Ancient Aliens

[Reverend]

Edit_XYZ wrote:

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Your 'avian delivery system' fails to coherently explain where babies come from - by a large margin (so, how do these birds get those children?). As such, it's not a viable explanation - not even close.

Magic...or aliens.

[Deckerd]

Edit_XYZ wrote:

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As opposed to wasting the best of your life doing a meaningless job in a cubicle (if you're relatively lucky)?
Or in a tin can at sea?
Or going on vacation in a tin can at sea?

You are joking of course.

[Robert Maxwell]

RAMA wrote:

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Or they have other concerns...if they aren't lonely, if they don't need our resoruces, what are they doing? In a multi-species race for nearly unlimited resources of a black hole at galactic center? Exploring time/multiverses? Exploring endless permutations of a superintelligent AI lifespan?

Sadly, there is no evidence. On the other hand, as exponentially advancing as our technology is, we may also be sadly inadequate to the task of knowing for, oh at least a few decades if not longer..

RAMA

It's just as likely they are busy not existing.

[Gov Kodos]

The alien plan:

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Edit_XYZ wrote:

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Occam's razor is a scientifical law, not an 'internet law'.

It's neither.

It's simply a principle - not a law - used in reasoning. Don't assume a more complex explanation where a simpler one is sufficient to explain the observed evidence.

The only reason a simpler explanation is more likely to be true is that it involves fewer assumptions that are not in evidence and therefore contains fewer opportunities for error at the start.

In any given situation, however, the conclusion reached via Occam's Razor may be wrong and a more complex explanation may be right. There's no law or any "law-like proposition" involved here.

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Robert Maxwell wrote:

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It's just as likely they are busy not existing.

More likely, actually. Occam's Razor and all that.

[Robert Maxwell]

My Name Is Legion wrote:

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More likely, actually. Occam's Razor and all that.

I was trying to be charitable.

[Lonemagpie]

Gov Kodos wrote:

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The alien plan:

Sadly their plan is becoming outdated, as Andy Murray being the first Brit to even make it to the final since 1938 hints...

Is it wrong of me that this sketch was all I could think of all weekend? And is it sad of me that I recognise the saucer sound effect from The Dalek Invasion Of Earth?

[Relayer1]

Haven't read the whole thread so apologies if I'm repeating this but :

Allowing even low estimates for the number of galaxies / suns / planets in the 'Goldilocks Zone' / life starting / intelligence makes it probable that intelligent life evolved elsewhere. Factor in FTL travel (which is a stretch) and you could still get theoretical visitors.

None of this, however, takes into account the staggering timescale or 'deep time' since the Big Bang. The chances of one of the aforementioned 'visitors' civilisations existing at the same time as ours is very very small indeed.

[Crazy Eddie]

Deckerd wrote:

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Nobody's going to sign up for a gig like that. Wasting the best of your life in a tin can?

Some people would. You wouldn't need that many, and it wouldn't be that hard to find enough volunteers.

[Crazy Eddie]

Edit_XYZ wrote:

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In the case of Fermi's paradox, the simplest explanation is...

Explanation for what? For why the million-item list of "things we don't know about extrasolar planets" includes whether or not life exists on any of them? Why does that even require an explanation?

The fermi paradox DOES build upon a cascade of assumptions, none of which have any support. The fundamental assumption is that if life was common in the universe, we could become aware of it, and that furthermore if INTELLIGENT life was common, we would be aware of it by now. Both of those are false assumptions, and all the others proceed from them.

Only if ALL - EVERY SINGLE ONE - of the aliens are hiding

Even the most far-fetched and romanticized sci-fi visions of what an interstellar civilization might look like, if that civilization does not possess FTL travel, the chances of their being aware of us are extremely small; significantly, our chances of being aware of them are much much smaller.

"100 million years is MORE than enough time to colonize the galaxy with ships only able of 0,1 lightspeed - 100 times more, to be exact."

What does a 100 million year old interstellar colonial species look like? At those timescales, our assumptions about who they are or what they are doing go right out the window, and recognizing it would become even harder: Just as far as Earth is concerned, 100 million years is a long enough time for a colony to be built, destroyed, then rebuilt and destroyed again over the course of a million years before being subsumed by erosion and elemental stress to the point that any artifacts of civilization would cease to be recognizable. OTOH, this being the Ancient Aliens thread we must also entertain the possibility that humans are the descendants of an alien race that colonized Earth millions of years ago before their society decayed into barbarism and the record of their origins was lost to time.

This, of course, stems from the assumption that interstellar colonization is likely to be a priority for spacefaring civilizations, when the only datapoint we have -- ourselves -- suggests otherwise.

I guess Karl Popper and many other philosophers of science, philosophers, scientists were 'intelectually lazy', eh?

They definitely didn't spend a lot of time on the internet, which is why Occam's Razor, applied in this thread, is being applied as an internet rule.

In your own words: This explanation is MORE complex, therefore it is LIKELY wrong!
Is intellectually lazy. Take the two competing explanations:
1) "She stole my wallet because she is three months behind on paying her rent and she was terrified of being evicted and winding up homeless."

2) "She stole my wallet because it was shiny."

The simplest explanation is the more likely one WITH ALL OTHER CIRCUMSTANCES BEING THE SAME. Occam's Razor is the LAST thing you resort to when evidence supports both explanations equally but one explanation requires more elements than the other. If you skip the evaluation part and don't care about the evidence, then you're really just making declarations.

[RAMA]

This TEDeducation animated short is amusing and informative:

Why Can't We See Evidence of ALien Life

http://www.33rdsquare.com/2012/03/wh...lien-life.html

[throwback]

I think one of the reasons that humans are looking for other intelligent life is that we want to know whether or not there is the possibility that we too might not go extinct. So, for me the question is about the mortality of our species. We humans are obsessive about death and, in the Western World, the death of civilizations, aren't we?

I know that the Neanderthals didn't create a civilization, yet I also know that they were intelligent and that some of them had sex with humans. So, for a brief period of history, humans were in contact with and interacting with another intelligent life form. Why do we forget that?

I am going out on a limb here, which may be sawed off the proverbial tree. I have noticed that nature generally doesn't do things in singles; 'she' does things in twos or more. Why wouldn't 'she' have created more than one intelligent species, capable of creating a civilization, and why are people arguing that two civilizations existing in the same time period could be an impossibility?

I do have to ask, why did the Q (quelle, German for "source"), the 'writer' of the physical laws that govern this universe, make intergalactic, and even interuniversal, travel difficult, if not nigh improbable?

[Deckerd]

Neanderthals were human.

[sojourner]

And "nature" is not a she or anything for that matter. Like the cylons, nature does not have a plan.