If there are aliens and a good sized amount of them decide to visit us, we are f***ed, I believe anyways. Just look at all the movies. Even if we manage to drive them away, it costs a lot of lives. I can't wait to see War of the Worlds.
Haha yeah I'd bet my immortal soul on it. All I ask for if they conquer Earth is a little bed with my name on it.
I think we are alone. In order for a planet to form, you need incredible amounts of destruction to occur (as evidence by scienctific theory), and in order for life to form, you seemingly need the right chemical equation (as evidenced by planets without life). In order for life to survive you need to make it through incredible amounts of ongoig destruction. These three concepts combined, lead me to believe, that intelligent life could not possibly survive long enough for intelligent contact. There may be life out there, but I doubt that life lasts very long. Seems probable to me, that we are alone. Just an aberration in the big scheme of the universe. An error. The first of our kind. Errors do and do not survive.
I don't see a whole lot of evidence, and I'm usually skeptical... One of my former students, however, who is otherwise normal, honestly believes that he ran into one of those little grey guys like in the picture when he was a child in South America. His brother saw it too. I think it was sitting in their bedroom, and they felt it was benevolent. As middle-aged adults, they still believe it and have done a lot of looking into the subject. I'm not sure how to explain it, but it is interesting that people from different cultures and backgrounds have independently come up with that same type of prototype alien. Maybe there is some sort of other explanation... ?
yeah, but with 100 billion galaxies with 100 billion stars each, you've got 10 sextillion chances for it to work out. and i'm sure no shortage of the elements that helped form life on earth floating around the universe. the planet thing is easy. the fact life started here and flourished through endless variations seems to indicate the odds can't be that astronomical against life starting and sustaining itself. actually, it would seem keeping life going doesn't seem to be that hard. it's gone on for 3+ billion years here with all sorts of mass extinctions and global changes sprinkled in. getting started would be the hard part, but like i said, with 10^22 chances, it should happen. so i think something has to be out there somewhere. whether anyone has figured out how to travel faster than light (i.e. wormholes) so that any of us could come in contact, who knows. i just hope if there ever is contact, we are the ones who do the finding b/c that'll mean we have the technology (and ass-kicking) advantage. not that i wanna kick the aliens' asses, i just don't want ours to get kicked.
I want to believe.... I have the occasional abduction dream; it is really terrifying, but I have no evidence whatsoever that anything out of the ordinary has happened to me along those lines.
Our species has been around for a good 1 or 2 million years, and recorded history began around 4-5 thousand years ago. The scale of the universe is mind boggling. Heck, there might even be simple life on Mars. In another 50-100 years we'll probably take a peek down Europa too. The trick of the matter is knowing how to identify life alien to our own. It'd be incredibly amazing if it looked similar the life on earth let alone looking like us.
It's likely, with the sheer number of stars out there, that life does exist somewhere else. However, there is almost no chance we've been visited (unless intelligent life existed on Mars millions of years ago and has subsequently vanished). It would be very cool if we've been visited because it would mean you can get here from there but, according to physics as we know it, it's just not possible to travel the great distances fast enough.
I say yes, and I think it would be fantastic if, in a few thousand years we are visited by a group of space "aliens" very similar to us except for the fact that the average "person" in their society is 10 times the size of us...so a 5' human would be a 50' "alien". And then we learn that we mysteriously and coincidentally have similar language skills. So we connect with them and they have everything we have, but bigger... Unfortunately for them, our Earth is smart enough to finally kill all of them when we realize that their version of "Friends" is still running. In the year 4583, our world goes through the New Age of Enlightenment and bans Friends from society. In fact, all evidence of the show is destroyed, from DVDs to books to all other artifacts. It gets to the point where if the word "Friends" is mentioned, the speaker is immediately found, arrested, and eventually forced to work at Dualstar Entertainment. So that's what the giant space creatures are killed.
I think great leaps in space are doable, but in order to make it happen, we need to find a disposable solar system first. Then we need to get there. Once you do, that star is your engine. A sun can take you anywhere you want to go as long as you are in it's orbit. And it can take you there quickly. They are the biggest balls of potential and kinetic energy we know of. All we need to do is use them. Or have the courage to do so, which right now, is the big leap that needs to be taken.
OK let's just say that because of the vast number of planets in the universe, there are super intelligent beings out there that can travel at half the speed of light. How in the hell would you figure that they would know to look at this insignificant dust speck three planets out from an umremarkable star on the edge of am unremarkable glalaxy. The same sheer numbers that make their existence possible make the chances of any contact impossible. Earth has been sending electromagnetic signals into space for about 100 years, that gives a detection radius of about 100 light years. Space as we know it has a radius of around 12 billion light years and since the volume of a sphere is a funtion (4/3 r3) the cube of the radius you can see that the percentage comparison of the volume we might be detected in to the volume where the possible life forms might exist is to the point of insignificance. You can do the math, but trust me, it is .000000000000.........percent But assume that out there at 100 light years some intelligent life hears Marconi's first transmission (he's constantly looking at the right frequency for a signal of a billionth of a watt and instantly understands the implication of the occillation patterns for Italian), jumps immediatley in his 1/2 the speed of light space ship and heads our way; he still won't be here for another 200 years.
