I love theses alien threads there such a tell.

To accept the possibility of life from another place... you must release restrictions as we know them.

Is it possible that something exists that is so profound that our brains can not even fathom the possibility?

What if your brain was a computer that could read FORTRAN all day. Introducing another language to it would be impossible. Sure... someone could eventually change the computer to accept other languages but as it stands... FORTRAN is the only thing it can read.

Even as technology progresses... that particular computer (your brain) would stand still in time... limited to only the language of FORTRAN.

It in no way means that something else...anything else... does not exist.. But in that box...that particular computer... only FORTRAN.

I understood the question as "assuming we do contact other intelligent life, is it more likely to be above or below our own level of technology?"

This seems more related to the question "will we contact other intelligent life?"

Stephen Hawking on Aliens

What do you mean with place? Somewhere in this universe? Then your statement is certainly wrong.

This might be the most mentally narrow post in this entire thread....at least a close second to JoeyKKK.

You're limiting our communication technology to the first 100 years of it's infancy?
Radio,etc,etc.

You do understand that technology keeps improving, right? What will we be using to communicate in 300 years?

The odds of us being alone in the universe has infinity higher odds than there being other life out there.

I really have no basis to calculate the odds of intelligent life out there, but even if I concede it as given there are still problems. Everything we know about physics tells us that the speed of light is an absolute maximum for the speed of transmission of a signal. It doesn't matter what the details of the technology are, the limitation is still there.

How much physics have you studied? I ask that so I have a feeling for what kind of discussion we can have.

This may be the most inaccurate statement ever... including most of mine and ALL of Howards.

Why is it inaccurate?

"To accept the possibility of life from another place... you must release restrictions as we know them." <--- This is wrong?

Seriously?

The fact that you say it is wrong makes it wrong? You can't accept that higher knowledge may exist elsewhere?

The limits of our knowledge could in no way be superseded by something else?

The fact that you can't comprehend this statement validates my claim.

The first two parts of his post were a question:

He wanted to get some clarity about what you meant by "place". The last comment seems to mean that if place is in this universe, then your expectation of removing restrictions (presumably things like the velocity of light, etc.) is almost certainly wrong.

His statement seemed pretty reasonable to me.

Understood. Restrictions on this "place" are what they are (as we know them). Restricting other unknown places to the rules and physics of this "place"...ie.. the world as we know it... are IMO unreasonable.

My proposal is that there may be things we don't understand and are unable to comprehend and those things may exist on another 'place".

It's also possible that those very things could exist here...on this place... but we don't have the technology to create or understand them.

Wrap your mind around this for a minute.
In this photo there is 10,000 separate galaxies, and the picture represents a section of the sky the size of a dime held 70 feet away from you.


Locomotion in regards of a being physically moving from point A to point B may be outdated in the future. Think in terms of wormholing and dimension transitioning.
I probably can't impress you with my lack of formal physics education, but I did date a girl for 7 years who has a degree in physics and was a physics instructor. Years of deep discussions on just about everything with her has given me a pretty broad exposure fwiw.

I realize that there are a lot of stars out there. You realize that they are a very long way away from us.

Even if the probability of intelligent life out there was unity, I would still bet that we will never interact with them.

Never is really BIG word.

Back to being narrow minded...........you remind me of people 150 years ago looking up at the moon and never thinking we'd ever walk on it, nor would it occur VERY soon. Of course, humans flying around in the air hadn't even become a reality yet, so a lot of people couldn't even entertain the idea..........

Holy cow... is someone else making the same point I made?

There is a difference. The moon was technically out of reach but not theoretically prohibited. Faster than light travel is more than technically difficult.

But speculate all you want. Just don't expect me to hold my breath.

I don't think you're listening.

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

The problem I have accepting your theory is that if there's intelligent life out there, it's not unreasonable to assume their technology is thousands if not millions of years ahead of our own. So, if FTL travel or communication is possible, why haven't we heard from them? It just seems if you assume we'd find them in a million years, we'd have to assume they would have found us by now. That we've had no such encounter, seems to suggest that either there's no one out there, or FTL travel/communication isn't possible (in +millions of years).

You dont think physicists knowledge that they have been gathering for a few hundred years will hold for a few billion more? What are you blind? We are the bees knees and know everything that we need to about our and all the other possible lifeforms limitations when it comes to space travel.

Well.... that is if physicists say the light barrier will never be broken or circumvented in the first place. Oh and they also have to discount cryogenics and putting people in long stasis because that could get us pretty far out there too.

You make a good point.....
We're all in a race of evolution after the beginning of time as it pertains to us, aka The Big Bang. An advanced form of life would have had to evolved more quickly than us to be beyond our technological advances.

There also other theories, such as perhaps human beings are not unlike that indigenous tribe in the Amazon that we've all agreed to not infect with the modern world. Perhaps that's how the aliens view us, or have decided to deal with us......or perhaps we're an alien ant farm....or perhaps we are of alien descent, only to arrive here on a meteor in some microbial state....but I'm guessing, space is just beyond massive, and thinking of it in terms of neighbor association is more than difficult, but definitely plausible. I think time is our best friend.

It's scary how much we both think alike.

That might not be good im a little out there.

If they're out there, I suppose another reason they haven't found us is that they aren't looking because they have more important things on their mind. If we assume they're a million years advanced, it's not unreasonable to assume they've conquered mortality and are more worried about and directing their resources towards dealing with something like the heat death of the universe than exploration.