Alien civilisations - less likely?

[Anthony G Williams]

Originally Posted by J Riff

Half do, the other half overrun and dominate, and they don't go away cos you are a love-god! And I oughter know.

Is that because you're an unappreciated love-god?

[J Riff]

No, it's because I live in Canada.
I'm reading Uninvited Visitors -a biologist looks at UFOs,
and it talks about OOPOs- out-of-place objects -
stuff that fell on Earth, in the times before the Media was completely leashed, and the list is awesome.
Blood, metal cannisters, animals, weird things that took weeks to die, all kinds of junk. Barns carried away, Angel-hair, all sorts fun stuff floating down.
The best ones, which we heard about when it happened, were the chunks of living....stuff, that took weeks, or in one case, two years to die.
It gets crazy. Chickens disappear, then fish rain down. Were 'they' trying to be nice and pay back for stealing the chicken coop?
Also, the Philadelphia Experiment letters are looked at. What the h*ll happened there?

[Metryq]

With all those chaotic planets out there, the mission of the Dark Star is sounding more plausible. Just be wary of bomb number 20.

Vertigo wrote: It's hard to imagine there are any significantly different resources out there than we don't already have here in our solar system

Ha! What a thought. The Orion slave girls are always greener on the other side of the fence? After incredible breakthroughs in physics and a massive economic and engineering effort, the first starships from Earth find a plentitude of intelligent life subsisting at pre-industrial levels. Given the opportunity, they'd all come to our Solar system as the prime real estate anywhere.

[Vertigo]

Ah well I wasn't considering Orion slave girls when I made the post...

But seriously we have a solar system unusually high in all the elements including the heavier ones. It is just hard to think of anything that would be worth transporting at such high cost. Seeds of useful alien plants perhaps, though that probably wouldn't be allowed. The only other thing I can think of that might be worth trading would be technology - knowledge rather than artifacts.

Compare with good old Earth; even here as transport cost continue to steadily rise, more and more effort is made to use local produce rather than incur those high costs and their carbon footprint. And that's just transporting a few thousand km rather than light years. Maybe that will change if we can ever develop some kind of cheap FTL drive but frankly I doubt it.

[clovis-man]

I'm sticking with the current mantra: If there were anyone else out there, they would have dropped in by now. So, by definition, they cannot exist.

[Stephen Palmer]

?

that's hardly a definition...

[Vertigo]

Originally Posted by clovis-man

I'm sticking with the current mantra: If there were anyone else out there, they would have dropped in by now. So, by definition, they cannot exist.

The problem with that "definition" is that we are here and unless we can find some physics that lets us get around the speed of light (unlikely in my opinion) we are unlikely to be going out there and dropping in on anybody else out there, which doesn't mean we don't exist.

So maybe there's lots of alien civilisations out there (personally I doubt it, but maybe) and they are faced with the same physics as us so have never been realistically able to go out visiting other civilisations.

As to why we haven't "heard" them, the timescales are very long and we, for example, are gradually getting much more efficient at how we transmit and receive radio. Within a decade or so I suspect we won't be blasting out very much in the way of undirected radio signals of a power strong enough to be picked up light years away. So maybe there's only a very small easily missed window of opportunity for detecting another civilisation by their radio emissions. They may be out there but we might never detect them. Personally I doubt there is much other intelligent life out there but for other reasons that I have expressed elsewhere, such as those that are the topic of this thread.

[clovis-man]

Originally Posted by Stephen Palmer

?

that's hardly a definition...

Nah. Just Fermi's conundrum. I would only say that mathematical models cannot be considered realistic when used to project the "odds". The word "likelihood" in and of itself begs the question.

[Anthony G Williams]

Originally Posted by J Riff

No, it's because I live in Canada.
I'm reading Uninvited Visitors -a biologist looks at UFOs,
and it talks about OOPOs- out-of-place objects -
stuff that fell on Earth, in the times before the Media was completely leashed, and the list is awesome.
Blood, metal cannisters, animals, weird things that took weeks to die, all kinds of junk. Barns carried away, Angel-hair, all sorts fun stuff floating down.
The best ones, which we heard about when it happened, were the chunks of living....stuff, that took weeks, or in one case, two years to die.
It gets crazy. Chickens disappear, then fish rain down. Were 'they' trying to be nice and pay back for stealing the chicken coop?
Also, the Philadelphia Experiment letters are looked at. What the h*ll happened there?

In years gone by, I read lots of books by people claiming the most amazing things and stating lots of evidence in support.

The problem was that none of the evidence was independently verified by anyone. It was basically hot air - and it doesn't sound as if anything has changed...

[Starbeast]

Originally Posted by Anthony G Williams

The problem was that none of the evidence was independently verified by anyone.

True, only the fortunate lucky few like astronauts get to see...........

The way these guy talk is no wonder why the NASA channel doen't show much of real time space with a clear picture, we always get mostly fuzzy black and white footage and long boring shots of mission control with personel standing around. Don't get me started about the so-called Earth Channel, no real time cameras with clear views of Earth there either. I clicked on that channel many times and I can't even make out the Earth, even though at the bottom of the screen it says "Earth View".

But of course, none of this proves the existence of alien space craft flying around constantly.

[J Riff]

Why worry about saucers, when the alines would be down here, impersonating human beings and doing horrific things, because they were raised in an insect culture.
Once they get onto welfare, there's no stopping them.

[Starbeast]

Originally Posted by J Riff

Why worry about saucers, when the alines would be down here, impersonating human beings and doing horrific things, because they were raised in an insect culture.
Once they get onto welfare, there's no stopping them.

A few people have written books about aliens from elsewhere among us humans, some had worked in the government and said:

"What worries the governments is the fact that some alien races either look human or can appear to look human."

If this is true, how would the average person know who is human and who isn't? Are they here to observe people close up or are they up to no good? Sometimes I think about how cruel humans can be to one another, maybe the outworlders want to analyze us because we do such unspeakable things to each other without care.

[Anthony G Williams]

Originally Posted by Starbeast

True, only the fortunate lucky few like astronauts get to see...........

But of course, none of this proves the existence of alien space craft flying around constantly.

You are right, it doesn't. Eyewitness evidence is notoriously unreliable and certainly never counts as "verified" by itself.

[Starbeast]

[J Riff]

Some things are too weird. People won't believe them, no matter what.
I think that every SF movie has an element of the truth, added together it's a real mess. Space-rats. Energy Vampires, protoplasmic leeches... all the things that might hang around a nice place like Earth. )