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Not a Drill: SETI Is Investigating a Possible Extraterrestrial Signal From Deep Space

As a partial aside, I always found it amusing that the various "classifications" people come up with for alien civilizations follow the same general path we did. When, you know, we barely followed it ourselves.

Also, Dyson Spheres are ridiculously stupid. The raw amount of material you'd need to build one, alone, greatly outweighs any benefits you'd gain from the project itself.

True. You need the material of millions of telluric planets to make a Dyson Sphere that could withstand solar wind without being blown off to pieces.
 
Any time we reply to your statements you just claim that we "haven't read them" or are misconstruing them. Please, restate your argument about how aliens should give us dangerous technology that has been made "safe" in some nebulous way. Feel free to use historic analogies and thought experiments.
 
Any time we reply to your statements you just claim that we "haven't read them" or are misconstruing them. Please, restate your argument about how aliens should give us dangerous technology that has been made "safe" in some nebulous way. Feel free to use historic analogies and thought experiments.

Find ONE of my posts where I said that aliens should give us technology, dangerous or otherwise!!!

There's no need to restate my arguments. Stating them once and for all was enough to begin with.
 
Find ONE of my posts where I said that aliens should give us technology, dangerous or otherwise!!!

There's no need to restate my arguments. Stating them once and for all was enough to begin with.
Then what exactly are you trying to say?
 
And the message has become muddled. Jesus, just restate the damn thing. You could save us all a lot of time just by reiterating your argument instead of being coy.
 
Ok. If aliens come here there are a few things to consider. First our atmosphere/air is likely to be different from theirs and they'll need environmental suits to walk around here. Second, it will not take them very long to realize that some of us are criminals, in fact it's likely that they have criminals in their own society already. So even if they use technology to get down there, you can rest assured that they'll take every precaution to keep us away from it. Or they'll just stay in orbit and observe us from there.

Are you following me so far?
 
Do go on, because so far you're agreeing with us that aliens would keep superior technology out of our hands.
 
Do go on, because so far you're agreeing with us that aliens would keep superior technology out of our hands.

I'm not sure I see a reason for a technologically superior race to even mess around with us. Star Trek has fed us a continuous line that humanity is somehow special in the grand scheme of things (especially with the Q), and I seriously doubt that is the case.
 
I'm not sure I see a reason for a technologically superior race to even mess around with us. Star Trek has fed us a continuous line that humanity is somehow special in the grand scheme of things (especially with the Q), and I seriously doubt that is the case.
I think it's reasonable to suppose that at least some individuals in other species would share our curiosity and desire to know everything. To draw an analogy, if we came across a planet populated with a cave dwelling species with flickers of intelligence, or even early multicellular life, I don't think we would pass it by because they weren't special.
 
I think it's reasonable to suppose that at least some individuals in other species would share our curiosity and desire to know everything. To draw an analogy, if we came across a planet populated with a cave dwelling species with flickers of intelligence, or even early multicellular life, I don't think we would pass it by because they weren't special.

At this point we would be happy if we could find proof that life has existed in the past anywhere else in the universe. We would overjoyed to find actual living things, even microscopic ones.
 
I think it's reasonable to suppose that at least some individuals in other species would share our curiosity and desire to know everything. To draw an analogy, if we came across a planet populated with a cave dwelling species with flickers of intelligence, or even early multicellular life, I don't think we would pass it by because they weren't special.

Not quite what I meant. But if they are technologically advanced, they would probably be able to investigate us from long range, in a way we wouldn't know or understand that was capable.

There is just this overriding urge to have us be the center of the universe. You see it in sci-fi, and shows like Ancient Aliens, where we are seemingly visited everyday by extraterrestrials. I just tend to think we sometimes don't understand how small and insignificant we really are. We're a grain of sand in the Mojave Desert.
 
Not quite what I meant. But if they are technologically advanced, they would probably be able to investigate us from long range, in a way we wouldn't know or understand that was capable.

There is just this overriding urge to have us be the center of the universe. You see it in sci-fi, and shows like Ancient Aliens, where we are seemingly visited everyday by extraterrestrials. I just tend to think we sometimes don't understand how small and insignificant we really are. We're a grain of sand in the Mojave Desert.

I don't agree. Life is something special and extremely rare in the universe. I am convinced that if aliens came by they would spend loads of time studying us.
 
Not quite what I meant. But if they are technologically advanced, they would probably be able to investigate us from long range, in a way we wouldn't know or understand that was capable.

There is just this overriding urge to have us be the center of the universe. You see it in sci-fi, and shows like Ancient Aliens, where we are seemingly visited everyday by extraterrestrials. I just tend to think we sometimes don't understand how small and insignificant we really are. We're a grain of sand in the Mojave Desert.

Absolutely agreed sci-fi breeds an arrogance that we are something special in a universe of near-infinite diversity (in infinite combinations ;) ) - Doctor Who is especially bad at this, but it's a universal trait of sci-fi, you're right.
However, it is worth considering how special a particular alien species might find us - if we are intelligent species #2352 then I think we'd find we took a three course dinner of humble pie very quickly - they may not even bother contacting us at all and just ignore our cute attempts to wave from our blue dot. But it is entirely possible that an alien race, even an advanced one, is in a similar situation to us in that they are looking up at the night sky and wondering whether anyone else is out there. Whatever our relative states of advancement, we wouldn't be ignored by such a species. The desire to explore, innovate and expand knowledge would almost be a pre-requisite of a civilisation that advanced, and an alien species, even a stupid bipedal ape, only comes along every now and then.
 
There is absolutely nothing that points to this conclusion. Heck, if anything, we may find that life is everywhere, if we ever have the ability to go and explore the galaxy.
Everything tends to prove that life is an extremely rare phenomenon, some scientists even think that it is not impossible that this is the only planet in the universe where intelligent life has emerged.
 
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