, but I have never seen a UFO or an alien for that matter.  Not saying that they don't exist; it's just that if they do exist and visit our planet they are very good at elusion.  Of course, humans aren't the most observant creatures on the planet are we?  LOL!


----------



## chrispenycate

I've been steering clear of this thread, largely because I've got a friend who's a determined Ufologist, spends weekends on top of a mountain with a high speed camera attached to a telescope mounted on a fast swivel film camera tripod. If I consider him barking mad, how is he worse than another, who sits well underground and tries to work out the origin of stars, and the universe itself, from the iterior of a dark tunnel? At least Dave gets some healtha fresh air and exercise and some great photos of a meteor shower.

Still, judging the motives of aliens is a thankless task (I can't do it for humans yet, and I promise that if I flew in on a flying saucer I don't remember anything about it) So saying "Why on earth (or off it) would they behave like _that_" is useless; call it religious observance, get the evidence, thesis, antithesis, theory; we can't guess.

Which brings me, by a very long and convuluted path to "Yes, at a general (rather than specialised ) level, humans are the most observant species on this planet. and possibly the only one observing factors which are not directly involved with their survival. This doesn't mean they are universally accurate , just that everyone else is worse.


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## Milk

This probably sounds odd, since Ive never read or heard of anyone who thought and expressed and agreed what I will type about my non belief in Aliens. 

I dont think they exist.

Why?

I think the universe is still way too young to be teeming with life.  I feel that the current age we live in (circa 12-15 billion years since the big bang or so)  in the scheme of things is actually a tiny span of time, its a wonder we exist so early in the history of the universe.

As soon as I first heard about how young the universe actually was when I was a kid, I felt that the idea of advanced Alien civilizations out there in space got thrown out the window.  It was rather depressing for me, but it was my gut reaction.

Compared to the scope of the sheer size of the Universe its own timeline is miniscule.  The size is huge, the timespan from bang until now is tiny.


The timeline for the Universe from big bang towards the last black holes fading is more like in ten to the 74th power number of years or some insane number like that.  This puts 12-15 billion years as being just a moment or two after the big explosion. Compared to a footrace, the whistle to charge forward is still blowing in slow motion.

Earth is around 1/3rd the age of the entire universe.  In the scope of total time  this makes the Earth and life on Earth Ancient!  Our sun would be a  2nd or possibly 3rd generation star.  But remember we are made from stardust...   So that first set of stars probably didnt have planets orbiting it, since where would that matter come from??  The first set of stars were not like the stars we have now anyhow and possible could not support planets
This galaxy only had a certain time frame where planets and heavy matter existed,  stars were even possible, galaxies were possible.  In the scope of total time of the universe its a tiny fraction of it.  


Of course if I ever see an alien in person, ill admit I was completely wrong.  But otherwise Im just gonna assume we are the first.  The universe is brand spanking new right now, it barely just started.  I think cross space , life will take a while to get established assuming it ever does.  The distances between stars are huge.


----------



## star.torturer

we aint the only ones in the universe, what about the monkeys


----------



## admathman

what are aliens? how do you class them? we used to class black people as "aliens"! any one that we dont like becomes an alien.


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## jackokent

I believe as with regards to this thread aliens are from another planet.  People we don't like now seem to be called insurgents or hostiles.

I still think its a bit big headed to think we are the only sentient beings in the universe, or that we are in the only universe.  Also, to take Milk's theory, ie that the universe is young and earth is a 3rd of it, well that still means there is ample time for someone else to develope too.  However, I am certainly not an expert so will bow down to some of the greater knowledge on this site.


----------



## Milk

Im no expert, and as far as I know nobody is. But the idea would explain the fermi paradox.

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

I just feel that in most Science fiction its just assumed that when we meet Aliens they have a few million years ahead of us as far as civilization. And even numbers and odds and probability aside, counting the billions and billions of sustainable planets, there has to be a place where civilization springs first, and why couldn't that place be here?



As far as the fermi paradox, it doesnt feel too far from our grasp the ability to create self replicating space probes. Like a century or so away as far as tech-- and yes im completely guessing about this. Small robots that would land on asteroids, comets, planetoids, moons, what have you, then they would mine and build copies of themselves, those copies would blast off to other destinations, repeat and rinse. The investment would be the research, then firing off that single probe to get the process started. In 10.000 years or so the Milky way would be teaming with these tiny robotic probes... so why havent the aliens already done this?


----------



## Jilliboo

The Drake Equation seems to state that it's illogical for people to believe that there aren't any extraterrestrials in the universe. I function mainly by logic. So, I do believe that another form of life is living somewhere in the universe.


----------



## carrie221

Fact, I think that we are not alone in the universe


----------



## Green

Wow, long thread, which I haven't read all the way through (sorry), but here's my own thoughts on the topic. I apologise if they've come up before.

I do believe that there are aliens out there. I basically fall into the category of "holy crap, it's a big place, and we're nothing special, really." It's hard to reconcile that with the fact that SETI have basically found nothing, yet, but I do believe it. At the end of the day, SETI have barely scratched the surface, and they're probably not scanning for the right things. Sure, some civilisations will use EM just as we do, but I suppose there's a lot who never bothered with the stuff (by the way, I think the chairman of SETI has said he expects to get some kind of result by about 2025 or something, can't remember).

I was catching up on the Drake equation a little while back. When I first heard about it, it seemed pretty optimistic on the whole ET front, but when I looked it up on wiki (Drake Equation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia), the latest figures are coming up with something like 8 x 10^-7 advanced civilisations per galaxy. Which is pretty disappointing, seeing as how that would make us quite rare and very isolated, and with our crappy travel methods, unlikely to envounter any aliens in my life time. Which is depressing.

I don't hold total confidence in the equation, for obvious reasons, but it is a guide line.

I honestly believe there are others out there, though I don't believe in the United Colours of Star Trek version of events. I think the universe is too interesting for us to be the only ones here. And we're too boring to deserve that.

PS - the universe isn't that old, really. I think it's about 14 billion years (last I heard, anyway). That's a lot on evolutionary timescales, so a lot of time for life to grow, but it's not that much on stellar timescales. The earth is about 4 billion years old, I think, which is nearly a third the age of the universe. So who knows. Is our sun second gen, or third, or what? I can't remember, but it's certainly not first. Anyway, my point is that the universe isn't as old as it seems sometimes  It took us 4 billion years to be able to detect/throw out EM radiation. So maybe not many others have got there yet. There may be an immense amount of lifeforms around in 20 billion years from now. I dunno.


----------



## manephelien

I can't believe we're the only technologically savvy species in the Universe. However, I don't believe we've been visited by aliens yet, and we never may, unless they live very long. Long-lived species will also evolve slower than shorter-lived ones, because the span between generations must be longer, lest it lead to overpopulation or war, which would tend to make exploration too expensive to undertake.


----------



## Jim Colyer

I believe all the alien stories we have heard up to now are hoaxes.


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## Spartan27

Yes, they are out there but not in the way "we" understand out there. 

Time and space as we understand it does not exist outside of our "simple principals".

Our simple technology cannot get to them....yet. Remember some of these have the ability to alter dimensions, thus not the need for "heavy technology" or the type of technology we understand....this is the reason we have not seen a clear picture of these "things". 

One last thought, we are in their location not the other way around, kind of like the seven continents make up the world...we are all connected it's just that overt contact is not allowed at this point in time...also the laws of good vs. evil applies to them as well......not pyhsics.....


----------



## Redhawk

I have to believe...I know what I saw, I know what my mother saw, I know what our neighbors saw...and it was NOT anything from here...didn't look like it, sound like it, or move like it....what else can I say?


----------



## Riker

I believe aliens exist in the universe.  Whether they are here on earth or not I have no clue.  But if they are, who's to say we can see them?  Maybe they are invisible beings to our own eyes.  We as humans may not be able to perceive them because of the way our senses work.  They may use other senses that we can't even imagine to exist.  There could possibly be an alien standing next to you right now and you may not even know it.  There is so much that we still dont know about earth that would make it hard for us to extend our earthly knowledge to the universe.


----------



## Urien

Apologies if this has been mentioned before.

The Fermi paradox runs roughly "where is everybody?"

Given the age of the galaxy where is the evidence of other advanced civilizations. We began broadcasting over one hundred years ago. If other technological socities were out there, it is likely given the age of the galaxy they would have been broadcating billions of years ago. In other words the sky should (if aliens are out there) be full of ancient chatter.

Where are their artifacts, their Von Neumann machines? The longer we search and find nothing, the more likely it is there is nothing to find.

Wiki link.

Fermi paradox - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


----------



## Paige Turner

andrew.v.spencer said:


> Given the age of the galaxy where is the evidence of other advanced civilizations. We began broadcasting over one hundred years ago. If other technological socities were out there, it is likely given the age of the galaxy they would have been broadcating billions of years ago.



But the entire universe came into being at the same time. It has taken billions of years for our galaxy and solar system to form, our planet to cool, and for life on earth to evolve from the simplest life forms to broadcasters. It seems likely to me that other worlds would be working to a similar time frame. I don't see how they could have been broadcasting billions of years ago, when the terrestrial planets were all whirling balls of magma.

Even if their evolution happened millions of years ago, remember the first entry in the Hitchhiker's Guide. It would take those broadcasts a very long time to reach us.


----------



## Urien

Paige, 

Many stars have lived and died since the birth of our sun, many are much older. It's possible I suppose that we all work to the same evolutionary timescale, but if we did civilizations would have arisen millions of years ago, and throughout the birth/death cycle of stars.

But even given that it's not very probable that we all hit the radio transmission mark at the same time. One hundred years is a very small proportion of billions or even millions.

Our galaxy is about a hundred thoudand light years across. Hence it takes a signal just one hundred thousand years to cross. Billions of stars are much much closer, and still we've heard nothing.




WE'RE ALONG HERE ON THIS SPINNING BALL OF MUD.

"Hello, hello... is there anybody out there?"


----------



## Riker

What if other planets evolved slower than we did?  There could be aliens out there that just havent developed the technology to communicate or travel through space.  Or if they evolved faster than us and use a different means of communication that we are not able to comprehend.  Our tehcnology may not be advanced enough to pick up on their communications.  But lets say they evolved at the same rate we evolved.  That still does not mean that we will use the same kind of technology as they would.  But now lets say they do use the same technology that we use and are able to pick up on it, that still does not mean that we will.  They could have broadcasted their message way before we were technologically able to pick up on it.  After their broadcast that could have lasted for a long period of time (before we could receive it), they may have given up on pointing their broadcasts our way, assuming that no one was here.  And you could turn this around and say that we may have given up on areas and turned our broadcasts in other directions even though life might have been where we were broadcasting.  We may write down the fact that where we were boradcasting there was no life and move on to other areas.  But there may have been life there, only it wasnt advanced enough to receive our messages.

Even though we haven't received any messages doesnt mean that aliens arent out there.  People should keep an open mind about this.  Our earth cannot be so unique to be the only planet to have life in the whole universe.


----------



## j d worthington

Basically, it's an open question. The likelihood that this is the only planet in the entire galaxy (let alone the universe) where life has developed is, I would think, rather remote. But it is possible. So far, we simply don't have enough evidence on way or the other to give any firm answer to the question. The problem is, with the universe the size it is, and the age it is, and the very brief time we are likely to be around as a species... it's unlikely that we will ever really have the answer to this one at all.....


----------



## Paige Turner

I remember a quote—well, that's not quite true, as we shall see— along the lines of "Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not. Both possibilities boggle the mind."


----------



## j d worthington

Paige Turner said:


> I remember a quote—well, that's not quite true, as we shall see— along the lines of "Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not. Both possibilities boggle the mind."


 
If I remember correctly, that's from Arthur C. Clarke... I'll have to go and check, but I think I recall that being one of his.....

EDIT: Yep. It is, though the wording is very slightly different:

_"Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering."_


----------



## Paige Turner

Yeah, well, he had time to polish his version. I had to wing it.


----------



## j d worthington

Paige Turner said:


> Yeah, well, he had time to polish his version. I had to wing it.


 
Coming in on a wing and a prayer....


----------



## Spartan27

Paige Turner said:


> But the entire universe came into being at the same time. It has taken billions of years for our galaxy and solar system to form, our planet to cool, and for life on earth to evolve from the simplest life forms to broadcasters. It seems likely to me that other worlds would be working to a similar time frame. I don't see how they could have been broadcasting billions of years ago, when the terrestrial planets were all whirling balls of magma.
> 
> Even if their evolution happened millions of years ago, remember the first entry in the Hitchhiker's Guide. It would take those broadcasts a very long time to reach us.


 
Paige...not trying to argue with you...but your statement is based on the big bang theory...a theory that is starting to crumble. Just see hawkings books on this (and a few other bright people on this very subject). If you look at it objectively, the big bang theory is the same thought process as one in the 13-1400's used to say the earth is flat.

And a very closed minded view at that.


----------



## j d worthington

Spartan27 said:


> Paige...not trying to argue with you...but your statement is based on the big bang theory...a theory that is starting to crumble. Just see hawkings books on this (and a few other bright people on this very subject). If you look at it objectively, the big bang theory is the same thought process as one in the 13-1400's used to say the earth is flat.
> 
> And a very closed minded view at that.


 
Spartan -- Again, I'd ask for some sources on this. Personally, I've not seen any, and I'd be very interested, especially in where, exactly, Hawking seems to be proposing an alternative. He has made it clear that he has doubts about the "classic" Big Bang model, but as for actually positing an alternative to the general principles of, I've not seen anything of that sort from him. So it really would be helpful if you could supply me with information on where to look at this. Or, for that matter, of other scientific articles/books that support your claims here. I'll admit to not having looked into this a great deal in a while, but nonetheless all I've seen tends to question aspects of, as said, the classic model (just as Darwin's original model has been questioned and refined), but not the principle itself. And as this really is a subject I'm fascinated with, I'd really like to see the arguments pro and con....


----------



## mosaix

Spartan27 said:


> Paige...not trying to argue with you...but your statement is based on the big bang theory...a theory that is starting to crumble. Just see hawkings books on this (and a few other bright people on this very subject). If you look at it objectively, the big bang theory is the same thought process as one in the 13-1400's used to say the earth is flat.
> 
> And a very closed minded view at that.



I think Big Bang has an awful lot of mileage in it yet before is starts to 'crumble'. To compare it and its proponents to flat-earthists is a little derogatory. A lot of thought and research has gone into Big Bang, practically none went into flat-earth.

I, too, would be interested in some links to support your statement.


----------



## j d worthington

In searching information out on this, all I've been able to come across is something he's said quite some time ago, and it again is challenging the _classic model of_, not the idea of the Big Bang itself.... it questions the singularity of the event, positing multiple Big Bangs ... not at all the same thing, though it has very important implications in interpreting age of the universe, yes. Even here, however, the question of whether these were simultaneous or within a relatively short term of each other, or spread out over a longer period, remains, and the thoughts on those things (that I've been able to track down, at any rate) are still rather nebulous -- you should pardon the expression. 

However, from what I've seen, this idea itself is still more in the nature of a hypothesis than even a theory at this point, and will require considerable research before it truly begins to challenge even the classic model.


----------



## Urien

An intriguing discussion. Nevertheless there is no evidence of aliens either on earth or received from the skies. Each day that passes and we hear nothing increases the probability that we are alone in this galaxy. Alone in the respect of having a technologically advanced civilization.

There appears to be no chatter in the sky, no artifacts, no signals from fifty thousand years ago. 

It seems unlikely that we are the only tech civ present in the galaxy right now. But we don't know the true probabilities of such a civilization coming into being anyway. Let's say it's a one in one hundred billion chance, and we've won. Someone has to. Of course until we've surveyed the galaxy we can never know how big or impobable the lottery was.


----------



## Spartan27

First off sorry if I came-off pushy...not my intent at all.

Big bang theory relies on the fact the mass/energy = stars/planets & other material = galaxies would be moving away from the bang (thus looking further and further out (i.e. further and further back in time) = less and less "stuff" to see). 

With new technology, especially within the last 3 years (see NASA - European Space Agency sites for further info), "we" are seeing the opposite.

Thus the statement...the big bang theory (depending on your age) will most likely be overturned, or at the very least modified to something like (many different big bangs occured in many different time periods = why some galaxies are actually moving in completely revese directions...away from the "original" and some towards the "original" big bang. As some with the knowledge in physics can attest...this can't happen (especially if every galaxy has a black hole at it's center).


----------



## j d worthington

Spartan27 said:


> First off sorry if I came-off pushy...not my intent at all.
> 
> Big bang theory relies on the fact the mass/energy = stars/planets & other material = galaxies would be moving away from the bang (thus looking further and further out (i.e. further and further back in time) = less and less "stuff" to see).
> 
> With new technology, especially within the last 3 years (see NASA - European Space Agency sites for further info), "we" are seeing the opposite.
> 
> Thus the statement...the big bang theory (depending on your age) will most likely be overturned, or at the very least modified to something like (many different big bangs occured in many different time periods = why some galaxies are actually moving in completely revese directions...away from the "original" and some towards the "original" big bang. As some with the knowledge in physics can attest...this can't happen (especially if every galaxy has a black hole at it's center).


 
First: I don't think it's being pushy ... I'm just not seeing any sources indicating more than a modification of the theory ... certainly no abandonment of it; which is why I was asking for sources. And when you cited Hawking, I went through what I could find, with no indication of anything other than that. Which is why I'm asking for some specific sources, so I can track them down; I think it would make fascinating reading, and very challenging.

As for the "can't happen" -- that's a dangerous statement to ever make with physics, especially when dealing with the complex areas of cosmology, etc., for the simple reason that one of the bases of science is the falsifiability of _any_ tenet of science, based upon new evidence. If we come across enough evidence, backed by observation, to indicate that yes, it is possible...  that simply means we have to restructure our model of how physics works. Unlikely in the extreme something may be, with a probability so close to zero that the difference doesn't matter ... but there's always at least the theoretical_ possibility_ of evidence emerging at some point to challenge any assumption in science. And Hawking is one of those who posits a multiple big bang, from what I've seen, so I'd be reluctant to make such a sweeping statement without some major evidence.

I'll go through the sites you mention again over the next several days; but so far I'm still not seeing anything to support your stance; if you have more that does, please pass them along; as I said, I do really enjoy finding about this sort of thing and -- after struggling with getting my mind around the various concepts of modern physics after being raised with an almost wholly Newtonian view, really -- any new evidence challenging them is likely to be as fascinating a journey again.


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## Hawkshaw_245

The more we learn about physics, the more we learn that there are EXCEPTIONS to the rules.

In astrophysics, in particular, new discoveries amend old laws, and rewrite others.  The last 20 years or so, we've learned a LOT about extra-solar planets, and the stars they orbit.  We're learning more and more about potential habitats for potential extraterrestrial life.


----------



## Milk

Spartan,


Are you talking about Hawkins' idea that time is bounded in infinite curvature along the plane of imaginary time?

Because its a controversial idea not generally accepted by most physicists.


From what I understand its the idea that time is spherical, and wrapped around a new plane called imaginary time. Since there are no points on a sphere then there are no singularity points in time. 
Analogy.

On a 2d map of the Earth. The North Pole would appear like a singularity, a place you could not go further then. All points ending in the north and south pole. However we know from exploration that not only can people walk on the North Pole but they can walk right on past it to the other side. This is because the Earth is bounded in infinite curvature like a sphere, no position is a singularity on a ball shaped object. When translating a 3d spherical shape into a 2d map, certain points appear magical and stretched out, like the North and South pole, Greenalnd appears much bigger then it actually is etc. But in reality no such 'special' points exist on our near sphere Earth.

Okay now towards the end of a "brief history of time" by Stephen Hawkins, he suggested that time worked the same way.

This would mean that the Big Bang or End of the Universe would be treated the same way in a sort of spheriod time lol.
Which would mean the Big bang wasn't a 'time starts here' point, its just another place in spheroid time.
If that makes any sense.


Unless you mean some new Hawkins idea which I havent heard about.


----------



## Spartan27

Hello, I agree with you regarding the time issue (for now). However, I believe we will see some "heavy" modifications to this. Sorry, what I should have stated is along with his writen works, he had provided valuable information in a Discovery program (I will look for the actual show via Discovery and then post the info here) I think the DVD of that program is for sale. I saw the show Late 2004/early 2005.

What he especially said was that we will be able to one day travel faster than the speed of light but not in known paradyms. We have known for years that time would actual begin to slow down as you approach the speed of light. One day perhaps light travel will be no big deal, so would faster than light travel (we just don't have the formula today).

I will find the program and then post.


----------



## Urien

If we go faster than he speed of light, then they could call us Mr Farenheit. It'll make supersonic men out of us. Then, to top it all off, we could be like the tiger and defy the laws of gravity.


----------



## Spartan27

andrew.v.spencer said:


> If we go faster than he speed of light, then they could call us Mr Farenheit. It'll make supersonic men out of us. Then, to top it all off, we could be like the tiger and defy the laws of gravity.


 

Huh?????


----------



## Urien

Are you doubting the physics of Freddie Mercury?


----------



## Spartan27

andrew.v.spencer said:


> Are you doubting the physics of Freddie Mercury?


 

Nah....no way would I ever doubt that dude!!!


----------



## taylorl3

must be Karma..


----------



## Spartan27

taylorl3 said:


> must be Karma..


 
Yes..instant karma!


----------



## Epic Universe

With so many galaxies out there, it's pretty hard to say other life doesn't exist. I tend to lean on the "probably fact" line. Then again, with the sheer unimaginable vastness of space distance, it might take a while for us to get out there to take a peek.

Thank goodness science fiction lets us do that right now, even if it is only in our heads.


----------



## lyanis

According with cientists space and time can be bend by a higher civilisation,and also nano-bots can be sent to every moon of every solar systems and reprduduce it self and so on.So there is a high possibility that we are beeing watched at this moment.The question is are we going to get to the point where they want to contact us?or are we going to destroy ourselfs before that happend


----------



## Moebius Tripper

How about looking at the underground bases on our moon....That book "The 12th Planet," by Sitchin will open your eyes to this possibility, which as of today, is fact....Need I mention the pyramids on Mars as proof of an alien civilization once existing there....There is a glass dome on the moon miles high which at present has only a few glass panes left in the dome's gridwork...Richard C. Hoagland has a video where he gives a slide show lecture on this dome...He is regularly on the radio show: "Coast to Coast AM" that is on nightly from 1 am to 5 am.


----------



## Naryaló S dú

Well I heard this somewhere, may not get it perfectly right, but the point rings clear
-Suppose 1 of every 20 stars has planets
-And 1 of every 10000 of those stars planets has the exact right conditions to support life
-And 1 in every 1000 of those planets have the right evolutional conditions to eventually create an intelligent, concious life-form.
-And 1 in every 100 of those planets have already created an intelligent, concious life-form.
-And 1 in every 100 of those species are intelligent enough to go into space.

If that's true theres trillions of trillions of intelligent space-faring creatures in the universe

I know mine isnt right, if anone can find the real page thats like this please post it.


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## Space Smith

Steve Greer's Disclosure project can be found on google video.

Many accounts of ET. Interestingly they ARE ALL humanoid. In the Sci Fi world you can have Dr Who type monsters BUT in "real life" they are fairly mundane compared with what an active imagination could come up with. Why no boggle eyed three headed monsters reported ? etc

ET may not be ET but extra dimensional . Perhaps related genetically to humans in some way we can't know. Sitchin as mentioned may be worthy of study....

Flying saucers were developed by the Third Reich. Plenty of info on the net if you take the trouble to look. Whether they had contact with "others" is an interesting topic - and touches on the occult. 

Overall, the body of evidence for "ET" is overwhelming. Plenty of stuff on google video...


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## Interference

Fact.  Next question, please ...


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## Space Smith

Interference said:


> Fact.  Next question, please ...



OK. Where in your opinion do they originate from ? and how many species ?


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## Urien

"Overall, the body of evidence for "ET" is overwhelming. Plenty of stuff on google video..." Space Smith. Not sure whether you're being sarcastic here. But as for evidence, I am still underwhelmed.

"Fact. Next question, please ..." Inteference. Not a fact, in fact no facts at all. Just speculation.

... what facts that do exist, i.e. we have NOT been contacted, indicates a sparsity of intelligent life out there.


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## Space Smith

andrew.v.spencer said:


> "Overall, the body of evidence for "ET" is overwhelming. Plenty of stuff on google video..." Space Smith. Not sure whether you're being sarcastic here. But as for evidence, I am still underwhelmed.
> 
> "Fact. Next question, please ..." Inteference. Not a fact, in fact no facts at all. Just speculation.
> 
> ... what facts that do exist, i.e. we have NOT been contacted, indicates a sparsity of intelligent life out there.



Not being sarcastic. If you read my previous post you'll see I'm in full agreement with you 

Just trying to pick your brains because you probably/may know more than me


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## Interference

Space Smith said:


> OK. Where in your opinion do they originate from ? and how many species ?



Outer space.

Life emerges.  Nothing unique about Earth.  From the deepest arctic pit to the highest volcanic rim, you'll find bacteria.

Life evolves.  Given enough time, intelligent life evolves.

Intelligence invents.  Depending on a civilisation's needs, invention can range from cork screws to space ships.

*Aliens? Fact or Fiction?*

Fact.

*Evidence?*

Speculation.

*Purpose of Speculation?*

To stop brains, to make people ask a question that has already been answered a million times instead of asking "If Aliens Are Out There, How Should It Affect Our Actions?"


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## Spartan27

PERCON said:


> Me again, the loony one.
> 
> I have reason to believe that we are very poor receivers. We can only see a very small portion of light, this being our visible light, of course stars out there in the universe exist which we cannot see because they are sending out light with big wavelengths which aren't in our visible range. Therefore, (Takes a deep breath), if there are stars we cannot see, sounds we cannot hear and very important things we can't understand then we aren't exactly the best beings to look for alien life. I'd leave the alien thing as a very promising reality for those living in the next century, not today.
> 
> The alien sightings are very intriguing, I still believe they are all wrong, the term alien 'sightings' to me is completely wrong. Aliens will most likely 'observe' not interact, they will be one of two things, either scientists or rebels, scientists would build the spaceships and have the internal instinct to look for answers and other life, rebels would steal the spaceship to escape from something on the planet blahdy blah...
> 
> In my opinion if you were captured by aliens you will NOT survive, scientists are usually scared of what they don't understand or can't compare to something else so the aliens WOULD disect you and see how humans work. Of course the aliens may not even go that far and may just observe from a distance and marvel at how self-centered human beings are, each one thinking that in their lifetime something amazing will happen even though there are billions of years in which life could have existed and could possibly find this planet.
> 
> Of course we might all be so self centered that we've completely missed the point. Earth may not be the first place that Humanity has existed on, what if life was sent on a meteor that crashed 'coincidently' into Earth, both killing off the dinosaurs and giving life to many primate like creatures, humanity being one of them. Aliens may have already travelled to Earth. They may never travel back here again, and for that reason alone I say "Let's not wait for aliens to find us, let's go find the aliens ourselves"
> 
> The weird one is now leaving again ("Phew" says everyone reading)...
> 
> _PERCON_


 
Nice info, and if I can add, from strictly a very 'secular' point of view, and from a mathimatical point of view, it would be an impossibility that other beings DON'T exist. 

Whether "they" are here or have come here once, is irrelevant or the means to get here is irrelenat as well. "They" are out there somewhere.


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## j d worthington

Spartan27 said:


> Nice info, and if I can add, from strictly a very 'secular' point of view, and from a mathimatical point of view, it would be an impossibility that other beings DON'T exist.
> 
> Whether "they" are here or have come here once, is irrelevant or the means to get here is irrelenat as well. "They" are out there somewhere.


 
Unfortunately, that remains an _assumption_, not backed by hard evidence. Without that evidence, all it will remain is something we believe to be the case. And mathematics without _some_ form of evidence to back it remains strictly theoretical... useful, but no indicator of reality, _per se_.

And yes, I tend to be one of those who believes there are not only other life forms out there, but other intelligent beings. But, so far, reliable evidence is still missing....


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## HardScienceFan

I suppose all really intelligent beings want to avoid us, JD


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## Pyan

j. d. worthington said:


> but other intelligent beings.



As well as who, jd?


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## HardScienceFan

Intelligent life on Earth is largely absent


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## j d worthington

HardScienceFan said:


> Intelligent life on Earth is largely absent


 
Pfoof! You're forgetting cats, dolphins, and elephants....


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## HardScienceFan

I suppose that's why said animals don't have elected leaders


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## j d worthington

HardScienceFan said:


> I suppose that's why said animals don't have elected leaders


 
Or automobiles... or mobile phones... or nuclear weapons.....


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## Interference

Spartan27 said:


> it would be an impossibility that other beings DON'T exist.
> 
> Whether "they" are here or have come here once, is irrelevant ...



Complete agreement from over here.

On a couple of the other points PERCON made, scientist always start what militiamen finish - at least here on earth.  If this planet is of any interest to alien life, it will be a strategic one, I think.  Assuming aliens are as warlike as we are, and Heaven protect us if they are!

If it were strategically necessary to wipe out a civilisation, in order to build a launching pad or some defence outposts, then I've no doubt they'd do it.  Farewell to dinosaurs - farewell, one day, to us.

If aliens think we're insignificant, does that mean they think themselves _significant_?  Humans are quite capable of holding both truths dear to their hearts.  The universe revolves around this person's need for new shoes, or that person's need to be a published author, or another's need to murder all the first born children in Bethlehem; while deaths are God's will, publication is unlikely to change your life, let alone your world, and those shoes will be on sale when they're out of fashion in a month's time.

I'm going to tag this with an unanswered question from a previous post - with apologies if it's off-topic - but, if we accept the existence of Alien Intelligence, what should our response be?  Should we prepare for an encounter with bullets or bibles?


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## Ursa major

I have just read this on the news pages of the BBC's teletext service:

"*There are estimated to be up to 370 million indigenous people in the world.*" Which would make the rest of us aliens, wouldn't it? 

Okay, to come clean, the whole story was this:

"_UN adopts treaty on native rights_

_The United Nations General Assembly has adopted a non-binding declaration on the rights of indigenous people after 22 years of debate._​
_The treaty sets down protections for the human rights of native peoples, and for their land and resources._​
_It passed despite opposition from Australia, Canada, New Zealand ans the United States. They said it was incompatible with their own laws._​
_There are estimated to be up to 370 million indigenous people in the world._"​But just because you may not be indigenous to your country, you're still indigenous to the planet, aren't you? Or perhaps the BBC knows something we don't!


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## Spartan27

j. d. worthington said:


> *Unfortunately, that remains an assumption, not backed by hard evidence.* Without that evidence, all it will remain is something we believe to be the case. And mathematics without _some_ form of evidence to back it remains strictly theoretical... useful, but no indicator of reality, _per se_.
> 
> And yes, I tend to be one of those who believes there are not only other life forms out there, but other intelligent beings. But, so far, reliable evidence is still missing....


 
Hard evidence? as in what?


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