Are we alone ??

[oldenough]

With the latest round of UFO sightings i got to thinking about whether there is intelligent life somewhere outside our Universe, and if there is, and it has made what must be a monumental effort to get here , then why do they not let thereselves be known to us. Now i realize there are a lot of opinions regarding UFO sightings and any debate on that would be futile, but to repeat myself the question is...what would be stopping them from making contact with us ?

[oldtimer]

The non-interference doctrine of star fleet command.

[Audio Flynn]

what would be stopping them from making contact with us ?

========================

Far too large percentage of the planet's population is barbaric. Perhaps they are waiting for us too quit killing each other so frequently.

[mas]

Oldtimer is obviously correct…

or it could simply be common sense...

But what truly fascinates me is our assumptions.

We, whom we assume to be the ‘most
intelligent life form in the universe’ can’t figure out what we see, (which is
after all exactly what a UFO ‘is’!), and by default that unknown becomes an alien
presence!

But when you think about our species' supreme
accomplishment, aside from our the inability to live together for any period of
time without regular bouts of spontaneous internecine genocide, being the TV with Jerry
Springer, court TV, Maury Povitch, TMZ, Tyra Banks, American Idol, Girls Gone Wild and JackAss videos, and
UTube...

No wonder the aliens seek out cows and lower invertebrates
with which to communicate. They ARE seeking out the more intelligent life forms
on Earth.

[Groomlakearea51]

OE: Good question. Here's a few thoughts.

Statistically (and based on the recent advances in orbiting object detection at extreme distances), and leaving the philosophical and theological issues alone, I would say probably more likely than not that there's someone out there. Just my gut feeling.

Contact? Assuming Einstein's theories are correct (and so far...), and we detect someone's EM (electromagnetic) spectrum radiations from let's say 5-10,000 light years away (well within our own galactic local area), then what we are hearing is 5-10,000 years old.... If that's the case, and we will never exceed the speed of light, then it would at least, answer the basic question, but could be very depressing.

EM transmissions by a civilization (unless extremely high powered, and directed/ aimed at us), in the grand scheme of things, are likely very hard to detect, if at all. Comparatively speaking, it's like trying to listen to a small child softly whispering in the top row of a large stadium when the stadium is filled with 100,000 very loud spectators. The SETI folks realized this and fairly recently have simply concentrated their nightly listening searches to unimaginably small areas of the sky. Each night, off to the next section. Again, the issue is space and time. The further away the potential object/star system is located, the further back in time we are actually looking/listening. And what's worse, suppose someone was listening to our location, and found nothing (say mid 1800's), turned their attention to the next object, and 3 days later (on Earth), Marconi and the crew fired up the first radios. The folks listening, unless the came back for another "listen", would never know!!!

Think of it this way: Assuming we are an "average" star, average planet, and it took 4+ billion years for us be at the point where we as the inhabitants at the top of the food chain use RF to communicate, it would probably be a safe start to look for (a) objects that would be the same age as we are, plus or minus a billion., and ( similar planetary objects that would likely support life similar at least in proportion and bio-function to ours. Of course, we can't "see" planets that small yet (yet...); then and only then "listen". Otherwise, just pointing the dish and hoping is probably useless.

But then again, if physics ever determines that we can develop a Faster Than Light (FTL) drive, we'd could still be gone for a seriously looooonnnnng time. If you could go faster than light, what's the upper limit. What is "warp-1"? 186K mpsec? Great, it'll still take me 10,000 years to get to Planet Bozo in the "Ozone-2" system. Is warp speed really exponential? If that were the case, maybe we could get there and back in time Christmas shopping.... Philosophical questions at this point.

Let's apply those parameters to the possible "other guy out there"..... Maybe that's why no-one has shown up to make "first contact". They simply either no longer exist in the "here and now" (after all we detected them or observed their planet as it was 10,000 years ago); or they are at the same techno-level as we are (plus or minus a few) and have the same problem we do (... in other words, they are listening to us at about the time Raquel Welch was running around in the bear skin bikini looking for food, and was not calling anyone on a cell phone...); OR (and it's possible...) that they have become advanced enough to where their EM transmissions are no longer conventional "light speed" RF as we know it. Some kind of weird quantum tunneling that disregards space and time? If option 3 is the case, we would never hear them because we don't know how to look for it, if even it could be done.....

There is apparently some research into "folding" space and time, but it's purely theoretical, and still does not have a hypothetical solution for anything, especially on a macro scale (as in us...).

Of course, the other option (and the most optimistic) is to consider the "Star Trek" idea. Very advanced intelligent life but with a political philosophy of non-interference with the locals rule. Since we have not figured out how to go real fast... anyone out there who has may just be staying away from us.. Look at it from their viewpoint... if they are "out there" and have been watching the local TV... For the last century it has been constant warfare, etc. Popping up on the White House lawn could get them zapped, etc... I'd stay away too, at least for awhile....

Just some thoughts as I take a break from doing some veneer.....

[Daddy Dee]

Are we alone? Interesting question.

I've given up the idea that UFO's are ET.

This is not the same as answering the question,

just my take that ET's are not a satisfactory explanation for UFO's.

[Islander]

what would be stopping them from making contact with us ?

The Prime Directive, obviously! Maybe they're carefully choosing their landing spot. They wouldn't want to make first contact with rednecks, for example...

[oldenough]

Interesting replies, but would it not be safe to assume that any life form that had the fantastic technology to get here (which some would vigorously maintain they have) could overcome any threat, logistics problem, or our own social problems. For my part i dont see that any life form so advanced that they could travel here would need to actually come here.

[oldbuckster]

Beam Me Up Mr. Spock, There's No Intelligent Life Down Here ....................... or something along those lines !!!!!!

[oldtimer]

True, they wouldn't need to come here, but I don't need to go the zoo either. It is possible that due to a space time continuum anomaly, that every now and then they accidentally zoom through, and aren't really trying to make contact, and instead just trying to get back out. Or as in the zoo analogy, they are just tourists.

[oldenough]

Beam Me Up Mr. Spock, There's No Intelligent Life Down Here ....................... or something along those lines !!!!!!

Exactly my point OB, but i think they could/should/would have known that before setting out.

[Groomlakearea51]

Maybe they're carefully choosing their landing spot. They wouldn't want to make first contact with rednecks, for example...

Yassir, good point!!! they land, wander over to the barbecue; I offer to take 'em tubin in the limo, give 'em a couple of cold brewskis', and then... offer them some gator tail, and it turns out they are reptiles in origin.... Boy what a "faux pas" from hell!!! I can see it now.... "Here's a little Aunt Sadie for yuh!!!" Zap, zap, zap.... more zaps... Be like a weird imaginary scene from Mars Attacks with Jack Nicholson dressed up like Larry the Cable Guy,...

[Groomlakearea51]

Interesting replies, but would it not be safe to assume that any life form that had the fantastic technology to get here (which some would vigorously mantain they have) could overcome any threat, logistics problem, or our own social problems. For my part i dont see that any life form so advanced that they could travel here would need to actually come here.

Aha!! the philosophical paradox. If I can get there, then I don't wan't to go there if they are not like us.....

[oldenough]

Aha!! the philosophical paradox. If I can get there, then I don't wan't to go there if they are not like us.....

Absolutely not the argument i'm making." Wan't" is not the same as "need", i would suggest that anybody putting in that amount of effort would need to come here, and i find it hard to believe they would come visit the Zoo without throwing the Apes a banana or two.

[oldtimer]

Who says they haven't? Or don't you believe in conspiracies...

[oldbuckster]

Sometimes I think I have been, well, invaded by aliens .... maybe I should clarify ... Space Aliens !!!!!!!!!!! If they are smart enough to get here, they are smart enough not to stay here ................ I feel so alone, sometimes .... [*-)]

[oldtimer]

Just exactly when do you feel invaded OB? When the wife comes into the snake pit?

[oldenough]

OT. I'm not saying they haven't, but no i don't believe in conspiracies, at least not in this context. It seems also that given the number of times we have been "visited" it can't be that the navigator read the map wrong, and if...if they are visiting maybe they are getting what they need, that just don't include making friends with the natives. That's the hard part for me to understand.

[oldtimer]

I know what you mean, and that post was basically jesting. As for nav mistakes, the universe is a strange beast, it might not be possible to always be right when using techniques which are beyond our grasp.

[Colin]

Even a cursory glance at Drake’s Law proves that there must be hundreds, probably thousands, and possibly millions, of life forms intelligent enough to master radio communications in this universe alone.

However, as science writer Carl Sagan succinctly proves in his fascinating book, Cosmos, any species that does communicate with us will be at least one million years more advanced! Worse, if they are somehow possibly headed here, bypassing billions of other planets without intelligent life, and possibly millions of planets with intelligent life, on a journey (at light-speed!) of a million years, than their intentions can not be honorable! There must be hundreds, probably thousands, and possibly millions, of Paleolithic era life forms for advanced aliens to study on planets that are hundreds of thousands of light years closer to them.

In any event, we will soon know. In 2043, it will be one hundred years since the first radio transmission of Hitler’s opening the Olympic games. At that time, his signal will leave our galaxy. Any superior life form scanning the entire universe for an intelligent radio signal will know that there is intelligent life on the third rock from our sun.

While they may not be looking for us, we are looking for them. “The longest-running search for radio signals from alien civilizations” is the SETI@home project, using desktop computers to help crunch the data.

“Since SETI@home launched eight years ago, the project based at the University of California, Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory has signed up more than 5 million interested volunteers and boasts the largest community of dedicated users of any Internet computing project: 170,000 devotees on 320,000 computers.”

SETI uses the idle time of your PC to crunch chunks of data from their radio telescopes, including the massive dish in Peru. Even as I bounce from browser sessions to Word and back, my 2.8 MHz dual-core PC idles along at 1-3% of processing power. SETI uses another few percent of that processing power.