A universe full of dead aliens

dr.fuzzenstein

M.T. Cranium wrote: »

David Icke...

Aaand I don't need to read any further than that.

dr.fuzzenstein

Wibbs wrote: »

Meh, I dunno. That's more a recent viewpoint on humanity. Go back a couple of centuries and we saw ourselves as flawed, but top of the tree beings, just below whatever gods were around. This "sure humans are little more than violent apes" was part of the backlash to earlier religious and philosophical thought. It would also be very common in mainstream science fiction.

A couple of centuries ago we thought we were the only ones and that the earth was the center of the universe. Naturally it was assumed that we were the crowning glory of God's own creation, that the entire universe literally revolved around us.
We are (it seems) a little more mature and we have begun to grasp the scale of the universe and where we are in evolutionary terms. We are not nearly as convinced by ourselves as we were back then.
And the backlash may be part of that maturity. We are getting more introspective. 500 years ago society was a lot more uncaring and vicious.
Torture, hanging, stoning and vicious public beatings were standard punishments for minor transgressions. Animals had no rights whatsoever. And, as said above, we thought we were the greatest thing since sliced bread even though that hadn't been invented yet.
Nowadays people are willing to cast a more critical eye upon the human race and despite us being pretty clever for some things, there are still events happening to this day that make you despair. As an alien I wouldn't come here in a fit. It is pretty much guaranteed that I would be captured, interrogated and experimented on and my technology stolen.
As for technology. Warlike aliens wouldn't bother with us because we have nothing of value to offer them and any natural resource could be harvested far easier on an uninhabited planet.

Wibbs

dr.fuzzenstein wrote: »

A couple of centuries ago we thought we were the only ones and that the earth was the center of the universe.

Outside of conjecture and science fiction we still are and are the centre of the universe as far as intelligent minds go.

We are (it seems) a little more mature and we have begun to grasp the scale of the universe and where we are in evolutionary terms. We are not nearly as convinced by ourselves as we were back then.

In evolutionary terms we're right up there by pretty much any metric you care to list. We're one of the most common mammals, we're by far the most common primate, we have adapted through externalising our own evolution to near every environment on the planet and as we speak there are humans faffing around above us outside the atmosphere. The fact we alone among all creatures who have ever lived on this world externalised our own evolution, and then understood and are starting to tweak it is enough. That we can ask and atempt to answer such questions marks us out as about the most important thing to happen to this planet since complex life arose.

And the backlash may be part of that maturity. We are getting more introspective. 500 years ago society was a lot more uncaring and vicious.
Torture, hanging, stoning and vicious public beatings were standard punishments for minor transgressions. Animals had no rights whatsoever. And, as said above, we thought we were the greatest thing since sliced bread even though that hadn't been invented yet.
Nowadays people are willing to cast a more critical eye upon the human race and despite us being pretty clever for some things, there are still events happening to this day that make you despair.

Philosophers and observers were thinking about all of the above and coming to similar conclusions going back to Mesopotamia. This is not a new thing. Hardly a shock as we're the same people. The duality of human nature has always been on the table for discussion and we were nearly always found wanting. Religion is an obvious one for that. We have always seen both our great potential and our animalistic nature that holds us back.

And over the centuries we've become demonstrably better and better. I would say if any comparisons can be made to a human life then humanity is more in adolescence now. A bit more introspective sometimes to the point of being miserable, a mix of cockiness and self doubt, but capable of seeing a better future and we'll come through that too.

As an alien I wouldn't come here in a fit. It is pretty much guaranteed that I would be captured, interrogated and experimented on and my technology stolen.

Like I say any star faring aliens would make us look like cavemen. They couldn't be captured. Unless it was an extreme fluke on our part. Their technology and brainpower would be beyond us, likely to the point where our greatest thinkers would be like uninformed children to them.

As for technology. Warlike aliens wouldn't bother with us because we have nothing of value to offer them and any natural resource could be harvested far easier on an uninhabited planet.

Well we don't know what they might value. Curiosity might be the obvious one. They may value stories above natural resources(as they likely could create them out of "nothing" anyway). They might see an Agatha Christie or Steven Spielberg of being of more value than any other resource we may have. They may value us for being "cute", the may value us as a window into their past. We just don't know and until one turns up, we can't know.

Capt'n Midnight

dr.fuzzenstein wrote: »

Imagine you're an alien and you're orbiting Earth.
You'd have the ability to intercept radiowaves and you have access to the internet.

Only for a very short time.

We've gone digital. That mean signals don't degrade gracefully. It's a digital cliff. With Satellite TV there's a very fine line between picture perfect and no-reception, and that's with some transponders dedicating up a third of the traffic to redundant error correction data.

ET can't watch TV unless close enough to be detected.

I used to get internet over a very long WiFi link. Could only be done because 802.11b allowed longer times than later versions. Nowadays being over 300 meters from the AP means it won't wait for your handshake.

tac foley

'Torture, hanging, stoning and vicious public beatings were standard punishments for minor transgressions.'

Still are in many places in the Middle East...

tac

Capt'n Midnight

In the early universe there wasn't much scope for life until supernovas started distributing heavier elements.

It took us nearly 5 billion years to evolve from the start of the solar system.

But other life could in theory have evolved from a solar system 5 billion years older than ours. Or it might not happen elsewhere for anther 5 billion years. We've only been broadcasting powerful decipherbale signals for a hundred years. So there's only a 1 in 50 million chance ET 'd be around at the right time, nevermind close enough.


On January 31st 1997 the French Navy sent out this Morse code message
“CALLING all. This is our last cry before our eternal silence.”

dr.fuzzenstein

tac foley wrote: »

'Torture, hanging, stoning and vicious public beatings were standard punishments for minor transgressions.'

Still are in many places in the Middle East...

tac

Because that's who we are.
We may be sitting in Starbucks with a laptop and a latte discussing social inclusion and the rights of minorities, but look towards crisis zones and see what's really inside us.
Hate, greed, intolerance, violence and genocide.
Never confuse civilisation with evolution.

And know that right now we like to points finger toward the middle east and sneer at the primitives and "towelheads", but let civilisation break down here and we're no better

Dr. Bre

We prob live in the matrix / a simulation.. controlled by aliens ��

Dr. Bre

Also David Icke theory that aliens run the world but can form into human entities isn’t that ridiculous if aliens are far more advanced than we are..

mickmackey1

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

In the early universe there wasn't much scope for life until supernovas started distributing heavier elements.

Nope, supergiants only have a lifespan of a few million years before going supernova. Heavy elements have been around almost from the start.

Wibbs

dr.fuzzenstein wrote: »

Because that's who we are.
We may be sitting in Starbucks with a laptop and a latte discussing social inclusion and the rights of minorities, but look towards crisis zones and see what's really inside us.
Hate, greed, intolerance, violence and genocide.
Never confuse civilisation with evolution.

It entirely depends on one's viewpoint Dr F. We're both the skinny latte drinking MacBook jockeys and the killers. However over human history the average person is more the former and the former is more and more common.

And civilisation is evolution. civilisation is there because we instinctively know we're no better without it. And We evolved it and were in turn shaped by it. Indeed most of the genetic changes in the human genome in the last 20,000 years have been in responses to it and there have been more changes in the last 15,000 years than in the previous 40,000. Communities got bigger and evolved over time in response to selective pressures from within and without.

In every case we sought to build a Utopia. It may have not worked at times, but we have the idea and wish, hope even need of Utopia. That's the distinction. One could argue the flash points come when different groups have a different idea of that Utopia. The "primitives and towelheads" have theirs, we have ours and we're pretty interchangeable, but that need and drive remains.

IMHO this duality has been best expressed in fables, mostly religious. It's one of the cornerstones of religion and much of philosophy. Even the warning against going too far with civilisation is there in tales like the Tower of Babel. And there are constant warnings against believing in our own spiel and how god/nature/the universe will screw you up if you sin too much and that sin is mostly that of hubris. Those same religions throughout history have preached that while we may be case creatures, we also have an actual though potential "divinity" within if we only stepped back from that base easy path that seems to offer the same power over our destiny. Hell something like Star Wars which channeled those archetypes bangs that drum throughout.* It resonated for so many and continues to do so because it's a deep narrative in our human psyche.

TL;DR? The human mind strives for better, both individually and collectively and mostly the latter and history demonstrates that it's getting better at being better and making who we are better in its wake. We came up with gods as a way to maybe one day become them, or at least angels, even if we become devils too often. That's who we are. And that's pretty bloody cool.




*not the recent Disney shite mind you. It's mostly channeling "postmodernist" angst with cynicism and easy answers instead of storytelling.

tac foley

Dr. Bre wrote: »

Also David Icke theory that aliens run the world but can form into human entities isn’t that ridiculous if aliens are far more advanced than we are..

Where, exactly, are these aliens supposed to have originated? I've never met Mr Icke, but I'm beginning to form the opinion that he is a wacko of the highest grade.


tac

Dr. Bre

tac foley wrote: »

Where, exactly, are these aliens supposed to have originated? I've never met Mr Icke, but I'm beginning to form the opinion that he is a wacko of the highest grade.


tac

No idea! But Where has anything originated from? If there are aliens living on other planets where did they originally come from. It’s mad to think that everything has a creator but whoever started all this had to also hve been created by something ...

Franz Von Peppercorn

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

In the early universe there wasn't much scope for life until supernovas started distributing heavier elements.

It took us nearly 5 billion years to evolve from the start of the solar system.

But other life could in theory have evolved from a solar system 5 billion years older than ours. Or it might not happen elsewhere for anther 5 billion years. We've only been broadcasting powerful decipherbale signals for a hundred years. So there's only a 1 in 50 million chance ET 'd be around at the right time, nevermind close enough.


On January 31st 1997 the French Navy sent out this Morse code message
“CALLING all. This is our last cry before our eternal silence.”

How did you get to the 1 in 50 million chance from that? Why assume older aliens didn’t continue to transmit just because humans have only for 100 years.

It’s not just transmission though - if the number of aliens out there is as plentiful as once assumed by the Drake equation (not as someone said, fermi - because fermi asks “where are they”) then at least some them would be billions of years older than us, and many of them smarter than us. That’s enough time to colonise the galaxy.

tac foley

Dr. Bre wrote: »

No idea! But Where has anything originated from? If there are aliens living on other planets where did they originally come from. It’s mad to think that everything has a creator but whoever started all this had to also hve been created by something ...

What I meant was, where did Mr Icke think that the aliens had originated?


I've just been doing a bit of reading about Mr Icke, and he really is turning out to be a very odd gentleman indeed.


tac

Dr. Bre

tac foley wrote: »

What I meant was, where did Mr Icke think that the aliens had originated?


I've just been doing a bit of reading about Mr Icke, and he really is turning out to be a very odd gentleman indeed.


tac

Good question. He doesn’t seem to mention where they originated. He’s convinced tho they rule the world!

dr.fuzzenstein

tac foley wrote: »

Where, exactly, are these aliens supposed to have originated? I've never met Mr Icke, but I'm beginning to form the opinion that he is a wacko of the highest grade.


tac

And you'd be right. And I've known people who follow his ideas. They've gone way past tin foil hat. I mean waved goodbuy to it in the rear view mirror a good few miles back.
Examples:
Obama and the Queen are lizard beings, the moon is an artificial spy satellite build by aliens, the inside of the earth is hollow and a giant spaceship port. The earth has 2 Stargates, one in the US, the other in Russia. In the rings of Saturn you will find a 35 mile long spaceship. There are a dozen alien species and there has been a galactic Spacewar going on for centuries right above our heads. The earth is controlled either by the grey aliens or the Illuminati or one of at least a dozen secret societies. There are people on YouTube who talk about their 25 year mission as genetically engineered super soldiers in outer space all over the galaxy.
I could go on about this stuff, but I make myself angry the amount of sh*t some trolls feed gullible people for a laugh.
And they really, honestly, seriously and fervently believe this. This stuff is gobbled up by people who want to give their crappy lives meaning. It's pure Walter Mitty stuff.

Top Tip:
If you want to scare yourself, go on YouTube and search for Project Camelot.
Oh the insanity! Pleiadian Messenger Eddie Page is a scream.

tac foley

I've got enough to cope with with what goes on in MY imagination, without filling any spare cells with somebody else's wacky ideas and theories.

tac

Wibbs

Franz Von Peppercorn wrote: »

It’s not just transmission though - if the number of aliens out there is as plentiful as once assumed by the Drake equation (not as someone said, fermi - because fermi asks “where are they”) then at least some them would be billions of years older than us, and many of them smarter than us. That’s enough time to colonise the galaxy.

It is and so far all we hear is silence. Either we're not listening hard enough, they're not speaking loud enough, or there's nobody out there speaking.


Or another possibility is that interstellar travel is nigh on impossible. That outside the areas around stars where planets keep space somewhat clear of debris by hoovering most of it up, that debris is spread out everywhere and though the gaps between the debris are large, over the distances and speeds that interstellar travel requires it's near guaranteed any ship will smack into something along the way.

Capt'n Midnight

Wibbs wrote: »

It is and so far all we hear is silence. Either we're not listening hard enough, they're not speaking loud enough, or there's nobody out there speaking.

Or they stopped broadcasting before we could listen.

FM provides a lot more noise immunity than AM so few of us could notice Morse code breaking through in the background on radio, and when it comes to TV and data a weak Morse signal will just be error corrected as humans aren't exposed to the raw signal.

We are now using lasers to communicate with satellites. Very narrow beam from a spinning Earth , good luck keeping that in focus.

Or another possibility is that interstellar travel is nigh on impossible. That outside the areas around stars where planets keep space somewhat clear of debris by hoovering most of it up, that debris is spread out everywhere and though the gaps between the debris are large, over the distances and speeds that interstellar travel requires it's near guaranteed any ship will smack into something along the way.

Nope. Radar woud work well out there too. The big problems with intersteller travel is the time it takes, without new technolgy it's going to take generations so self sufficiency as you can't pop down to the hardware store.

There's also the need to apply the breaks when you get there so you need to carry lots of mass and energy or have massive energy collectors like solar sails or ramjets.

Wibbs

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Nope. Radar woud work well out there too.

Depends on the speeds involved. If you're going at decent percentages of the speed of light, even something the size of a football is going to have serious energy behind it, so you have to spot stuff larger than say an inch at say 20% the speed of light at a distance where you'll be able to alter course around it(if you'll be able to do much in the way of course corrections at those kinda velocities). I suspect you'd be doing that regularly too, so over years, even decades you're almost certainly going to take a hit from something. A better option might be to send ahead a "pilot fish" craft(s) along your path, far enough ahead to spot danger and relay it back and to take one for the team if need be.

Capt'n Midnight

Wibbs wrote: »

Depends on the speeds involved. If you're going at decent percentages of the speed of light, even something the size of a football is going to have serious energy behind it, so you have to spot stuff larger than say an inch at say 20% the speed of light at a distance where you'll be able to alter course around it(if you'll be able to do much in the way of course corrections at those kinda velocities). I suspect you'd be doing that regularly too, so over years, even decades you're almost certainly going to take a hit from something. A better option might be to send ahead a "pilot fish" craft(s) along your path, far enough ahead to spot danger and relay it back and to take one for the team if need be.

Pilot fish is a no brainer, along with a sacrificial shield for the micrometeroites.

Lasers too.

Intersteller space is vast. It's as difficult as avoiding three bees while flying over Europe.


And chances are you'd be flying in a hollowed out nickel-iron asteroid , and if you lived in the back then you'd have hundreds of meters of protection
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_depth#Newton%27s_approximation_for_the_impact_depth

Wibbs

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Intersteller space is vast. It's as difficult as avoiding three bees while flying over Europe.

Your first statement is a given, but your second is very much up for debate. We quite simply don't know. Consider that 80 odd percent of the universe is made up of dark matter, stuff we can't observe there could well be a helluva lot of stuff floating around in the darkness of interstellar space.

tac foley

What we need is the Stargate travel system, whatever that might be............Not simply a galaxy-hopper, but from one side of the Universe to the other in as much time as it takes to hold your breath and let it out.

Love that original movie, me. I have it in Finnish with Lat/Lith/Est options - called 'Portti tähdet' - as well as the more usual version. For some reason, when I bought one off E*** to replace the one I'd lost, the Baltic States version came with it.

tac

tac foley

Wibbs wrote: »

Your first statement is a given, but your second is very much up for debate. We quite simply don't know. Consider that 80 odd percent of the universe is made up of dark matter, stuff we can't observe there could well be a helluva lot of stuff floating around in the darkness of interstellar space.

You mean darker than the darkness darkness? If we can't observe it in the fust place, how do we know when it's NOT there, but simply hiding behind the darkness?


If you get my drift...:cool:


tac

Capt'n Midnight

Wibbs wrote: »

Your first statement is a given, but your second is very much up for debate. We quite simply don't know. Consider that 80 odd percent of the universe is made up of dark matter, stuff we can't observe there could well be a helluva lot of stuff floating around in the darkness of interstellar space.

We can see when gas or dust clouds block starlight.

turns out that most of the missing matter is hot monotomic gas

and the dark stuff like neutrions don't interact that much



Also starwisp or other light probes would travel ahead so we'd have an inkling of what to expect.


Thing is the technology we'd need to survive a journey would allow us to live amonst the ateroids and harvest far more energy from the sun than we do now.

Fourier

To give figures to what Wibbs is saying, at 10% of the speed of light, something weighing 1kg would hit you with several times the force of the Hiroshima bomb.

Capt'n Midnight

Fourier wrote: »

To give figures to what Wibbs is saying, at 10% of the speed of light, something weighing 1kg would hit you with several times the force of the Hiroshima bomb.

To get to 10% the speed of light then for each and every Kg of mass of you , your supplies and space craft you will need a Hiroshima bomb, and the same again to slow down at the other end.

Fourier

tac foley wrote: »

What we need is the Stargate travel system, whatever that might be............Not simply a galaxy-hopper, but from one side of the Universe to the other in as much time as it takes to hold your breath and let it out.

There's currently nothing to suggest you could make such a system, the current theories of physics do not allow it to be built.

Although there is some evidence, depending on how you look at the evidence, that the subatomic world does have access to such a system. Question would then be more if it can be made to work for large objects like ourselves.

Wibbs

Fourier wrote: »

To give figures to what Wibbs is saying,

Thank god, cos my maths ability runs out when I run out of fingers, socks off for hard sums (found out I apparently have dyscalculia(sp). Thick is easier to spell and likely more accurate)

at 10% of the speed of light, something weighing 1kg would hit you with several times the force of the Hiroshima bomb.

The energies involved are massive. On that score and maybe I have this all arseways, but is course correction at those type of velocities a major issue? Would lateral G forces not be scarily high? OK it's hardly equivalent, but Im thinking in a car driving at 20 Kph you barely notice steering inputs, but at 200Kph you do. I'd be thinking at 10% light speed firing up the sideways thrusters would leave the crew as stains on the walls with blinking eyes?

Fourier wrote: »

There's currently nothing to suggest you could make such a system, the current theories of physics do not allow it to be built.

Although there is some evidence, depending on how you look at the evidence, that the subatomic world does have access to such a system. Question would then be more if it can be made to work for large objects like ourselves.

These days we know so much and more, we're aware of areas we don't know or quite know about, but I do wonder what a civilisation that was a million years in advance of us would know and be able to build. The time between us and say the pinnacle of ancient Athens is pretty short in the scheme of things, but what we know and what we can build would really seem like magic even to the best of their minds. Drop an Airbus into an olive grove outside Athens and they'd likely be able to figure out what its likely purpose was, but would be at a complete loss on how to reverse engineer it. Maybe they'd figure out electricity from it and that there were more materials awaiting discovery and their metal workers would have a field day, but not so much beyond that.

Thats one reason or many why I never bought the whole Roswell crash thing. To be fair that was my dad's influence. He was an engineer and when that stuff was popular when I was a kid that was his take. His actual example was when we got an LED(fancy) calculator(the Ma™ was an accountant) and he mused imagine giving that to a caveman. At best he or she would figure out that pressing buttons made red lights go on, but beyond that... Even the very brightest of them couldn't begin to understand what it was, much less how it worked. Even if you told them what it was they'd be at a loss. Most hunter gatherers think of numbers as 1, 2, 3, many. You'd have to explain many broken into defined things. you'd have to explain zero and you'd have to explain its purpose to a society where it would serve none.

Never mind brain power, an alien's perception itself could be different. There were people in the backwaters of Turkey, who because they were very devout Muslims had never seen representative art. If you showed them a painting of a bird or a horse or a person, they would only report seeing a jumble of colours, rather than "horse", "bird" "person". And they were subjects they were familiar with. Show them a picture of a aeroplane or Buzz Aldrin on the Moon and you would be hard pressed to describe the picture they weren't seeing. The colour blue another example. It's a relatively recent named colour. The Old Testament has no reference to it, neither do ancient Greek writings, or ancient Japanese. In some cultures today that don't have the colour and if you show them a colour wheel they just don't see blue. They usually see it as an continuation of/another green. There are many examples of this and that's within one species on the same planet. Imagine another species from a different environment and thousands, maybe millions, maybe billions of years ahead of us? Aliens like that would be truly alien.