Do aliens really exist??

[anotherlife]

It is likely life does exist elsewhere, intelligent life is another thing but the numbers of possible habitable worlds lends itself to possibly intelligent life as well. Worrisome that we have been listening for 50 years and have not heard a discernible 'signal' or 'pattern' out there. Since the age of the universe is 13.7 billion years that means Earth showed up about 9 billion years later. Plenty of time for large numbers of planetary experiments like ours that eventually winked out as their sun ended its cycle.

If there were other intelligent life it isn't too far fetched to think they could be millions or even hundreds of millions of years behind or ahead of us. We think interstellar travel impossible but go back a measly 150 years on Earth and tell someone we will soon land a man on the moon and bring him back or land a machine on that comet up there and see images of its surface and no one would think it possible.

With all the pictures and video that people have taken the last 50+ years if there were anything flying close to Earth we'd have some evidence. There isn't any real evidence.

As for Roswell, I'll leave that where it is.

You make some good points

More evidence we haven't been "visited"
Everyone now carries a video camera in their pocket. Any alien visit would be recorded and posted on youtube within minutes

But the visits are not random. They are planned. Or, are you saying they are not aliens but demons?

 

[rightwinger]

It is likely life does exist elsewhere, intelligent life is another thing but the numbers of possible habitable worlds lends itself to possibly intelligent life as well. Worrisome that we have been listening for 50 years and have not heard a discernible 'signal' or 'pattern' out there. Since the age of the universe is 13.7 billion years that means Earth showed up about 9 billion years later. Plenty of time for large numbers of planetary experiments like ours that eventually winked out as their sun ended its cycle.

If there were other intelligent life it isn't too far fetched to think they could be millions or even hundreds of millions of years behind or ahead of us. We think interstellar travel impossible but go back a measly 150 years on Earth and tell someone we will soon land a man on the moon and bring him back or land a machine on that comet up there and see images of its surface and no one would think it possible.

With all the pictures and video that people have taken the last 50+ years if there were anything flying close to Earth we'd have some evidence. There isn't any real evidence.

As for Roswell, I'll leave that where it is.

You make some good points

More evidence we haven't been "visited"
Everyone now carries a video camera in their pocket. Any alien visit would be recorded and posted on youtube within minutes

But the visits are not random. They are planned. Or, are you saying they are not aliens but demons?

Maybe they are just ghosts or zombies

Think about it

 

[Soupnazi630]

I don't know if aliens exist or not but it is tempting to believe they do, after all, there is a lot of space we don't know anything about.

What do you think of the 1947 Roswell ufo crash??.

It was not a UFO it was a radar target balloon

 

[anotherlife]

It is likely life does exist elsewhere, intelligent life is another thing but the numbers of possible habitable worlds lends itself to possibly intelligent life as well. Worrisome that we have been listening for 50 years and have not heard a discernible 'signal' or 'pattern' out there. Since the age of the universe is 13.7 billion years that means Earth showed up about 9 billion years later. Plenty of time for large numbers of planetary experiments like ours that eventually winked out as their sun ended its cycle.

If there were other intelligent life it isn't too far fetched to think they could be millions or even hundreds of millions of years behind or ahead of us. We think interstellar travel impossible but go back a measly 150 years on Earth and tell someone we will soon land a man on the moon and bring him back or land a machine on that comet up there and see images of its surface and no one would think it possible.

With all the pictures and video that people have taken the last 50+ years if there were anything flying close to Earth we'd have some evidence. There isn't any real evidence.

As for Roswell, I'll leave that where it is.

You make some good points

More evidence we haven't been "visited"
Everyone now carries a video camera in their pocket. Any alien visit would be recorded and posted on youtube within minutes

But the visits are not random. They are planned. Or, are you saying they are not aliens but demons?

Maybe they are just ghosts or zombies

Think about it

Oh I saw this the other day on TV, that zombies used to be real, as certain entities called "avatars" had the power of disturbing the dead and bring them back to life, rotting and all. Yuck. Holloweeners may be suckers.

 

[IsaacNewton]

It is likely life does exist elsewhere, intelligent life is another thing but the numbers of possible habitable worlds lends itself to possibly intelligent life as well. Worrisome that we have been listening for 50 years and have not heard a discernible 'signal' or 'pattern' out there. Since the age of the universe is 13.7 billion years that means Earth showed up about 9 billion years later. Plenty of time for large numbers of planetary experiments like ours that eventually winked out as their sun ended its cycle.

If there were other intelligent life it isn't too far fetched to think they could be millions or even hundreds of millions of years behind or ahead of us. We think interstellar travel impossible but go back a measly 150 years on Earth and tell someone we will soon land a man on the moon and bring him back or land a machine on that comet up there and see images of its surface and no one would think it possible.

With all the pictures and video that people have taken the last 50+ years if there were anything flying close to Earth we'd have some evidence. There isn't any real evidence.

As for Roswell, I'll leave that where it is.

You make some good points

More evidence we haven't been "visited"
Everyone now carries a video camera in their pocket. Any alien visit would be recorded and posted on youtube within minutes

I saw an interview with Steven Spielberg about a month ago and he was talking about making Close Encounters. He noted something I've thought for the last 20 years. In the film a reporter says to the effect "in all the video we've shot we've never captured a car wreck as it happened." Spielberg noted this was true at the time but now there are hundreds of millions of video cameras at any one's fingertips at any given time. If there were something to see we'd have recorded it by now. Not definitively, but by the odds there isn't evidence.

It may well be that travelling faster than the speed of light turns out to be insurmountable and star travel impossible. If so then any intelligent life that arises is forever destined to do so alone. Our tv broadcasts have been travelling through space since 1936 so about 80 years or 80 light years distance.

The universe is a big place! Rough estimates now are 150 billion light year across. I have a feeling that there are ways to take shortcuts and we will, if we survive long enough, find them.

 

[rightwinger]

It is likely life does exist elsewhere, intelligent life is another thing but the numbers of possible habitable worlds lends itself to possibly intelligent life as well. Worrisome that we have been listening for 50 years and have not heard a discernible 'signal' or 'pattern' out there. Since the age of the universe is 13.7 billion years that means Earth showed up about 9 billion years later. Plenty of time for large numbers of planetary experiments like ours that eventually winked out as their sun ended its cycle.

If there were other intelligent life it isn't too far fetched to think they could be millions or even hundreds of millions of years behind or ahead of us. We think interstellar travel impossible but go back a measly 150 years on Earth and tell someone we will soon land a man on the moon and bring him back or land a machine on that comet up there and see images of its surface and no one would think it possible.

With all the pictures and video that people have taken the last 50+ years if there were anything flying close to Earth we'd have some evidence. There isn't any real evidence.

As for Roswell, I'll leave that where it is.

You make some good points

More evidence we haven't been "visited"
Everyone now carries a video camera in their pocket. Any alien visit would be recorded and posted on youtube within minutes

I saw an interview with Steven Spielberg about a month ago and he was talking about making Close Encounters. He noted something I've thought for the last 20 years. In the film a reporter says to the effect "in all the video we've shot we've never captured a car wreck as it happened." Spielberg noted this was true at the time but now there are hundreds of millions of video cameras at any one's fingertips at any given time. If there were something to see we'd have recorded it by now. Not definitively, but by the odds there isn't evidence.

It may well be that travelling faster than the speed of light turns out to be insurmountable and star travel impossible. If so then any intelligent life that arises is forever destined to do so alone. Our tv broadcasts have been travelling through space since 1936 so about 80 years or 80 light years distance.

The universe is a big place! Rough estimates now are 150 billion light year across. I have a feeling that there are ways to take shortcuts and we will, if we survive long enough, find them.

I like to subscribe to what I call my Cornfield Theory

The closest star is 4 light years away. Even if travelling at the speed of light were possible, it would take four years to get here and four years to get back. So an interstellar traveler would have spent eight years in space and when they got back and were asked what they saw they would say....we saw this cornfield in Iowa, turned around and came right back

Anyone finding a planet like earth with intelligent life (which is very, very rare) would stay for an extended period of time. The visit would be more......Take me to your leader
than a quick flyby of an Iowa cornfield

By the way...you can go on youtube and see all kinds of car wrecks as they happen

 

[Boss]

Traveling the speed of light has an insurmountable problem with physics. Theoretically, it cannot happen. We can dream and have fantasies. That will never change physics. And even traveling anywhere near the speed of light... it's not only something we can't do at this time, I'm not so sure we'd want to. Think about streaking through space in a tin can at near the speed of light and encountering a nice sized asteroid or meteorite crossing our path? It's fun to watch space travel in the movies but in reality it's much more wrought with problems. There is no AAA in space, if you have a problem you just die.

I think the wormhole theories are a lot of wishful thinking by whimsical minds. We have no evidence such a thing is even possible. I still find it stunning that some of you people are the same people who argue vociferously in other threads about the absence of evidence for God but somehow, you believe in this kind of stuff.

 

[rightwinger]

Traveling the speed of light has an insurmountable problem with physics. Theoretically, it cannot happen. We can dream and have fantasies. That will never change physics. And even traveling anywhere near the speed of light... it's not only something we can't do at this time, I'm not so sure we'd want to. Think about streaking through space in a tin can at near the speed of light and encountering a nice sized asteroid or meteorite crossing our path? It's fun to watch space travel in the movies but in reality it's much more wrought with problems. There is no AAA in space, if you have a problem you just die.

I think the wormhole theories are a lot of wishful thinking by whimsical minds. We have no evidence such a thing is even possible. I still find it stunning that some of you people are the same people who argue vociferously in other threads about the absence of evidence for God but somehow, you believe in this kind of stuff.

That is the thing with alien fantasies

They have to subscribe to the same chemistry and physics that we do

They have to subscribe to the same periodic table of elements as we do and it is still the most simple elements and simple compounds that will form life

When you look at what happens to a subatomic particle when it is accelerated at emense speeds and then ask what would happen to a living being that was accelerated like that?

 

[Boss]

It is likely life does exist elsewhere, intelligent life is another thing but the numbers of possible habitable worlds lends itself to possibly intelligent life as well. Worrisome that we have been listening for 50 years and have not heard a discernible 'signal' or 'pattern' out there. Since the age of the universe is 13.7 billion years that means Earth showed up about 9 billion years later. Plenty of time for large numbers of planetary experiments like ours that eventually winked out as their sun ended its cycle.

If there were other intelligent life it isn't too far fetched to think they could be millions or even hundreds of millions of years behind or ahead of us. We think interstellar travel impossible but go back a measly 150 years on Earth and tell someone we will soon land a man on the moon and bring him back or land a machine on that comet up there and see images of its surface and no one would think it possible.

With all the pictures and video that people have taken the last 50+ years if there were anything flying close to Earth we'd have some evidence. There isn't any real evidence.

As for Roswell, I'll leave that where it is.

You make some good points

More evidence we haven't been "visited"
Everyone now carries a video camera in their pocket. Any alien visit would be recorded and posted on youtube within minutes

I saw an interview with Steven Spielberg about a month ago and he was talking about making Close Encounters. He noted something I've thought for the last 20 years. In the film a reporter says to the effect "in all the video we've shot we've never captured a car wreck as it happened." Spielberg noted this was true at the time but now there are hundreds of millions of video cameras at any one's fingertips at any given time. If there were something to see we'd have recorded it by now. Not definitively, but by the odds there isn't evidence.

It may well be that travelling faster than the speed of light turns out to be insurmountable and star travel impossible. If so then any intelligent life that arises is forever destined to do so alone. Our tv broadcasts have been travelling through space since 1936 so about 80 years or 80 light years distance.

The universe is a big place! Rough estimates now are 150 billion light year across. I have a feeling that there are ways to take shortcuts and we will, if we survive long enough, find them.

I like to subscribe to what I call my Cornfield Theory

The closest star is 4 light years away. Even if travelling at the speed of light were possible, it would take four years to get here and four years to get back. So an interstellar traveler would have spent eight years in space and when they got back and were asked what they saw they would say....we saw this cornfield in Iowa, turned around and came right back

Anyone finding a planet like earth with intelligent life (which is very, very rare) would stay for an extended period of time. The visit would be more......Take me to your leader
than a quick flyby of an Iowa cornfield

By the way...you can go on youtube and see all kinds of car wrecks as they happen

Your posts are fun to read. It's like watching a sci-fi movie.. you speak with such authority on space travel, not having ever done any yourself.

Why do we assume that another intelligent life form would be anything at all like we are? How do we know that "physical reality" isn't like a radio frequency? Perhaps the reason we don't find signals from other civilizations is the same reason you don't find two radio stations broadcasting on the same frequency? Perhaps there are vast populations as close as Mars, we're just not aware of them because they are operating on a different 'frequency' of reality?

It's just funny how our minds work. We can all rationalize that if we met an alien civilization they would probably not speak English... I mean, what are the odds, right? But the same exact odds apply to virtually anything about them in relation to us, when you think about it. Whatever they are will not be a product of a system like ours, so they will likely be nothing at all like us. We somehow rationalize they will have five senses like us, why do we think this? Why can't they lack our five senses but have five of their own which are suited to their existence? No reason... just our human hubris kicking in.

 

[Boss]

Traveling the speed of light has an insurmountable problem with physics. Theoretically, it cannot happen. We can dream and have fantasies. That will never change physics. And even traveling anywhere near the speed of light... it's not only something we can't do at this time, I'm not so sure we'd want to. Think about streaking through space in a tin can at near the speed of light and encountering a nice sized asteroid or meteorite crossing our path? It's fun to watch space travel in the movies but in reality it's much more wrought with problems. There is no AAA in space, if you have a problem you just die.

I think the wormhole theories are a lot of wishful thinking by whimsical minds. We have no evidence such a thing is even possible. I still find it stunning that some of you people are the same people who argue vociferously in other threads about the absence of evidence for God but somehow, you believe in this kind of stuff.

That is the thing with alien fantasies

They have to subscribe to the same chemistry and physics that we do

They have to subscribe to the same periodic table of elements as we do and it is still the most simple elements and simple compounds that will form life

When you look at what happens to a subatomic particle when it is accelerated at emense speeds and then ask what would happen to a living being that was accelerated like that?

Well a particle being accelerated doesn't cause anything to happen. It can be collided with another particle... is that what you mean?

And WHY do you think alien life has to conform to our physics? I admit, it is probably a natural assumption but we shouldn't make assumptions. We may not know everything... yes, I realize that may shock you but it's the truth.

 

[percysunshine]

.
"Do aliens really exist??"
.

Explain Dennis Rodman...

.

 

[Delta4Embassy]

It is likely life does exist elsewhere, intelligent life is another thing but the numbers of possible habitable worlds lends itself to possibly intelligent life as well. Worrisome that we have been listening for 50 years and have not heard a discernible 'signal' or 'pattern' out there. Since the age of the universe is 13.7 billion years that means Earth showed up about 9 billion years later. Plenty of time for large numbers of planetary experiments like ours that eventually winked out as their sun ended its cycle.

If there were other intelligent life it isn't too far fetched to think they could be millions or even hundreds of millions of years behind or ahead of us. We think interstellar travel impossible but go back a measly 150 years on Earth and tell someone we will soon land a man on the moon and bring him back or land a machine on that comet up there and see images of its surface and no one would think it possible.

With all the pictures and video that people have taken the last 50+ years if there were anything flying close to Earth we'd have some evidence. There isn't any real evidence.

As for Roswell, I'll leave that where it is.

You make some good points

More evidence we haven't been "visited"
Everyone now carries a video camera in their pocket. Any alien visit would be recorded and posted on youtube within minutes

I saw an interview with Steven Spielberg about a month ago and he was talking about making Close Encounters. He noted something I've thought for the last 20 years. In the film a reporter says to the effect "in all the video we've shot we've never captured a car wreck as it happened." Spielberg noted this was true at the time but now there are hundreds of millions of video cameras at any one's fingertips at any given time. If there were something to see we'd have recorded it by now. Not definitively, but by the odds there isn't evidence.

It may well be that travelling faster than the speed of light turns out to be insurmountable and star travel impossible. If so then any intelligent life that arises is forever destined to do so alone. Our tv broadcasts have been travelling through space since 1936 so about 80 years or 80 light years distance.

The universe is a big place! Rough estimates now are 150 billion light year across. I have a feeling that there are ways to take shortcuts and we will, if we survive long enough, find them.

I like to subscribe to what I call my Cornfield Theory

The closest star is 4 light years away. Even if travelling at the speed of light were possible, it would take four years to get here and four years to get back. So an interstellar traveler would have spent eight years in space and when they got back and were asked what they saw they would say....we saw this cornfield in Iowa, turned around and came right back

Anyone finding a planet like earth with intelligent life (which is very, very rare) would stay for an extended period of time. The visit would be more......Take me to your leader
than a quick flyby of an Iowa cornfield

By the way...you can go on youtube and see all kinds of car wrecks as they happen

Your posts are fun to read. It's like watching a sci-fi movie.. you speak with such authority on space travel, not having ever done any yourself.

Why do we assume that another intelligent life form would be anything at all like we are? How do we know that "physical reality" isn't like a radio frequency? Perhaps the reason we don't find signals from other civilizations is the same reason you don't find two radio stations broadcasting on the same frequency? Perhaps there are vast populations as close as Mars, we're just not aware of them because they are operating on a different 'frequency' of reality?

It's just funny how our minds work. We can all rationalize that if we met an alien civilization they would probably not speak English... I mean, what are the odds, right? But the same exact odds apply to virtually anything about them in relation to us, when you think about it. Whatever they are will not be a product of a system like ours, so they will likely be nothing at all like us. We somehow rationalize they will have five senses like us, why do we think this? Why can't they lack our five senses but have five of their own which are suited to their existence? No reason... just our human hubris kicking in.

For a species to evolve to the point of inerstellar travel, some assumptions can be made. Like they'd have evolved from a predator species of their home planet that they were successful enough to do better than the compeitition to have evolved that far. Prey animals don't become intelligent since they become snacks. And being the eater of flesh, the nutrition has an effect. So being predators we can start making some good guesses about their nature and physiology. Predators need stereoscopic vision for ranging for instance, so they have likely at least two eyes in the fronts of their heads, and if that's the case finite arrangement for biology then comes into play. Only so many ody configurations where stereoscopic vision predators are gonna successfully evolve. If they're from a planet orbiting certain kinds of older stars emitting less light they probably have larger eyes to get more light, maybe they can see near-infrared or ultraviolent wavelengths like rattlesnakes and the like. If the planet's gravity is higher than our's they may be shorter with stronger legs, etc.

 

[rightwinger]

It is likely life does exist elsewhere, intelligent life is another thing but the numbers of possible habitable worlds lends itself to possibly intelligent life as well. Worrisome that we have been listening for 50 years and have not heard a discernible 'signal' or 'pattern' out there. Since the age of the universe is 13.7 billion years that means Earth showed up about 9 billion years later. Plenty of time for large numbers of planetary experiments like ours that eventually winked out as their sun ended its cycle.

If there were other intelligent life it isn't too far fetched to think they could be millions or even hundreds of millions of years behind or ahead of us. We think interstellar travel impossible but go back a measly 150 years on Earth and tell someone we will soon land a man on the moon and bring him back or land a machine on that comet up there and see images of its surface and no one would think it possible.

With all the pictures and video that people have taken the last 50+ years if there were anything flying close to Earth we'd have some evidence. There isn't any real evidence.

As for Roswell, I'll leave that where it is.

You make some good points

More evidence we haven't been "visited"
Everyone now carries a video camera in their pocket. Any alien visit would be recorded and posted on youtube within minutes

I saw an interview with Steven Spielberg about a month ago and he was talking about making Close Encounters. He noted something I've thought for the last 20 years. In the film a reporter says to the effect "in all the video we've shot we've never captured a car wreck as it happened." Spielberg noted this was true at the time but now there are hundreds of millions of video cameras at any one's fingertips at any given time. If there were something to see we'd have recorded it by now. Not definitively, but by the odds there isn't evidence.

It may well be that travelling faster than the speed of light turns out to be insurmountable and star travel impossible. If so then any intelligent life that arises is forever destined to do so alone. Our tv broadcasts have been travelling through space since 1936 so about 80 years or 80 light years distance.

The universe is a big place! Rough estimates now are 150 billion light year across. I have a feeling that there are ways to take shortcuts and we will, if we survive long enough, find them.

I like to subscribe to what I call my Cornfield Theory

The closest star is 4 light years away. Even if travelling at the speed of light were possible, it would take four years to get here and four years to get back. So an interstellar traveler would have spent eight years in space and when they got back and were asked what they saw they would say....we saw this cornfield in Iowa, turned around and came right back

Anyone finding a planet like earth with intelligent life (which is very, very rare) would stay for an extended period of time. The visit would be more......Take me to your leader
than a quick flyby of an Iowa cornfield

By the way...you can go on youtube and see all kinds of car wrecks as they happen

Your posts are fun to read. It's like watching a sci-fi movie.. you speak with such authority on space travel, not having ever done any yourself.

Why do we assume that another intelligent life form would be anything at all like we are? How do we know that "physical reality" isn't like a radio frequency? Perhaps the reason we don't find signals from other civilizations is the same reason you don't find two radio stations broadcasting on the same frequency? Perhaps there are vast populations as close as Mars, we're just not aware of them because they are operating on a different 'frequency' of reality?

It's just funny how our minds work. We can all rationalize that if we met an alien civilization they would probably not speak English... I mean, what are the odds, right? But the same exact odds apply to virtually anything about them in relation to us, when you think about it. Whatever they are will not be a product of a system like ours, so they will likely be nothing at all like us. We somehow rationalize they will have five senses like us, why do we think this? Why can't they lack our five senses but have five of their own which are suited to their existence? No reason... just our human hubris kicking in.

Damn...that is a stupid post

Other intelligent life does not have to be like we are......but they have to use the same basic building blocks as we do

The science and chemistry of those basic building blocks have to follow the same laws ours do

You don't find two radio stations broadcasting on the same frequency because of the FCC

 

[percysunshine]

It is likely life does exist elsewhere, intelligent life is another thing but the numbers of possible habitable worlds lends itself to possibly intelligent life as well. Worrisome that we have been listening for 50 years and have not heard a discernible 'signal' or 'pattern' out there. Since the age of the universe is 13.7 billion years that means Earth showed up about 9 billion years later. Plenty of time for large numbers of planetary experiments like ours that eventually winked out as their sun ended its cycle.

If there were other intelligent life it isn't too far fetched to think they could be millions or even hundreds of millions of years behind or ahead of us. We think interstellar travel impossible but go back a measly 150 years on Earth and tell someone we will soon land a man on the moon and bring him back or land a machine on that comet up there and see images of its surface and no one would think it possible.

With all the pictures and video that people have taken the last 50+ years if there were anything flying close to Earth we'd have some evidence. There isn't any real evidence.

As for Roswell, I'll leave that where it is.

You make some good points

More evidence we haven't been "visited"
Everyone now carries a video camera in their pocket. Any alien visit would be recorded and posted on youtube within minutes

I saw an interview with Steven Spielberg about a month ago and he was talking about making Close Encounters. He noted something I've thought for the last 20 years. In the film a reporter says to the effect "in all the video we've shot we've never captured a car wreck as it happened." Spielberg noted this was true at the time but now there are hundreds of millions of video cameras at any one's fingertips at any given time. If there were something to see we'd have recorded it by now. Not definitively, but by the odds there isn't evidence.

It may well be that travelling faster than the speed of light turns out to be insurmountable and star travel impossible. If so then any intelligent life that arises is forever destined to do so alone. Our tv broadcasts have been travelling through space since 1936 so about 80 years or 80 light years distance.

The universe is a big place! Rough estimates now are 150 billion light year across. I have a feeling that there are ways to take shortcuts and we will, if we survive long enough, find them.

I like to subscribe to what I call my Cornfield Theory

The closest star is 4 light years away. Even if travelling at the speed of light were possible, it would take four years to get here and four years to get back. So an interstellar traveler would have spent eight years in space and when they got back and were asked what they saw they would say....we saw this cornfield in Iowa, turned around and came right back

Anyone finding a planet like earth with intelligent life (which is very, very rare) would stay for an extended period of time. The visit would be more......Take me to your leader
than a quick flyby of an Iowa cornfield

By the way...you can go on youtube and see all kinds of car wrecks as they happen

Your posts are fun to read. It's like watching a sci-fi movie.. you speak with such authority on space travel, not having ever done any yourself.

Why do we assume that another intelligent life form would be anything at all like we are? How do we know that "physical reality" isn't like a radio frequency? Perhaps the reason we don't find signals from other civilizations is the same reason you don't find two radio stations broadcasting on the same frequency? Perhaps there are vast populations as close as Mars, we're just not aware of them because they are operating on a different 'frequency' of reality?

It's just funny how our minds work. We can all rationalize that if we met an alien civilization they would probably not speak English... I mean, what are the odds, right? But the same exact odds apply to virtually anything about them in relation to us, when you think about it. Whatever they are will not be a product of a system like ours, so they will likely be nothing at all like us. We somehow rationalize they will have five senses like us, why do we think this? Why can't they lack our five senses but have five of their own which are suited to their existence? No reason... just our human hubris kicking in.

Damn...that is a stupid post

Other intelligent life does not have to be like we are......but they have to use the same basic building blocks as we do

The science and chemistry of those basic building blocks have to follow the same laws ours do

You don't find two radio stations broadcasting on the same frequency because of the FCC

.
If there were an extraterrestrial posting in USMB, how would we know?

I have always suspected rightwinger is not from this planet.

 

[Boss]

Other intelligent life does not have to be like we are......but they have to use the same basic building blocks as we do

Or they can use building blocks we've not discovered yet. This is what I mean... we ASSUME a lot when it comes to this stuff. It's like we think we know everything. I'd say it's a pretty safe bet we don't know everything.

Predators need stereoscopic vision for ranging for instance, so they have likely at least two eyes in the fronts of their heads, and if that's the case finite arrangement for biology then comes into play. Only so many ody configurations where stereoscopic vision predators are gonna successfully evolve.

And we see this manifest in our science fiction creations. However, there is no rule that says other species must follow your preconceptions. You are making rationalizations based on life in your system. Yours may not be the only system. In fact, I think it's far more likely their system would be totally different in ways that we can't even understand as of now. There's no "proof" for any of this, it's all total speculation from top to bottom. We can speculate and rationalize all day long, we're probably not going to live long enough to find out if we were right.

 

[Boss]

You don't find two radio stations broadcasting on the same frequency because of the FCC

Well yeah, but that's not what I meant. Why does the FCC not allow it? Because you'd have two stations conflicting with each other's signals. Perhaps life in our universe operates on the same principle... it's out there but we don't observe it because it's not on our frequency? It's not far fetched because we know that everything we can observe is about frequency.

 

[IsaacNewton]

It is likely life does exist elsewhere, intelligent life is another thing but the numbers of possible habitable worlds lends itself to possibly intelligent life as well. Worrisome that we have been listening for 50 years and have not heard a discernible 'signal' or 'pattern' out there. Since the age of the universe is 13.7 billion years that means Earth showed up about 9 billion years later. Plenty of time for large numbers of planetary experiments like ours that eventually winked out as their sun ended its cycle.

If there were other intelligent life it isn't too far fetched to think they could be millions or even hundreds of millions of years behind or ahead of us. We think interstellar travel impossible but go back a measly 150 years on Earth and tell someone we will soon land a man on the moon and bring him back or land a machine on that comet up there and see images of its surface and no one would think it possible.

With all the pictures and video that people have taken the last 50+ years if there were anything flying close to Earth we'd have some evidence. There isn't any real evidence.

As for Roswell, I'll leave that where it is.

You make some good points

More evidence we haven't been "visited"
Everyone now carries a video camera in their pocket. Any alien visit would be recorded and posted on youtube within minutes

I saw an interview with Steven Spielberg about a month ago and he was talking about making Close Encounters. He noted something I've thought for the last 20 years. In the film a reporter says to the effect "in all the video we've shot we've never captured a car wreck as it happened." Spielberg noted this was true at the time but now there are hundreds of millions of video cameras at any one's fingertips at any given time. If there were something to see we'd have recorded it by now. Not definitively, but by the odds there isn't evidence.

It may well be that travelling faster than the speed of light turns out to be insurmountable and star travel impossible. If so then any intelligent life that arises is forever destined to do so alone. Our tv broadcasts have been travelling through space since 1936 so about 80 years or 80 light years distance.

The universe is a big place! Rough estimates now are 150 billion light year across. I have a feeling that there are ways to take shortcuts and we will, if we survive long enough, find them.

I like to subscribe to what I call my Cornfield Theory

The closest star is 4 light years away. Even if travelling at the speed of light were possible, it would take four years to get here and four years to get back. So an interstellar traveler would have spent eight years in space and when they got back and were asked what they saw they would say....we saw this cornfield in Iowa, turned around and came right back

Anyone finding a planet like earth with intelligent life (which is very, very rare) would stay for an extended period of time. The visit would be more......Take me to your leader
than a quick flyby of an Iowa cornfield

By the way...you can go on youtube and see all kinds of car wrecks as they happen

Yes that is the point about car wrecks Spielberg was making, there are so many cameras now if there were something visiting we'd have SOMETHING to look at. Something. We don't yet.

As for life on another planet I think in fact it would be made of the same stuff we are and probably evolve similarly, though not exactly (but likely close to) as life on Earth. There is a reason life evolved here of the atoms and molecules it did, that is what worked to form life, water being the key ingredient. Occam's razor. The same laws that governed the rise and evolution of life here would be in force everywhere. Also, I think the fact that life evolved out of the elements that it did suggests that that is the easiest formula for such an occurrence to take place.

Also, any intelligent life that came here would simply be the mirror image of us going there. We want to know, they would want to know. We wouldn't be there to invade anything, the huge outlay of resources alone would mean as simple a craft as possible sent to be a probe. They wouldn't be aliens visiting us, it would be us visiting us. Intelligence seeking out other life and intelligence. There's the line in Contact where the Jodie Foster's character thinks it absurd that an alien race would want to invade us, it would be like us stepping on an ant hill. And the religious gentleman responds, "and how guilty would we feel wiping out an ant hill".

My response is, "if they had satellites and talked to us"?

Its all conjecture but odds say there is some form of life out there. I think we are getting close to finding other planets with life as our ability to find and study other planets is increasing very quickly.

 

[Boss]

The same laws that governed the rise and evolution of life here would be in force everywhere.

Ike, I have to disagree with you here.

In case it has escaped your notice, our system of nature is quite unique. Our planet has a wobbly rotation due to a collision which created a geosynchronous moon, which is just the right size to pull and tug on ocean tides. If we did not have seasons or tides, how many billions of life forms could have never evolved? Would our "theory" of evolution have even worked? I mean, I know it's easy to say "meh, life would have figured out a way..." but really, when we get down to it... without the tides or seasons, what would life be? How could plant life know to regenerate seeds or produce pollen? How would an ocean without tides avoid becoming stagnant, creating an environment nothing could live in? I think we can see how no tides or seasons would be a major calamity for life as we have come to know it.

So no... the same "laws" won't apply elsewhere unless they happened to be lucky enough to be on a planet with plenty of oxygen, water and rock, with the right density and atmospheric pressure, in a wobbly rotation around just the right sized sun with just the right sized moon, so on and so forth.

 

[wihosa]

Any alien beings capable of traveling multiple light years to reach Earth are far more advanced than we. It stands to reason that their technology is wholly different than ours. They may look upon radio waves as a form of communication the way we see the Pony Express, ridiculously out molded. Even if for some reason they did monitor radio waves they might find us so primitive as to have nothing to say to us. Would we stop to have a conversation with a squirrel?

 

[Boss]

Any alien beings capable of traveling multiple light years to reach Earth are far more advanced than we. It stands to reason that their technology is wholly different than ours. They may look upon radio waves as a form of communication the way we see the Pony Express, ridiculously out molded. Even if for some reason they did monitor radio waves they might find us so primitive as to have nothing to say to us. Would we stop to have a conversation with a squirrel?

Another aspect is one raised by Stephen Hawking... I'm told he's a pretty smart guy... He says it's perhaps a bad idea for humanity to be sending signals out into space in order to try and make contact with something... He gives the analogy of the human body as the universe and we are like a virus organism within that system. Our signals could be as detrimental as signals in the body which trigger antibodies. There could be something out there that we don't necessarily want to know we are here.

I am still blown away by the "observer effect" in physics. If you want to really expand your mind about this subject, go read up on this. Absolutely fascinating stuff.