I believe in intelligent beings living on other planets but I doubt they've ever visited or made any kind of contact with us whatsoever.
Do you believe in the existence of aliens?
- Thread starter Nerdius Maximus
- Start date
There has to be other intelligent life out there. Just way too many stars and way way to many galaxies.
Are their aliens visiting Earth right now? Probably not. However, I wouldn't be completely blown away if there were. Although I'm 99% sure they aren't.
It's depressing thinking there is other life out there and we may never get to meet them. It would be fantastic to study and learn everything about them. Their biology, their history, art and culture in general. It would be an amazing discovery to compare the development of two completely separate intelligent species. Would their development be similar to ours or would their society have taken vastly different paths? How different would they really look? I kind of think they might not be as different looking as we might think.
Are their aliens visiting Earth right now? Probably not. However, I wouldn't be completely blown away if there were. Although I'm 99% sure they aren't.
It's depressing thinking there is other life out there and we may never get to meet them. It would be fantastic to study and learn everything about them. Their biology, their history, art and culture in general. It would be an amazing discovery to compare the development of two completely separate intelligent species. Would their development be similar to ours or would their society have taken vastly different paths? How different would they really look? I kind of think they might not be as different looking as we might think.
Forehead aliens!
Would we even recognise it if we encountered it? Storyboard aliens and postulated RL aliens each suffer the limitation that nothing can be envisaged beyond out imaginations. These are generally limited (even if the boundaries are pushed far out) to analogues of Earth Native creatures. Anything outside these parameters could slide right by us.
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Well... intelligent, space faring species surely won't look like dogs, jellyfish or spiders. They need hands, and - more important - they need opposable thumbs. Otherwise they will never be able to successfully use tools. I also find it highly likely that they are indeed bipeds. I don't know how practical it would be to have 4 legs and 4 arms. At least on Earth that has NEVER been successful. All dominant species we've found walk on 4 legs, from the dinosaurs to us humans. And what we can definately exclude is the silly tripod idea. That is the most unstable and most unnatural form. The limbs of animals always come in pairs, and I don't think this would change on another planet.
And then aliens need to live in an environment that allows building computers, rockets and whatever. So no space faring fish.
And then aliens need to live in an environment that allows building computers, rockets and whatever. So no space faring fish.
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I once had a long conversation with a guy who worked for the government in some capacity. He told me this very elaborate story about the existence of aliens that, to make a long story short, was very convincing. He claimed to have encountered one personally, and to have seen one of their ships. It was evident to me that he really believed what he was saying. He was very afraid to discuss it, but he opened up to me about it because he thought I'd be open-minded enough to accept what he was saying. He told me that the ones that have visited us are not benevolent, that we're basically lab rats to them.
He said that the "greys" that people talk about are some kind of artificial slave race and not the actual aliens themselves. It was an extremely fascinating conversation, and I have to admit, it got me thinking, and wondering "what if" but I really didn't believe a word of it.
He said that the "greys" that people talk about are some kind of artificial slave race and not the actual aliens themselves. It was an extremely fascinating conversation, and I have to admit, it got me thinking, and wondering "what if" but I really didn't believe a word of it.
The whole "interstellar aliens are raiding us and we're their lab rats" scenario is just too implausible. There must be great technological and even economic barriers against making this work. If they werre advanced enough to overcome those issues then they would be here in force already. And what use as a "lab rat" is a species from a completely different ecosystem?
That's what I was getting at. The cost and difficulty of making such journeys makes them impractical, if they're trying to solve some problem of theirs at our expense, as in the "they're already here and secretly making us their lab rats" scenario.
I think First Contact came close to something plausible. Imagine this:
"Science vessel T'Pock, stellar system survey report. Class III star with large collection of planets. Third planet reasonably hospitable and supporting a diverse ecosystem. Dominant species is a primitive, volatile, round-eared Vulcanoid. Conclusion: avoid contact until further notice."
I am just never going to be able to get past the precision cut stone ruins of Puma Punku. How was this done? Until this gets explained to my satisfaction, planet Earth was crawling with aliens a thousand plus years ago
LOL, does it really need aliens to cut precise lines into stones? I mean I've always suspected that this creepy old gravestone mason right around the corner was from another planet, but...
This scenario makes only sense if there are SO MANY intelligent life forms out there that you can actually allow yourself the luxury of ignoring most of them.
Or a limited number of contacts that ended badly (hostility, cultural disorder, interminable Archer lectures about gazelle development, etc.)
Why should it be so impossible, that, should some alien overcome all those borders with the distance and technology, they are not doing it for power, resources and such, but simply out of curiousity?
If I could fly around in space and visit other planets that at least would be MY reason to do it. I would not want to rule other planets, I would not want to destroy them, to get their ressources, to make myself lazy and rich using the others for slaves or whatever...just plain, simple curiousity... for all the fascinating things, that might await me out there to be discovered, to be astonished about, to touch, so see, to feel, to inspire me to new ideas...
TerokNor
If I could fly around in space and visit other planets that at least would be MY reason to do it. I would not want to rule other planets, I would not want to destroy them, to get their ressources, to make myself lazy and rich using the others for slaves or whatever...just plain, simple curiousity... for all the fascinating things, that might await me out there to be discovered, to be astonished about, to touch, so see, to feel, to inspire me to new ideas...
TerokNor
It could be they just don't share this attitude.
Here in North America, we tend to see the wilderness as--not as something safe, exactly--but not as something particularly dangerous, either. It's a place you visit on camping trips. And if something goes wrong, there's a good chance that someone will come to help you.
But it wasn't so long ago that people saw wilderness areas as something ugly and frightening. They were places inhabited by "primitive" and "savage" people who would just as soon rob you and kill you as look at you, and where getting lost or suffering an accident meant death. Just a hundred years ago, an expedition to the polar regions or to the tops of the highest mountains was like an expedition into outer space. Exploration was a dangerous endeavour that required courage, good luck, and sometimes, superior firepower.
It may be that any intelligent aliens in this part of the universe share this attitude toward the trackless wilderness of outer space and its inhabitants. Even if they were somehow capable of travel across interstellar distances, it wouldn't follow that such travel would be easy and safe for them. Look at the enormous effort and expense required even to send small unmanned spacecraft to other planets within our own star system. And even if extraterrestrials detected us with robot probes, they might decide that it's simply not worth the trouble and expense of trying to contact us in person.
MeanJoePhaser
Admiral
Gotta test your prescription drugs and cosmetics on something.
Depends entirely on who's in charge. If they are religious, want our resource or even want to colonize, we are fucked. Because then they come with the evangelization and burning of infidels. And the relocation. And of course they'll bring their own diseases.
