Meanwhile in Mexico

Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) said:

You really think they would want to meet us?

Aliens with a vastly evolved society and technology would fly here and say, this is a little too "hold my beer," and then be like, "let's give them another 5000 years."

This is akin to driving cross-country to go to a bar to pick up women only to find that the only woman is a toothless meth-head hooker with a penis.

Here's a scary thought, they might instead show up and think "oh good, this planet will be easy to conquer" because an alien civilization of imperialist fanatics, like the Necromongers from the Riddick series, would not only feel more compelled to achieve interstellar travel but would be a lot less cautious about making contact than an enlightened and peaceful Starfleet.

I imagine it would go a lot like Cortez, aka not great for us

In reply to GameboyRMH :

That also implies morals and ethics. Morality is nothing to say....a python. It sees food, it eats food. It has no concerns for the feelings of a deer. Purely a human construct. 

GameboyRMH said:

Mndsm said:

This brings up a philosophical construct that sits in my head regularly. I wonder if the real reason we've not connected with extra-terrestrial life is- how we define life. Carbon, oxygen, proteins, basic building blocks of all living creatures, right? But...

What if it's not? Just because mankind hasn't discovered something doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Even now we struggle to wrap our minds around the way aliens could possibly look. They almost always end up humanoid in fashion. Two arms, two legs, etc. Sure you've got space cockroaches and tentacle monsters and stuff too but...nothing's every completely out of the blue. Every modern alien concept we have as the human species is based on something we can process.

There are chemical reasons for carbon-based life that mean only a couple of alternate configurations such as silicon-based could work, so we can narrow down the possible options for chemical makeup. Also from our experience on earth, we can be pretty sure that some alien creatures would look like crabs...

That's assuming the periodic table as we know it is a- complete and accurate universally (and I mean truly universally not just universally as we understand it) and within that context we've exhausted all possible means of "life". As human beings? We're probably pretty close. As crab people? Who knows? There's so many possibilities out there that we can't even fathom it's insane. Think of what we didn't know 50 years ago, and 50 years before that, and 50 years before that. That's just us as one little dust mote under the bed of the universe as a whole. 

I'm not concerned as long as we have a progression of action heroes to stop the invasion. But what happens when Tom Cruise, Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith start to age out? Can Millenials do anything to halt the hordes?

In reply to Kreb (Forum Supporter) :

Chris Pratt is a candidate but he's a Gen. X'er

In reply to GameboyRMH :

He's also a Schwarzenegger by proxy. That's gotta count for something extra. 

I have a suspicion that the vast majority of intelligent life out there is artificial in origin. Evolution by natural selection works on million year timescales but once you make a general self-aware AI, evolution by instant redesign will, even if not out of malice but by mere competence, take over and once it does adapt to its environment, I doubt it self-terminates very often.  I think it likely that there are and/or have been other biological intelligent life that also came up with computers and technology and have been outlived by the tech it created. 

And I have my doubts that we'd be able to even recognize it for what it is if any of it showed up 'round these parts... 

PS these "alien corpses" are obvious straightup gradeschool level poor-ameteur simpleminded BS just sayin'

Someone here recommended a piece of Science Fiction: The Children series by Adrian Tchaikovsky which really got into how evolutionary paths will inevitably vary according to environments. He posited scenarios where spiders and octopi develop to a level of rudimentary space travel. It made me think of how many different ways it could go. Hollywood tends to go with either the monster model, or the skinny benevolent model. In fact, they could be enormous or microscopic, breathe oxygen or something else, be biological or artificial -  the  possibilities are infinite. Maybe our universe is just a seventh grade science project for something beyond our ken.

ET phone home ... these "corpses" bear an uncanny resemblance to Spielberg's ET alien character. I read in another article that the guy that presented this has been debunked before. Too bad. Over the past sixty years I've read enough about the UFO/UAP/alien-visitor phenom to personally think there could very well be something to it. I am not a skeptic. Far from it. I'm open-minded. But something about this this case just just smells fishy to me.

Welcome to Erff.

I like how the US government is now on the UFO bandwagon. What better way to explain our super duper high tech aircraft sightings than to say it is aliens.

Yahoo.com: NASA says it will appoint secret UFO chief

Kreb (Forum Supporter) said:

Someone here recommended a piece of Science Fiction: The Children series by Adrian Tchaikovsky which really got into how evolutionary paths will inevitably vary according to environments. He posited scenarios where spiders and octopi develop to a level of rudimentary space travel. It made me think of how many different ways it could go. Hollywood tends to go with either the monster model, or the skinny benevolent model.

The standard tropes about aliens and what would be dangerous irk me.

The type of alien life that is liable to become a dominant, tool using, and expansionist species is not what most hollywood and SF make it out to be. Let's think about why homo-sapiens took the position we did, but set aside the morphology.

SF likes to make the dangerous aliens something with a lot of natural weapons and evolved advantages. Nope. Humans aren't dangerous because we are big, strong, fast, have natural weapons, or anything like that. We took over the planet because we *don't* have those things.

Humans became dangerous because we had to get creative and solve the problems of survival sideways.

A big thing Tchaikovsky gets right in the 'Children of Time' series is that the species that fills this niche would have evolutionary pressures from all directions. It would evolve as both predator and prey, and have communal social structure requiring both competition and cooperation.

As for the question of "would a sentient space faring species be hostile or friendly..?"

I'm not sure what they would be, but probably not out to conquer and certainly not out to eat us.

To eat us, they'd need to be able to metabolize our organic structures. They'd probably have a hard enough time breathing our atmosphere, let alone trying to digest a protein made of foreign genetic material.

So conquering for natural resources... Space is big. Really really big. It takes a lot of time and ENERGY to travel across it. If you've solved those problems to be able to travel between solar systems, you don't need the resources to be found there. If you need to mine resources, there are bound to be more convenient sources close by. An inhabited planet - even a primitive one - is going to be an extra PITA to mine.

More likely dangerous scenarios would be non-sentient life (as in 'The Andromeda Strain', 'The Expanse', or 'Project Icarus'), or an ark ship from a no-longer habitable world arriving here and bringing some sort of plague.

Mndsm said:

That's assuming the periodic table as we know it is a- complete and accurate universally (and I mean truly universally not just universally as we understand it) and within that context we've exhausted all possible means of "life". As human beings? We're probably pretty close. As crab people? Who knows? There's so many possibilities out there that we can't even fathom it's insane. Think of what we didn't know 50 years ago, and 50 years before that, and 50 years before that. That's just us as one little dust mote under the bed of the universe as a whole. 

The periodic table *is* universal. Elements are elements. They are defined by the number of protons in the nucleus. You can have different isotopes and ions with different numbers of neutrons or electrons, but not different elements. The blanks in the periodic table are all at the end, which are elements that *must* be artificially created because they are not stable.

This has been tested with fancy telescopes looking at distant stars and galaxies.

We can be pretty certain that these elements will regularly combine into certain very common compounds like: water, ozone, CO2, and ammonia. What will vary throughout the universe is the relative concentration of different elements and compounds.

So although life elsewhere is likely to be formed from Carbon, Hyrdogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen... the structures of larger molecules it forms those elements into are likely to be very different from DNA or terran proteins. I wouldn't even be surprised if alien life stores energy in carboyhdrates other than glucose and fructose (which are relatively simple molecules).

The powers that be do not want an alien presence here.

If aliens see what our government and corporations are doing to us they will shut them down.

no more gravy train for Daddy Warbucks.

Beer Baron said:

 

SF likes to make the dangerous aliens something with a lot of natural weapons and evolved advantages. Nope. Humans aren't dangerous because we are big, strong, fast, have natural weapons, or anything like that. We took over the planet because we *don't* have those things.

 

Yeah, why would a technologically advanced species look like they are perfectly evolved to kill without the use of weapons? Makes no sense.