Yeah but he was living in the dark ages. They didn't even have VCRs or microwave ovens back then.

Now we have jetpacks: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/0..._n_476858.html

This is pretty dumb. LOL @ him if he actually said that.

Trying to start a 2+2 poker house?

Aliens aren't hot and that's why they are cross-breeding with us. They are apparently cognizant of the fact that they are ugly as ****, and seem to be taking the appropriate measures to remedy the situation.

Kidding aside, this is an interesting thread. It's nice to see bright guys like NoahSD take a step back and decide to educate instead of mock. I really do appreciate the more intelligent among us here breaking down complex material into something a dummy like me can digest.

What always baffles me, though, is how very smart people laugh off the whole UFO/alien subject. Sure, there is a lot of cult-like nuttiness surrounding the topic, but there are also very compelling cases that make those who laugh them off appear willfully ignorant. I do realize the OP was geared toward the discovery of a planet we could theoretically one day visit, but discussion of space travel in general always seems to bring us around to talking about whether or not we are being visited.

The following book is supposedly the real deal wrt UFO research- particularly for skeptics willing to take an honest look at the matter. Serious author with impeccable credentials and no new age bs. Probably nothing all that revealing for people up to speed on the more renowned cases, but it could prove eye-opening to the haters.

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sourc...E0f_9A&cad=rja

Imagine how advanced another life form would have to be to be able to even reach our planet (assuming they are from another galaxy). We can't even comprehend it, because our civilization is hundreds if not thousands of years away from that.

Knowing this, if another life form approached our planet it would look like a decrepit gas station in West Memphis, Arkansas. There's no way you're stopping there.

Did anyone see that professor lady at Harvard I think who slowed down light by passing a light beam through a supercold tube? That was insane. You could see this little dot of light moving like 1mph because the medium it was traveling through was so sparse.

One common theory is that the ethics of inter-planetary exploration dictate not interfering with the development of a species.

Or perhaps they are emotionally-impaired and don't experience empathy and curiosity the way we do. Although technologically superior they function like worker ants, simply existing for the goal of self-preservation.

It's pretty ridiculous to think that another species, no matter how advanced, would have little to no interest in an entire planet of alien life. Unless you assume that earthlike planets are a dime a dozen and that 99% of life evolves the same way on all the "Earths."

Both of these seem like stupid assumptions.

Edit, even if it turns out that there are eleventy billion Earths out there, it seems crazy dumb to assume that all the lifeforms on all planets would just be the same and therefore boring and not worth observing in any way.

We study animals and other living organisms on our planet that have been around for 100s of millions of years and animals that we have evolved past past millions of years too. We go ape**** over the possibility that their may have been bacteria on the next planet 100s of millions of years ago. So hypothetically if an alien race ran into our planet I find it hard to believe that they wouldnt be at least a little interested in us even as a intelligent being observing an animal in its natual habitat. The only way they wouldnt be interested is if we are just 1 of 100s or 1000s of the same type of planet and species that they have already found. If the latter is the case then that makes the hole hypothetical idea even more interesting imo.


If a highly intelligent being isnt curious about the universe around them whether it be the 10 mile radius around them or their entire galaxy then I see no way that they would ever, EVER have the motivation to make a machine so complex that it could take them from 1 galaxy to another. Our curious nature is what drives us beyond our current limits.

It's totally anthropocentric to assume that aliens would be interested in us.

They might not even detect us with whatever sensory apparatus they have. They might be orders of magnitude off our scale. They might see us as a disease. They might only be interested in big titty asian women (wait, that's me).

Why wouldnt they be interested in us even in the tiniest of ways unless they have already ran into us 1000s of times? Why wouldnt they be interested in all of the creatures of this planet and the many resources we have? Just throwing in a big dictionary word doesnt cut it as an explanation.

As far as not seeing us, we have manmade objects that are clealy visible from space and we emit tons of light at night time. Thats enough for them to see us.

If you're talking about entanglement, I think its fairly well understood that this doesn't violate causality due to the no cloning theorem. Basically, even though a particle whose entangled pair (dunno what the vocab actually used for this is) has been observed behaves differently from a random particle, there's no way to distinguish between the two without interacting in some classical way with the pair particle. That's not an incredibly satisfying, but it works.

Noah are u some kind of amateur physicists or something?

Take a wider perspective. The light you are talking about is a very narrow range of the electromagnetic spectrum. You assume it's the most important because it's the one that human eyes happen to detect. Plenty of earth creatures see in the infrared or ultraviolet, or navigate sonically or tactilely, or by exchanging molecules or any number of things. That's just earth creatures, which all share a common heredity.

Or as I mentioned, the scale might be totally off and we're the size of a universe to them, or the size of an proton.

Even if only 1% of inhabitable planets work out like Earth, what is the motivation to do anything more than observe if they've already confirmed that they've seen our type before?

Do we have anything to offer a civilization like that except possibly an inhabitable planet/resources which they would just take if they wanted anyway?

Unless they're immortal, the assumption that aliens have nothing better to do with their time/technology than to introduce themselves to the downy caveman neighbors and try to educate an obviously incredibly inferior race also seems stupid.

I've stopped for gas in West Memphis. You pull off, you get back on, easy. And I am hardly a unique personality. Ergo, we need a better analogy or explanation.

I think they would easily have equipment to see our light spectrum and whatever else to detect us if they can make it in our area. We have that kind of equipment (spectrums of light that we can and cant see) and we are at such a primitive stage in our technological development. As for the scale, well then they might as well be on the other side of the universe and that's not worth worrying about imo.

I was on the whole " whether or not they would be interested in us" debate and this is clearly going in another direction which would actually bring us back to our current reality where we are just to divided by space.

'Cardo, yeah but was it decrepit?

It was a mildly real environment but it was all good.

You emit an aura of street cred' which is not commonly found in the white man.

West Memphis is hard, ya dig?

lol

But what about the *aliens?*

Maybe I've missed some context on the Hawking quote. I don't think they'd necessarily introduce themselves or interfere with us in any way (I could see them not wanting to bother if they are already in contact/relations with hundreds or thousands of other more advanced worlds), but I can't imagine that they wouldn't be closely observing us if they were capable of such a thing.

So if hundreds or thousands of years from now we encountered some form of primitive alien life on another planet, you think we'd just move right along cause we wouldn't find them interesting enough? LOL.

If aliens are confirmed to exist then thousands of past UFO reports could be cited as evidence that we have already been under observation for a while.

i think this decade we will theoretically prove life. oxygen only exists on this planet because of that tiny bacteria that exerted oxygen billions of years ago which eventually helped the evolvion of plants. So what im saying is that if you can prove a decent % of oxygen exists in a planet you can assume some form of plant or something exists on said planet.

If you look at the history of evolution i really think any planet that flourishes in a oxygen emitting lifeform will have some really high probability of having earth like life forms.

Now my understanding is that we will have the capabilities to observe the atmosphere of these planets in the next few years and thus prove oxygen does or doesnt exist.

Am i completely wrong here?

I think the ****ing universe is so cool. so much **** mathematically perfect. love it. we dont even know what makes up the vast majority of it.