Aliens - The Space Kind

[S'tasaulk]

I hate to be that person, but it is Monida. I traveled all over the state. Beautiful country.

Thank you my mother would be disappointed in me too. Was too lazy to double check since I knew it was spelt wrong. MT is my fave state to be in if i could...well minus the alien shit

 

[Ghostapplesause]

It's great this thread got bumped as news today suggests we might be the only advanced civilization in the observable universe.

This goes well with my hypothesis from another thread and that the Drake Equation is junk science.

This has reinforced my theory that both primitive and sentient life is rare in the universe because it is inherently hostile to life. I do not believe life is found everywhere like in Science Fiction.

 

[Gone_Fission]

Based simply on the truly massive size of the universe and the incredible number of stars, I doubt we're the only intelligent industrial civilization, although I don't think it's improbable that we may be the most technologically advanced species in the Galaxy. Ironically, there may even be Milky Way planets inhabited be life forms far more intelligent and culturally advanced than us, but may lack opposable thumbs to build complex tools, or even live underwater which rules out harnessing fire or smelting ore into metal tools.

 

[Lysol]

To be fair, I wouldn't expect aliens to want to engage with society at large after they find Tumblr or FurAffinity or some shit. So either they think we're too creepy or they don't exist.

 

[Gone_Fission]

To be fair, I wouldn't expect aliens to want to engage with society at large after they find Tumblr or FurAffinity or some shit. So either they think we're too creepy or they don't exist.

Honestly, with how retarded and insane our world is right now, I think there may be some truth to that South Park episode about Earth being a reality TV show for aliens.

 

[Zbk3VmLfujjzjxBd43tL]

To be fair, I wouldn't expect aliens to want to engage with society at large after they find Tumblr or FurAffinity or some shit. So either they think we're too creepy or they don't exist.

Alien anthropologists would love that shit the same reason human anthropologists love finding about weird shit random tribes in New Guinea do. And aliens probably have a Kiwifarms equivalent anyway.

 

[eldri]

From a Nietzschean perspective, it is understandable why an advanced alien civilization would never bother to contact us.

The plot of the original Neon Genesis Evangelion films explains this, albeit implicitly. The life of the individual, assuming the non-existence of God or any other guiding force, is filled with horrors that are purposely ignored, also known as eldritch horrors.

However, this leaves emptiness within the individual, which inadvertently creates disharmony for the individual. Ultimately, the eldritch horrors must be faced; however, in doing so, a decision has to be made, which is what Shinji faces at the end of the last original movie. The decision is to either remove that emptiness within by integrating with others also, ultimately, joining the collective consciousness, or continue on as an individual and suffer, knowing that emptiness will remain.

Once a collective consciousness is created, it only exists within itself. That is why Shinji's father states that the stone evangelion floating in space serves as a reminder that humanity existed. Collective consciousness doesn't exist in a typical sense as it does not engage with anything external to it. It is at peace, through and through; thus, does not see the point of interacting.

This conclusion may be attainable by advanced alien civilizations, in which they exist in a technological ooze of some sorts.

A real life manifestation of this is the wave of "political correctness" with its overly emotional sentiment, as the collective consciousness is the logical and ultimate conclusion of progressivism.

 

[Guardian G.I.]

My ideas on this subject:

1. SETI looks for extraterrestials by listening to radio waves, finds nothing, and then declares there's no sentient alien life around Sol. But radio transmissions are not the only possible way to communicate - advanced civilizations are probably using different technologies we don't know. Trying to eavesdrop on them using radio is like intercepting Internet files with a walkie-talkie. Even then, potential candidates for alien signals like the Wow signal are often discarded because they are not as we expect. We're expecting alien life to be just like us in all respects.
   
2. At our distance from closest stars, we can't detect anything anyway. One experiment I've read about somewhere tried to find evidence of sapient beings... in photos of Earth from space. Night lights and radio transmissions aside, an outside observer could only find traces of human existence by finding agricultural fields and human infrastructure on the surface - features that couldn't be explained by geological processes. It requires being in orbit and photographing the planet's surface up close. Otherwise, tough luck.
   
3. Maybe there's a big interstellar war going on and everyone is maintaining radio silence? One fun fringe theory I've read claimed just that based on reports of "missing stars" from 18th and 19th century astronomers. In that case, spamming radio transmissions in all directions and sending probes with messages is just asking for trouble.
4. Contact with a very advanced civilization isn't going to be particularly benevolent by default - remember how well did the arrival of strange new people went for Native Americans? Still, we're expecting their behaviour based on ourselves and what we know, and they could be completely different from us humans.

I think the most interesting question that would arise from contact with intelligent aliens would be how the major religions would react to it.

No idea about major religions, but a few zealous Russian Orthodox Christian cults I've heard about consider aliens and UFOs to be work of demons trying to shatter the Christian faith in God. If extraterrestials show up, they'll likely scream bloody murder and hide in the forests or underground like they usually do.

 

[JULAY]

Oh, boy, something for me to sperg about... As far as intelligent life existing somewhere else in the universe, it is a virtual certainty that it either does at the present time, or did at some point in the past. There are roughly 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the observable universe, and that's to say nothing of galaxies that may be beyond what we can observe with scientific instruments.

Given that, on average, a main sequence star like our Sun lasts about 10 billion years, with a useful lifetime before expanding into a red giant of ~9 billion years, you end up with a total number of productive years for every main sequence star combined that is absolutely staggering. Considering that red dwarves last even longer, on the order of 80 billion years or so, that number only increases.

What we now know, which Frank Drake and Carl Sagan didn't, is that planets are very common. In fact, it seems likely that for most stars, with the exception of the largest hypergiants which tend to accrete all of their mass into the star itself, planets are the rule rather than the exception. So given all of those planets around all of those stars, and how many years each has for nature to do its thing (or not), it would be more ridiculous to believe that intelligent life hasn't originated at least once on one of them for a period of time.

That being said, the real questions are:

Are any of these intelligent lifeforms in our galaxy?

Do any of them exist now, contemporaneously with our species?

Cutting the vastness of the universe down to our galaxy certainly reduces the odds quite a bit, and limiting our investigation further to a pretty narrow period of time, i.e. the time since human beings of one sort or another have existed, trims it even further. Taking the next step and reducing it to the amount of time that we have had a technological civilization capable of being detected from deep space really starts cutting it down.

The shitty thing is that we have only ourselves as an example. If our experience is typical, then most technological civilizations that might arise probably destroy themselves after a few hundred, maybe a few thousand years before they ever develop interstellar travel (if that's even possible) which seems to me to be a prerequisite for any species longevity. A few thousand years isn't a very long time for technological civilizations to discover one another.

On the other hand, maybe we're just unnaturally war-like, and short sighted, and thus an aberration. Problem is with a sample size of one, you can't make any inferences. I can say this though, should we ever find evidence of life, either current or former on Mars or another location in the solar system, the odds of there being other intelligent life in the galaxy go way, way up. If the development of organic life is so common that it happened twice (or more) in one solar system, then it would be arrogant and foolish for us to think that the only place and time intelligent beings developed in our galaxy was here.

I'll happily take those autistic ratings now...

 

[Gar For Archer]

I think whether or not we find life on Enceladus (on which scientists have just discovered organic molecules) will reshape our view on the rarity of carbon-based life.

Right now, as far as we know, we're the only life forms in the universe, a freak occurrence. If we find life on Enceladus, no matter how primitive, it suggests that life will form eventually, as long as certain environmental conditions are met.

As far as actual human-level intelligent life, I wouldn't be surprised if it exists somewhere in the universe, but I think it's doubtful we'll ever contact them, much less meet them, in the foreseeable future. Even if we somehow discover alien life using the technology we have today (fancy electronic telescopes), we'd be seeing their civilization millions of years in the past at the earliest - Andromeda, the closest galaxy to us, is still 2.5 million light years away. In order to discover and contact alien life, FTL travel and communication is a necessity - we'd need to see what's currently happening millions - perhaps billions - of light-years away.

Spoiler: FTL sperging

Right now, FTL travel is basically science fiction. This isn't some technological breakthrough we're merely waiting on - as far as we're concerned, there's no evidence that FTL travel and communication is actually possible in the first place. Now, I know that there's the Alcubierre drive, a proposed FTL engine that bends space around it, but that's purely theory and also depends on the existence of negative mass, which is also something that doesn't exist (and likely can't, based on our current understanding of physics). Anyways, for all intents and purposes, as far as modern science is concerned, FTL travel is impossible.

Perhaps a more "sensible" alternative to FTL would be teleportation of some sort, and based on what little I know about wormholes and black holes apparently some scientists think they could possibly link distant points in space. Anyway, we know so little about black holes that there's at least the possibility they could unlock the secrets of galaxy-hopping. FTL travel, however, is impossible without another breakthrough in physics that radically changes the way we understand the universe.

 

[Zbk3VmLfujjzjxBd43tL]

My ideas on this subject:

1. SETI looks for extraterrestials by listening to radio waves, finds nothing, and then declares there's no sentient alien life around Sol. But radio transmissions are not the only possible way to communicate - advanced civilizations are probably using different technologies we don't know. Trying to eavesdrop on them using radio is like intercepting Internet files with a walkie-talkie. Even then, potential candidates for alien signals like the Wow signal are often discarded because they are not as we expect. We're expecting alien life to be just like us in all respects.
   
2. At our distance from closest stars, we can't detect anything anyway. One experiment I've read about somewhere tried to find evidence of sapient beings... in photos of Earth from space. Night lights and radio transmissions aside, an outside observer could only find traces of human existence by finding agricultural fields and human infrastructure on the surface - features that couldn't be explained by geological processes. It requires being in orbit and photographing the planet's surface up close. Otherwise, tough luck.
   
3. Maybe there's a big interstellar war going on and everyone is maintaining radio silence? One fun fringe theory I've read claimed just that based on reports of "missing stars" from 18th and 19th century astronomers. In that case, spamming radio transmissions in all directions and sending probes with messages is just asking for trouble.
4. Contact with a very advanced civilization isn't going to be particularly benevolent by default - remember how well did the arrival of strange new people went for Native Americans? Still, we're expecting their behaviour based on ourselves and what we know, and they could be completely different from us humans.

1. Agreed, it makes more sense to communicate using precise laser pulses, and radio signals decay with range so we'd need colossal telescopes to detect them.
2. Sadly. The best evidence will be alien Dyson swarms or other megastructures or maybe some alien star having a large amount of radioactive isotopes from aliens shooting nuclear waste into it.
3. That doesn't make sense. Look at all the broadcasts during WWII. And if you're an alien civ who knows of an interstellar war, the people fighting the war know of you, and you can't hide. Consider that any alien civ within a few hundred million light years of us knows of Earth already. We probably are just yet another "terrestrial planet with life" in their catalog, but as a spacefaring civilization, they have all the time in the world to catalog the universe, and some truly colossal telescopes to help them.
4. Native Americans got some nice metal tools and guns out of it. Sure, it left them totally dependent on the white man for more goods, but some Indians benefitted. Aliens probably have similar enough behavior to us since some weak-ass species inevitably goes extinct from natural selection. Animals don't evolve a human-like brain unless they need to, and our ancestors that came down from the trees and into the African savanna had nothing but their big ape brains to help them.

Given that, on average, a main sequence star like our Sun lasts about 10 billion years, with a useful lifetime before expanding into a red giant of ~9 billion years, you end up with a total number of productive years for every main sequence star combined that is absolutely staggering. Considering that red dwarves last even longer, on the order of 80 billion years or so, that number only increases.

Something like 2/3 of stars are red dwarf stars, but they're pretty shitty places for intelligent life because most habitable zone planets around them are tidally locked and subject to extreme solar flares right up close.

What we now know, which Frank Drake and Carl Sagan didn't, is that planets are very common. In fact, it seems likely that for most stars, with the exception of the largest hypergiants which tend to accrete all of their mass into the star itself, planets are the rule rather than the exception. So given all of those planets around all of those stars, and how many years each has for nature to do its thing (or not), it would be more ridiculous to believe that intelligent life hasn't originated at least once on one of them for a period of time.

Yeah but if there's have one hot Jupiter in the wrong place then the orbits of any planet in the habitable zone is fucked so no intelligent life. And solar systems like ours seem to be pretty rare.

The shitty thing is that we have only ourselves as an example. If our experience is typical, then most technological civilizations that might arise probably destroy themselves after a few hundred, maybe a few thousand years before they ever develop interstellar travel (if that's even possible) which seems to me to be a prerequisite for any species longevity. A few thousand years isn't a very long time for technological civilizations to discover one another.

The good part about being primitive is that it's also really hard to totally destroy ourselves. Probably applies to aliens too, so even if they blow themselves back to the Stone Age they can easily recover since they have all the ruins of technology laying around to help innovate/scavenge. Even if there's only 10,000 people left on Earth, we wouldn't need more than a few thousand years to rebuild civilization to today's levels. And maybe people wouldn't blow each other up again the second time around .

 

[Male Idiot]

I feel like there are a few factors that needs to be taken into account:

-How big the universe is.
-Aliens may have evolved and died out already.
-How hard intelligent life is to evolve.

I feel like the chance to have an intelligent species evolve is VERY low. Something that happens very rarely in the galaxy. So the intelligent life on every planet star trek star wars thing is unlikely.

Than to detect another civilisation it has to be living in a definite time frame.
Alien civilisation A is 500 light years from civilisation Human H.

So to be detectable today, A civilisation would need to have produced radio waves 500 years ago exactly.

For this,we need:
-A system that can support life well enough to let it prosper. No red dorfs.
-Life has to occur.
-Life has to evolve and prosper to more advanced forms without any lesser forms dominating it, like maybe big giant lizards.
-Intelligence has to evolve.

Dophins are a good example of how it can go wrong. They got the brain capacity, but lack the manipulative organ as well as live underwater, where they can not create fire and thus have a hard time making primitive civilisation starting materials.

Also a species fitting the criteria needs to be social to form a civilisation efficienty.

Also, a species can be intelligent but needs to have certain other characteristics to reach civilisation.

-It needs to have a smart enough brain.
-It needs a manipulative limb that can finely manipulate objects.
-It needs a good spatial sensory apparatus.

Most likely, this alien would need some time of fingers or multiple tentacles and eyes to go with that brain.

Echolocation without eyes would most likely be insufficient for higher intelligence to create technology.

There also would need to be a medium for quick and efficient communication, which means they would need hearing, or a 360 degrees vision that would let them communicate by changing colours or using bioluminescence.

Also at least two eyes would aid in spatial vision.

So, for a tool using civilisation we need:
-Brains.
-Eyes.
-Ears.
-Manipulator limbs.
-Some form of locomotion.

These would all be needed for a space ayy lmao civilisation to occur.

Also, since FTL is most likely not possible, civilisations would be restricted to sublight colony ships, which would greatly retard interstellar growth. Though the more long lived and hibernation capable the species, the less trouble this is.

I also think that we would need to fear civilisations slightly more advanced than us.

The slightly more advanced whites curbstomped the indians (feather) and got all the stuff they wanted from them.

But nowdays, do European white men go to poke amazones tribes for their riches? Nope. We are so far advanced that they are not a threat, and they offer us nothing. And if they are sitting on some oil, we just give them a marble and a lighter and its ours.

So a sufficiently advanced alien civilisation would most likely have no reason to attack us, since we would have nothing it really needs. A slighty more advanced one, however, would be tempted to at least force us to pay a tribute. Even than it would be not totally one sided, for the resources to use in a generation colony ships would significantly curb their offensive potential.

So all hyper advanced Q-s out there are not out to get us, because do we make a concentrated effort as a species to kill off ladybugs? Nah, we don't. Any species advanced enough to effortlessly wipe us out most likely has no reason to bother with it.

But since FTL is most likely impossible, and alien generation ships would be hard pressed to get us and very very far away, we are pretty safe.
Aliens are most likely galaxies away and without faster than light engines. Most life seems to be doomed to live until the star reaches the end of its life cycle.

As for humans I think blowing each other back to the stone age is very unlikely, as that would require everybody to go to war.

I think I read a sci-fi somewhere that had South America take the leading role after the US and the Soviets blew each other up over a meteorite impact being mistaken for a soviet nuke.

 

[Orkeosaurus]

I think it's far more likely that the aliens presumably visiting Earth are time travelers or interdimensional beings than actual honest to god creatures from other galaxies.

I might be really late on this also but the question "why would aliens put lights on their spaceships" really tripped me up. Or why they would be visible to begin with.

 

[Caz]

I think it's far more likely that the aliens presumably visiting Earth are time travelers or interdimensional beings than actual honest to god creatures from other galaxies.

What bugs me is that we haven't even fully explored our own planet. I read somewhere that 95 percent of the ocean is still to be revealed.

I might be really late on this also but the question "why would aliens put lights on their spaceships" really tripped me up. Or why they would be visible to begin with.

I think the whole aliens are always naked theme when it comes to most close encounters is the more ridiculous one. The lights and visibility can be explained by the fact that they want to test our reaction. Or plain incompetence (they forgot to switch to stealth mode or whatever...).

 

[Gone_Fission]

For this,we need:
-A system that can support life well enough to let it prosper. No red dorfs.

Interstingly enough, red dwarfs may actually be ideal for supporting life and lead to a rebirth of life and potentially civilizations hundreds of billions of years after all the larger stars have exhausted their fuel supplies and gone cold, and the the low energy red dwarfs kick into high gear as they switch to helium fusion.

 

[Zbk3VmLfujjzjxBd43tL]

Also, since FTL is most likely not possible, civilisations would be restricted to sublight colony ships, which would greatly exceptional individual interstellar growth. Though the more long lived and hibernation capable the species, the less trouble this is.

Going no faster than 10% the speed of light, we could colonize the galaxy in 1-2 million years. Colony ships would be huge anyway (probably 10K people minimum) and have their own gravity and wouldn't be too different than a normal space colony.

Interstingly enough, red dwarfs may actually be ideal for supporting life and lead to a rebirth of life and potentially civilizations hundreds of billions of years after all the larger stars have exhausted their fuel supplies and gone cold, and the the low energy red dwarfs kick into high gear as they switch to helium fusion.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=-iWGtQ03OZM

Red dwarfs are ideal for life in general, it's just they're so low-energy (so evolution takes longer) and are usually flare stars (so high radiation fucks up the development of life) that it takes literally forever. But since red dwarfs are the majority of stars in the universe and will be even more common in the next few trillion years, common sense would suggest that most life will exist around red dwarf stars, including most intelligent life (which currently does not exist in many places).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_710 - This star is a low-end orange dwarf (0.6 solar mass, K7V), but it will be within 0.25 light years of Earth in 1.28 million years. We can move to here when the Sun burns out, since if we're still here when this star comes by, we can move it into orbit around our Sun as it evolves into a red giant and then a white dwarf. This star won't die for at least 20-30 billion years.

 

[Gone_Fission]

From what I've heard, the energy output isn't so much the problem with red dwarfs so much that it's the fact that at current output levels all planets in the current habitable zone of a red dwarf would be totally locked to the star, leading to some insane weather patterns and windstorms on top of the intense solar weather being able greatly affect the closely orbiting planets. The higher output of a late life red dwarf may be too hot for its current habitable zone, but it may thaw out the frozen outer worlds that are not tidally locked and more distant from solar weather effects.

 

[feedtheoctopus]

I think the most interesting question that would arise from contact with intelligent aliens would be how the major religions would react to it.

UFO researcher Jacques Vallee has a book called "messengers of deception" where he talks about how human beings pretty much started attaching religious significance to UFOs the moment they entered into public knowledge. As a result we ended up with shit like Heaven's Gate or Scientology. If aliens showed up tomorrow half of us would shit ourselves in existential terror and the other half would start worshiping them as gods.

Traditional religion is, in the west anyway, eroding in front of us. I think if aliens ever did make contact the entire structure would pretty much implode. Religion would have to adapt itself or die. I think in the short term you'd actually see a tremendous amount of violence. Your typical pentecostal, snake handling, type isn't going to see the mothership and then go "oh gee, guess I was wrong! Whatevs". Our beliefs have us more than we have them. If you believe something you will, without even trying to do it, structure your entire reality to confirm that belief. People are capable of serious mental gymnastics and they display this all the time. Result would be religious communities retreating inwards and developing a generally paranoid and hostile view of the outside world.

"Visitor from zeta reticuli" then becomes "demonic entity sent to mislead man"

 

[QU 734]

Anything ayy lmao that is advanced enough to reach us is a bad thing.

Humans became dominant on Earth because we're the smartest, most dangerous things around.

I'd prefer to keep it that way.

 

[Commander Keen]

I like to think that there are aliens and they come visit every so often.

But these aliens are a bunch of drunk, red neck, gay, BDSM aliens. So they get loaded on whatever they need to get shithoused, pile up in the UFO with all their gay rowdy buddies, then go abduct and molest random people.

If you've read some of these abduction stories, they're pretty intense. And pretty gay. Seems to be a common theme.