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Topic: Aliens? What Aliens? Post ReplyPost New Topic
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John Byrne
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Grumpy Old Guy

Joined: 11 May 2005
Posts: 132236
Posted: 09 October 2018 at 7:18pm | IP Logged | 1 post reply

LINK

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Robbie Parry
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Joined: 17 June 2007
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Posted: 10 October 2018 at 1:58am | IP Logged | 2 post reply

i think we'll be waiting a long time for first contact. As in forever.
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Petter Myhr Ness
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Joined: 02 July 2009
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Posted: 10 October 2018 at 5:25am | IP Logged | 3 post reply

Every since I was a child I've been dreaming of alien contact, but it's likely to just stay a dream. The sheer vastness of space makes it improbable that we'll ever reach those corners of the Universe where life is likely to exist. Would love to be proven wrong there, though.
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Adam Schulman
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Joined: 22 July 2017
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Posted: 10 October 2018 at 6:29am | IP Logged | 4 post reply

We've yet to fully explore the vastness of Earth's oceans. We don't know about everything that's down there, right? If we can't even finish that project, I don't see how we'll ever find aliens. Or if it would be a great idea if we did. ("These beings are too dangerous to let live...")
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Robbie Parry
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Posted: 10 October 2018 at 6:32am | IP Logged | 5 post reply

Didn't Troy Tempest say exactly the same, Adam? 
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John Byrne
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Posted: 10 October 2018 at 7:00am | IP Logged | 6 post reply

Distance and time are both big factors. If tomorrow we detect an intelligent civilization on a planet orbiting a star 100 light years away, we will be seeing them as they were a century ago.

There's also the matter of technology. For us to detect them, an alien civilization would have to be operating at the same level we are at the moment of detection. If they are a only few decades either side of us, that detection becomes more and more unlikely.

If Proxima A has a dominant civilization at the level of Napoleonic France, the fact that they are "only" 3.8 light years away won't mean much. Neither would it if they were an equal span ahead of us.

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Eric Sofer
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Posted: 10 October 2018 at 7:45am | IP Logged | 7 post reply

I'm paranoid. I still would want to encounter an alien race on a neutral site, and be certain that they couldn't find a way to track our representatives back to Terra.

Both of those are impossible at our current level of technology - when it would take an emergency priority plan to get to Mars any time in, say, the next twenty years, there IS no neutral site in the Solar System.

We have nothing like a cloaking system that would work - I don't even know how well stealth bombers work against both instruments and plain ol' eyeballs. (Then again, I've never seen a stealth aircraft, so...)

The only possibility I can think of in the next 50 years is still a long shot. If we detected an alien exploratory race before they detected us, we might be developed enough to send non-humanoid robots to, say, Titan or Ganymede. As communications would obviously take eight hours back and forth, we'd want to lie about that - say a communications burst every 12 hours. And rather than return them to Earth, we'd want to be able to self-destruct them once discussions were done (or more reasonably, set them on a 24 hour self-destruct that must be deactivated every 12 hours... or after a day, they deactivate and blow up.)

Sure it sounds crazy. But it's at least a margin of safety. And in any case, I suspect that, while aliens could land tomorrow, we won't have extra-terrestrial visitors anytime soon.
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Kevin Brown
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Joined: 31 May 2005
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Posted: 10 October 2018 at 9:23am | IP Logged | 8 post reply

Ugh.  The site won't let me read it without turning off the ad blocker.  Ain't gonna happen.

Ah well.
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Thomas Woods
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Joined: 09 June 2004
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Posted: 10 October 2018 at 11:45am | IP Logged | 9 post reply

If they are out there and more advanced than us, I bet
they are already buried in levels of their own matrix
and don't really care about reality.
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Andrew Bitner
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Joined: 01 June 2004
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Posted: 10 October 2018 at 12:06pm | IP Logged | 10 post reply

It seems beyond dispute that there are alien races out there-- the math makes it all but certain. That said, as JB notes, distance will probably ensure that we remain total strangers even to our closest neighbors.

We're having enough trouble fixing the simpler problems facing our planet. Getting to the point of meeting extraterrestrials seems like an impossible reach at present.
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marios ksidonas
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Posted: 10 October 2018 at 12:36pm | IP Logged | 11 post reply

...We are talking about HUGE distances ...
Space is so vast and yet we haven't found anything about alien life !
This does't mean that is impossible to be in existense...but is more likely impossible to come in contact with them!
First we haven't a mapped the universe yet! Also the area that is mapped and the signals we have received from that area indicates no alien life!( fun factor : every once in a while we all here those big mouth announcements from NASA of that  new planet that can suctain life , only to find out that is some hundreds lightyears away!( 300000 km/sec for a whole year/ whole decade!)
And above this there is the other parameter...that we should co-exist at the same time-period!I mean that galaxies are born and die!And we are no exception! We don't know if alien civilisations are born , or will be born, who says that is the most propable to exist at the same time period!It is something very very unlikely to happen!
and in the case that something is found and we decide to send a mission (in cryo-stasis ect ect) the rest of us won't be alive to see it.
And for any other possibility there are other difficulties that reach the point of no executable! And so on and so on.....
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John Cole
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Joined: 02 March 2008
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Posted: 10 October 2018 at 1:02pm | IP Logged | 12 post reply

Maybe planet earth is not mature enough to be welocmed into the galactic community?
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