Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

 LordofHats wrote:

 lord_blackfang wrote:
You probably don't spend thousands of years to travel to a different planet just so you can do butt stuff on local drunkards.

Wild speculation theory,

What if, the aliens who come to earth and probe the local drunkards are the space version of the local boys who go cow tipping and there's nothing nefarious about it? It's just a bunch off dumbass kids, drunk of space beer, fresh off from space drivers ed, bored out of their minds in a hodunk nebula where nothing happens and they have nothing to look forward to but following Ghlock and Schleel into the minnes, having a laugh at those goof aliens on the blue planet

Douglas Adams came up with that idea over forty years ago.

Maybe they've been using earth for a real time strategy game for millennia. Different factions pick a region of earth and its people, and try to elevate it to prominence under complex game rules.

I wish i could say that was my idea, but roger zelazny kind of invented it a long time before RTS games were a thing in the story "The game of blood and dust."

 AndrewGPaul wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:

 lord_blackfang wrote:
You probably don't spend thousands of years to travel to a different planet just so you can do butt stuff on local drunkards.

Wild speculation theory,

What if, the aliens who come to earth and probe the local drunkards are the space version of the local boys who go cow tipping and there's nothing nefarious about it? It's just a bunch off dumbass kids, drunk of space beer, fresh off from space drivers ed, bored out of their minds in a hodunk nebula where nothing happens and they have nothing to look forward to but following Ghlock and Schleel into the minnes, having a laugh at those goof aliens on the blue planet

Douglas Adams came up with that idea over forty years ago.

It's not a particularly practical one under known physics unless these space teens are immortal, unbelievably bored and have easy access to planet killer level hardware.

That sounds more plausible than anything out of Ancient Aliens

No aliens visited humanity in the past. Period. If you believe in flying saucers you might as well believe in Santa Claus.

 Strg Alt wrote:
No aliens visited humanity in the past. Period. If you believe in flying saucers you might as well believe in Santa Claus.

 Strg Alt wrote:
No aliens visited humanity in the past. Period. If you believe in flying saucers you might as well believe in Santa Claus.

A lack of evidence from something we already know so little about, is not evidence.
While I myself think that it's a *very* remote possibility, it still can't be excluded.
Until we have a time machine, no one can know that with 100% certainty.
If anything, I believe in a remote and advanced human or hominid civilization more than aliens when it comes to certain myths. But one can't exclude the possibility of our ancestors being visited by aliens in the remote past. Some of their stories say they did, and until we can 100% prove that wrong, it's a possibility.
Regardless of the plausibility, we should be open to the theory.

Rigid opinions and belief systems do not promote scientific progress.

 Ghool wrote:

 Strg Alt wrote:
No aliens visited humanity in the past. Period. If you believe in flying saucers you might as well believe in Santa Claus.

A lack of evidence from something we already know so little about, is not evidence.
While I myself think that it's a *very* remote possibility, it still can't be excluded.
Until we have a time machine, no one can know that with 100% certainty.
If anything, I believe in a remote and advanced human or hominid civilization more than aliens when it comes to certain myths. But one can't exclude the possibility of our ancestors being visited by aliens in the remote past. Some of their stories say they did, and until we can 100% prove that wrong, it's a possibility.
Regardless of the plausibility, we should be open to the theory.

Rigid opinions and belief systems do not promote scientific progress.

Visited us for what? To have a chat? This doesn't make any sense at all. If aliens would come to our planet, they would colonize it immediately.

There are very few planets in habitable zones like our Earth. Other than that there are more conditions needed to enable evolution to take place. In addition life itself to evolve into higher organisms is no small feat.

Space travel is a highly dangerous affair for organisms. So aliens zipping through space belongs to the realm of science-fiction. That's why deep space is explored by robot probes.

Scientists have listened for radio beam emissions for centuries which could originate from aliens. No luck so far. Do alien life forms exist? Absolutely yes. Bacteria & Archaea come to mind.

Strg Alt wrote:Visited us for what? To have a chat? This doesn't make any sense at all. If aliens would come to our planet, they would colonize it immediately.

.

I think you answered your own question here - colonization? Possibly resources? Science?
How do we know 100% that this already didn't happen?
How do we know that entire purpose of said probes wasn't to colonize habitable worlds?

Strg Alt wrote:There are very few planets in habitable zones like our Earth. Other than that there are more conditions needed to enable evolution to take place. In addition life itself to evolve into higher organisms is no small feat.

Absolutely. But our current knowledge of what's actually out there is so limited in scope, we can't really draw definitive conclusions.

Strg Alt wrote:Space travel is a highly dangerous affair for organisms. So aliens zipping through space belongs to the realm of science-fiction. That's why deep space is explored by robot probes.

Who said it was organic life forms? It could have been robots, AI controlled organics, or who-knows-what?
I never said they had to be non-robotic. Or cybernetically enhanced.

Strg Alt wrote:Scientists have listened for radio beam emissions for centuries which could originate from aliens. No luck so far. Do alien life forms exist? Absolutely yes. Bacteria & Archaea come to mind.

Again I will point out that our technology is far too crude to even make an attempt at detecting civilizations more advanced than ours. Hell, even civilizations less advanced than our own.

And I completely agree with you.

There is such a thing as keeping an open mind, and being able to question your own beliefs and our rigid systems of consensus.
The fact is, there is the *possibility* that we could have been colonized in the distant past. Is it very plausible? Not really.
In fact, it really doesn't make sense. Neither does quantum mechanics. And the fight against that was strong and fierce for many years.
And it took nearly a century for it to be commonly accepted fact. Should quantum mechanics work? Not in any common sense way.

But that doesn't mean it can't happen. Ever. No way. Ever. Because QM was proven right, and indeed things at micro-scale don't make sense at macro-scale.

The possibility is still there that we were visited/colonized in the past. I'd rather be open to whatever is then close myself off from what might possibly be truth.
Does it mean that my belief system is now compromised?

Without open minds progress is stifled. Seems that it's a hard point to get across I guess.
But I guess these days the term Devil's Advocate seems to be lost on some folks.

 Strg Alt wrote:

Visited us for what? To have a chat? This doesn't make any sense at all. If aliens would come to our planet, they would colonize it immediately.

So... have you set up house permanently in every place that you've ever visited?

Human researchers travel all over the world studying all sorts of things without bothering to colonise the places they visit. There are any number of reasons that an outside civilisation might have wanted to visit without actually taking over the place. We could well be an alien anthropologist hot spot and just not know it.

There are very few planets in habitable zones like our Earth.

That we know of. Our methods of finding planets in other star systems are still pretty crude, extremely hit-and-miss at the best of times, and not particularly good for finding anything other than larger planets.

Space travel is a highly dangerous affair for organisms. So aliens zipping through space belongs to the realm of science-fiction. That's why deep space is explored by robot probes.

Space travel is highlight dangerous for us because our technology for doing so is still rather primitive. Air travel was also a highly dangerous affair, once upon a time. Technology improves. If we're assuming that a civilisation has the technology to travel between solar systems in a reasonable timeframe to begin with, it's also reasonable to assume they've worked out a few more of the kinks than we have so far.

Or, as Ghool said, they used robots.

Scientists have listened for radio beam emissions for centuries which could originate from aliens. No luck so far.

By the same token, I've come to the conclusion that my next door neighbours don't actually exist, because I've been sitting here for an hour with a glass held up to my ear, and I haven't heard a television from over there at all.


To be clear, I'm not saying we have been visited by aliens, because I've yet to see any evidence that this is actually the case. But it certainly can't be dismissed out of hand simply because we lack the technology to do so.

I'm intensely curious how scientists have been listening for 'radio beam emissions' for centuries.

Voss wrote:
I'm intensely curious how scientists have been listening for 'radio beam emissions' for centuries.

Before more modern means of such receiving scientists were relying on jury-rigged alien technology.

My default stance on UFO discussions is do not engage. UFO does not mean aliens, it means unidentified, and there are many things in the air that we can't explain. Seems like a leap to assume a space-faring race decided to come loiter on our planet and probe our people.

Two things that surfaced recently that seem open for strong skepticism.

- The Tic Tac videos
- The stories about Nitinol / Bigelow Aerospace

The Tic Tac videos have been around for a while, what got my attention was the fact US legislators were discussing them. They asserted we don't know who made this or where it could have come from.

The way I read the situation, this is not aliens. A program is looking for funding and this was the best way to get attention. News reports are a great way to manufacture urgency. No way to say what was on those HUDs but we absolutely know how decisions on Federal funding happen.

Stories about Nitinol have been around for a while and the name came up again based on some FOIA requests in relation to Bigelow Aerospace.

I lived in Las Vegas and know people from Bigelow. They're engineers, not research scientists. There's no way they were handed a deposit of strange metal and asked to figure it out.

Bigelow does build space capsules and makes some pretty bold decisions on what materials to use in constructing them. They do some contracting on components to reduce size and weight and have some people who really know MEMS / 2D materials.

Bigelow laid off all it's staff when Coronavirus hit, just like all the casinos in the area. I get the sense they made some advancements in 2D materials, specifically with programmable substrates that can alter surface characteristics, and would like to get started again. And that's why we're hearing about this in the news, the description of the metal is too close to near-term technical advances to not ask "why are we hearing about this now?"

Encourage everyone to ask questions and consider the motivation of the people involved, especially when it comes to a politician or government official admitting something. The only incentives that exist in government are to do nothing and keep people who would make you work from advancing in their careers.

On the difficulty / danger of space travel, it comes back to a statement, that I cannot remember where I first heard it; any technological, architectural or cultural endeavour only represents a tiny fraction of the capacity of the civilisation that did it, because it’s basically impossible to harness all of the resources of a civilisation to a single goal. Even if you assume some sort of hive mind, a vast amount of the capacity of the group will be going into just sustaining the group. The consequence is that if we encounter an interstellar traveller, interstellar travel is going to be a relatively straight forward technology for that civilisation.

Life Jim, but not as we know it.

Same goes with technology.

Right now, so far as we know, we can’t exceed the speed of light. Yet, not so long ago, the idea of powered flight, let alone Rockets to the Moon were fanciful.

We can also largely only base our understanding of life to what’s on our planet - because thats a shared cradle.

What we don’t necessarily know, and can’t for certain say, is that other forms of life cannot possibly exist - or what environment might be required.

Are there aliens out there, somewhere? I say yes, absolutely. It seems ludicrous to me to suggest otherwise. Our Galaxy alone is vast, yet isn’t all that big compared to others. The Universe so far as we know is infinite. To suggest we’re the only planet with complex, let alone intelligent life isn’t so much laughable, as utterly terrifying.

After all, let’s say we get to those other planets in Goldilocks Zones. What if despite the correct placement, they’re lifeless and inert? No trees. No gas exchange. No microbial life. That’s a genuinely terrifying thought to my mind. I don’t see how we could even start terraforming such a barren world.

Now, have those life forms ever made contact with us? Much as I’d like to believe they have (SciFi junkie), almost certainly not. There’s simply no need. We’re presumably not interesting enough to actually do a meet and greet - especially when they can simply observe us from a distance and realise what a bunch of lunatics the dominant life form is.

I genuinely fear we’ll never make it off this rock, and humanity is doomed to extinction by its own idiocy.

To quote The Universe Song? We better all pray there’s intelligent life in space, because theres bugger all down here on Earth.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Apologies for the rather dour post. I’m normally really quite optimistic in life. Just....not here.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Life Jim, but not as we know it.

Same goes with technology.

Right now, so far as we know, we can’t exceed the speed of light. Yet, not so long ago, the idea of powered flight, let alone Rockets to the Moon were fanciful.

Powered flight was never fanciful, because birds, bats and bees could demonstrably do it. We went from the first glider in 1849 to the Wright Brothers in 1902 to Charles Lindberg in 1927 because it was demonstrably possible to fly heavier than air - nature had been doing it forever.

Nature has NOT been showing us FTL. At all. We've theorized all sorts of things but when we run the math we hit things like 'negative energy' or 'infinite energy'. Now, physics is full of weirdness and maybe we'll find a cheat for this sort of thing, but there's a big difference between "Figure out how birds do that flying thing which they obviously do" to "How do we go faster than light, given that everything obviously does not go faster than light." Because right now stuff like infinite energy and negative energy just exist on paper.

 John Prins wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Life Jim, but not as we know it.

Same goes with technology.

Right now, so far as we know, we can’t exceed the speed of light. Yet, not so long ago, the idea of powered flight, let alone Rockets to the Moon were fanciful.

Powered flight was never fanciful, because birds, bats and bees could demonstrably do it. We went from the first glider in 1849 to the Wright Brothers in 1902 to Charles Lindberg in 1927 because it was demonstrably possible to fly heavier than air - nature had been doing it forever.

I don't know about you but most birds I see tend to be a LOT smaller than aircraft. There are also none that are even close to breaking the sound barrier - more than once.
Also don't forget a bird is built for it, their bones and bodies are lighter by far (strip the feathers off and they downsize a lot). A human is super heavy and dense in comparison to a bird. The idea that you could build aircraft capable of carrying hundreds of people at once is almost mythological at certain points in history.

This is the thing, technology often has gatekeeper elements that make certain ideas impossible to laughable at various stages in history. Unless you make the breakthrough (often several) that unlocks a new understanding, materials, methods, concepts. Then fanciful dreams become reality

Seriously go back 100 years and tell people that you could have a machine in your hand which can store a library worth of books and access the world's known recorded knowledge and call people in real time in Australia and they'd consider it the work of science fiction at best. IT's so far beyond their comprehension to imagine such a device and it breaches so many "laws" and sciences that they understand. Yet today we consider it so commonplace that its actually abnormal to not have a mobile phone or at least access to one.

If FTL is possible than the Fermi Paradox just becomes even worse. It becomes even more ridiculous that aliens are nowhere to be seen if interstellar travel is trivial.

Interdimensional travel is pretty much the only made up tech that would allow alien civilizations to expand and not be detectable.

It being possible and it being trivial are not in the least bit equivalent.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
If FTL is possible than the Fermi Paradox just becomes even worse. It becomes even more ridiculous that aliens are nowhere to be seen if interstellar travel is trivial.

Interdimensional travel is pretty much the only made up tech that would allow alien civilizations to expand and not be detectable.

I would guess that it’s probably not trivial, at least within our current understanding and technology.
But if we look at the size of the solar system alone, space is big. Really big, and really empty.

And if there were aliens that far surpassed us and have made interstellar travel easier, would we even be able to detect them?
And if they were more advanced than us, why would they want to interfere with us and our evolution?

I don’t think they would.

If we only make a comparison to our modern culture alone, it’s a strict policy among anthropologists that if a tribe has not been contacted by modern society, that we refrain from doing-so. This is to ensure their culture and society remains intact.
I think we as humans have learned the hard lesson about hijacking other cultures and colonization.
If any sort of advanced alien culture happened across our planet, we can probably safely assume that we wouldn’t detect them, and they would not likely interfere.
However, in some of the ancient myths and the bible, the stories state that those that did interfere with humans were cast out and considered ‘fallen’. It could be an allegory disguising the truth about alien gods. Or you it could be just another advanced civilization in the distant past and it’s equivalent of anthropologists messing with the native, Stone Age cultures.

Like I said before though, the more likely possibility is there was some ancient culture that colonized a huge chunk of the planet before falling into ruin, destroying themselves, or some sort of cataclysmic event wiped them from the face of the planet.
Aliens are a really big stretch.

I mean modern humans only have social values established within their generation, ones before and after have different, if slightly similar ones. Different countries at the same time can have vastly different social values. The idea that humanity today has a single unified set of values isn't true; nor is it true in the past.

So to suggest that aliens would 100% behave a certain way because of what some of our social values today are, is childish. That's just looking at it purely in imposing human values on aliens; let alone the fact that aliens are, well, aliens, and imparting human characteristics upon them is pointless.

Heck we even have to be careful about doing such to pets and animals on our own world. Whilst we still might share many similarities, its important to realise that their impression and interpretation of the world around them is different to our own. Heck even just what we see and hear differs to them - some cna see colours we cannot; hear things we cannot and vis versa.


Aliens might think of behave in any way and a true alien might have concepts of behaviour that we cannot work out. They might feel emotions (or have a semblance of an emotional system) that we cannot feel; they might have whole rafters of senses that we do not which changes their perception of what's around them.

They might have faster than light travel and have no interest in contacting other life at all. Using it only when needed for resources or the like.



The possibilities are near endless. Heck there might well be species and "life" out there that we'd not even consider alive. Creatures that operate purely in a "drone" like state and yet have achieved much through it; but are not what we'd consider really "alive" as such.

It doesn't matter if they want to be seen or not, unless our understanding of physics is completely wrong - like, to the point that literally everything we can observe only coincidentally conforms to our understanding of physical laws and could just devolve into something completely nonsensical at any moment - then advanced civilizations are detectable with current technology.

An odd argument to make when we already make aircraft that are barely detectable with modern technology?

 Overread wrote:

I don't know about you but most birds I see tend to be a LOT smaller than aircraft. There are also none that are even close to breaking the sound barrier - more than once.
Also don't forget a bird is built for it, their bones and bodies are lighter by far (strip the feathers off and they downsize a lot). A human is super heavy and dense in comparison to a bird. The idea that you could build aircraft capable of carrying hundreds of people at once is almost mythological at certain points in history.

Birds were, however, proof that heavier than air flight was possible, even if it was only possible for very light creatures.

But we have no FTL phenomena to point to. At best we can point to enormous regions of space expanding in such a way that the expansion is greater than light's ability to cross the gulf (cosmic event horizon) and we've got no idea why it's happening or what's driving it.

That's the difference between humanity achieving heavier than air flight and achieving FTL. One was just figuring out the physics from an observable phenomena, the other is figuring out the physics from NEVER observed phenomena.

 Azreal13 wrote:
An odd argument to make when we already make aircraft that are barely detectable with modern technology?

Yes, funnily enough it can be easier to detect a dyson in another galaxy than a teacup in Earth orbit.

 lord_blackfang wrote:

 Azreal13 wrote:
An odd argument to make when we already make aircraft that are barely detectable with modern technology?

Yes, funnily enough it can be easier to detect a dyson in another galaxy than a teacup in Earth orbit.

Ah right, you pivoted from "they haven't been here" to "we couldn't spot them where they are" and I didn't notice. Not hugely consistent but ok.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

John prin wrote:But we have no FTL phenomena to point to.

Well, quantum entanglement may be, but we have no real grasp of how it works to say for sure.

 Azreal13 wrote:

 lord_blackfang wrote:

 Azreal13 wrote:
An odd argument to make when we already make aircraft that are barely detectable with modern technology?

Yes, funnily enough it can be easier to detect a dyson in another galaxy than a teacup in Earth orbit.

Ah right, you pivoted from "they haven't been here" to "we couldn't spot them where they are" and I didn't notice. Not hugely consistent but ok.

My bad for being unclear, in this

 lord_blackfang wrote:
If FTL is possible than the Fermi Paradox just becomes even worse. It becomes even more ridiculous that aliens are nowhere to be seen if interstellar travel is trivial.

Interdimensional travel is pretty much the only made up tech that would allow alien civilizations to expand and not be detectable.

I was already referring to detecting colonies, which should be more numerous with FTL, not UFOs on Earth.

 Overread wrote:
I mean modern humans only have social values established within their generation, ones before and after have different, if slightly similar ones. Different countries at the same time can have vastly different social values. The idea that humanity today has a single unified set of values isn't true; nor is it true in the past.

So to suggest that aliens would 100% behave a certain way because of what some of our social values today are, is childish. That's just looking at it purely in imposing human values on aliens; let alone the fact that aliens are, well, aliens, and imparting human characteristics upon them is pointless.

Heck we even have to be careful about doing such to pets and animals on our own world. Whilst we still might share many similarities, its important to realise that their impression and interpretation of the world around them is different to our own. Heck even just what we see and hear differs to them - some cna see colours we cannot; hear things we cannot and vis versa.


Aliens might think of behave in any way and a true alien might have concepts of behaviour that we cannot work out. They might feel emotions (or have a semblance of an emotional system) that we cannot feel; they might have whole rafters of senses that we do not which changes their perception of what's around them.

They might have faster than light travel and have no interest in contacting other life at all. Using it only when needed for resources or the like.



The possibilities are near endless. Heck there might well be species and "life" out there that we'd not even consider alive. Creatures that operate purely in a "drone" like state and yet have achieved much through it; but are not what we'd consider really "alive" as such.

Completely agree. I was using that analogy because there are mythic tales and stories that said as much.
Thus, if we assume these ancient gods were indeed aliens, that perhaps they did have some sort of non interference values similar to our own.
Of course that’s an assumption again. But we’re not really dealing with much solid evidence here. So I’m making assumptions and leaps based on what we know already through story and myth and extrapolating that.

I’d also say that quantum entanglement and teleportation are more plausible with what we know than FTL travel.

Blackfang - one problem is you're assuming that alien races would build big things for us to spot. You mention a Dyson Sphere, but we also have to consider that that might be what "we'd" build if we could, but might not be what other alien races could or would build.

They might have no need or desire or even idea of such a structure. They might be totally pacifist and simply explore other worlds in tiny ships leaving little to no trace. So they'd have the technology, but the wouldn't be colonising or building or doing things on other worlds that we might notice.

It could also be that life arose, developed, fell and was rendered to dust generations ago and that what evidence there is is buried in the ground on planets and such. Ergo that it all happened and we missed it. Or rather missed it within our sphere of visual observation.

Or maybe its happening right now, but we don't see it because the light travelling to us is so ancient by the time it reaches us.

Yeah, I'd like to think that any civilisation with the ability to build a Dyson Sphere would have realised long before that point what a horribly ridiculous waste of resources it would be.