i made this post at another forum but thought I would post here to get some feedback ------- the only aliens that are theorized to exist in our gallaxy are little organisms in the watery surface of one of Jupiter's moons (Io?) and maybe the ones that are now non-existent on Mars. so let's say there really were aliens. their technology would of course be way out of reach. and my guess is that it'll take an incredible amount of time for a civilization to develop such technology - to travel lightyears within a couple years of months or even days. before any civilization can reach such level, it'll probably be overpopulating its resident planet and there would be numbers of wars that set back development for a little while or two. ok and even if they get as intelligent as us humans, it will still takes an enormous amount of time to travel such distance. SETI has not picked up any radio signals that resemble a form of communication [yet] so the nearest alien is probably/maybe a lightyear away, who knows. a lightyear (distance light travels in one year) is approximately 9,460,528,404,846 kilometers or 5,878,499,812,499 miles. unless the alien civilization develops space ships that can travel such distance before they all die of starvation and dehydration, it'll not reach earth. and if they DO carry water, they'll probably end up having to build a spaceship as big as neptune, assuming it needs water to survive (and that its body composition is similar to ours). and so on. did I miss out anything? i don't believe in aliens, but if they do exist, they will never get in contact with us humans and we will never come into contact with them either. (i don't believe in creationism either) so we can believe in them all we want, but we will never have proof of them existing. ------ i think i missed out something..... i really don't know if aliens exist but this is my idea of things
I'm quite sure its impossable to travel at or above the speed of light. So even at near lightspeed it will take over a year to travel a lightyear.
no, but the milky way galaxy is about 100,000 lightyears in diameter and contains billions of stars and many many solar systems too. the earth is a very special planet. its temperature, geographical conditions, and the star it orbits is the right condition for organisms to thrive on. astronomers have yet to find a planet like it, mainly because planets are very hard to find. and although I haven't found a textbook that mentions this, I'd say only about 1 out of 100,000 planets have conditions as good as earth's. that reason alone makes the whole thing about aliens coming into contact with us unbelievable. the nearest star is 4.3 light years away, and since planets have to orbit stars (and not other planets) to hold life, i'm gonna go ahead and say that there are no intelligent lifeforms less than a lightyear away.
Actually, if you consider it, we've been broadcasting EM signals (in the form of radio and TV) for much more than one year. TV's been around for, what, about 50-60 years? Even more if you count radio signals. Assuming that any sentient life out there can detect and be able to interpret the signals, we're looking at no sentient life within approximately 25-30 light years so far (25ish years to get the signal there and 25ish for them to get a signal to us at lightspeed). Any observations we do with telescopes can't be trusted either when it comes to sentient life because if you look at a star or planet x lightyears away, you're seeing the star/planet from x years ago. IMO anyway.
correct (it's not just your opinion). if you look at a galaxy 10 million light years away you're looking back in time by 10 million years if we're ever gonna establish contact with intelligent life form, it'll be mucho years later and by then we'll all be dead...
Interesting bit of trivia: Looking into a telescope is like looking into the past. That's not in question. Did you know that no matter how powerful our telescopes get we will never see the Big Bang? You would assume that if you could look far enough out, you could see the Big Bang (since the farther out you look, the farther back in time you look). Actually, the farthest back we'll ever see is approximately 400 000 years after the Big Bang (approximately 14 billion years ago), the time when recombination occurred.
I'm quite sure there is other intelligent life out there somewhere. There's nothing particularly unique about our situation, despite what you might hear from the ID zealots and other religious idiots. Think of all the millions of stars in this galaxy, then think of the fact that this galaxy is one of 30 or so in our "Local group", and that there are millions of other galaxies out there. I was reading something yesterday about the "Great Wall", the largest structure we know of in the universe. It's a collection of galaxies with rough dimensions of 500 x 300 x 15, in units of millions of light years. I can't believe that we're alone in all of that. I don't think you can make an absolute statement that we'll never contact other forms of life. A fairly common idea in some sci-fi books is colonising the galaxy at slower than light speeds - with a good enough method of propulsion (much better than anything we have now) it would be possible to reach significant fractions of lightspeed. Say we could get to 0.5c - the Centauri system is then about 8 years away. That's not a quick trip, but it's doable. All it takes is for a species to last for a few hundred thousand years and they could spread over a huge area. Interstellar travel isn't impossible at all. What's more important for our chances of meeting aliens is where they are in the universe. If they're in our own galaxy, the chances of eventually running into them (assuming we don't wipe ourselves out) would be quite good. If they're 400 million light years away, then there's probably not much chance unless someone invents a method of travelling FTL. I'd be more interested in how humanity would react to meeting another intelligent species. I'd like to think we'd behave sensibly, but I doubt it. We can't even get along with each other yet.
I think Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes fame put it best: "The proof that there is intelligent life out there is that they're intelligent enough NOT to come in contact with us." Or something along those lines. I believe that there is intelligent life out there, but if you were an intelligent life form, would you want to come in contact with a race that can barely sustain themselves??
There's another interesting point in there - why should we assume they'll think anything like we do? They might actually enjoy helping the galactic equivalent of the village idiot. Alternatively, they might be on a holy crusade to cleanse the galaxy and we'd just be another target. We might not be able to understand their motivations at all. They might not even have anything we'd understand as "motivation".
Life on earth was created by aliens jerking off on a puddle of water. Shit, if we're the only planet with intelligent life forms, it's a shitload of space to waste. There has to be more life forms out there.
all good points. what type of galaxies are there in the "great wall"? if the stars are all supergiants, i doubt there will be any planets orbiting it. remember the machines we sent out to Jupiter/Saturn? did you know they were equipped (I think this applies to every satellite/shuttle that is destined to visit the Jovian planets) with a disk with sillhuettes of a male and a female and some other stuff and a machine that plays "instructs" the so-called aliens of how to communicate with earthlings along with a timeline of the human history? or something along the lines of that (i don't have my astronomy textbook with me anymore). it's really interesting. i hope you didn't misunderstand my original post, i wasn't trying to force the nonbelief of aliens, I just wanted to say it's not very likely but if there were intelligent lifeform outside out solar system, we would probably never hear/see from them.
this was what was bugging me this whole time, i'm glad people aren't ignoring this thread! we're all just selfish creatures and we (especially americans) like to think that people think like us or try to force others to think like us. also, what if the civilizations aren't as developed as ours? they might be in their "stone age" like we were. i don't think any intelligent lifeform (if it exists) will reach such technological advancement (intergalactic travel) in its lifetime.
Ok, for one we just recently discovered the first actual planet outside of our solar system; up untill now we could only see the effect when they crossed over a star. Now say you look back 100 light years, that would be looking back to 1905. Thats not even a significant amount of time. Look back 1 million years we're looking at what the star looked like 1 million years ago, thats the STAR not the planets that revolve around it. 1 million years ago there could of been a civilization could as advanced is ours, at this point they would have 1 million years of evolution on us. They may be so advanced as to have the technology to travel faster than light speed, and they may try to contact us some day. Just we may have to prove ourselves worthy of being contaced by an advanced race. And if you think that we're the only ones out there, look at the size of the milky way then look at the size of the universe. You will see it only makes up a small portion.
but if that civilization is like us and likes to kill each other, then it'll probably not reach such teachnological advancement. let alone overpopulation of the planet unless each of them lives up to a maybe thousand years and aren't as horny as us. also, the star the planet orbits will age and will run out of hydrogen to burn which will lead to helium fusion, making the star bigger, therefore having more surface area. the planet will be scorched, and gases on the planet will escape from the atmosphere, which will kill all its inhabitants, IF they survived that long in the first place. even a very slight expansion of a star has huge impacts on its orbiting planets. sorry, i don't think it will work. EDIT: about the planet we discovered outside our solar system... i don't know in-depth and i just barely heard about it, but we've found a lot of planets before.... but we could only detect them if it was part of a binary system.
I thought there were theories about...as lame as it sounds..."wormholes"? We watched a video from PBS in physics once about that kind of stuff, it seemed pretty real. Quantum Foam.
The Voyager and Pioneer probes were similarly equipped IIRC, and they're all way, way out there towards the edge of our solar system now. It looks like you're saying "Either they don't exist, or they exist but we'll never ever get to meet any", and I didn't agree with that. There's nothing to stop spacefaring species making contact with each other. If we discovered evidence for intelligent life say 10 light years away, it's entirely possible that we could communicate using radio, albeit at 10 year intervals, and maybe in a few hundred years, go visit them in a shiny new type of spaceship. What would humanity do? Simple, exploit the poor bastards. Remember that there's a big, big difference between intergalactic (between galaxies) and interstellar (between stars) - interstellar travel should be much easier to achieve than intergalactic because the distances involved are orders of magnitude smaller. This will happen to us, but not for several billion years. If a species survives that long, their original star settling into old age wouldn't be much of a problem for them to handle. Why couldn't they just planet-hop from system to system? Why couldn't they colonise multiple systems? They might just move their planet into a wider orbit. The more advanced your technology is, the less you need to worry about stuff like this.
probably... and since the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light, i don't think it'll even be possible for intergalactic travel to happen... i think it's more like a million years. i don't think it'll take that much expansion to completely dry up a planet... i don't think planet-hopping between solar system is that easy either. just finding a planet that'll suit their needs is hard enough, let alone finding any planet. imo there's a limit to how advanced technology can get.
I favor a third explanation; the aliens just don't care about the Milky Way Trailer Trash humans! With the distances involved, unfocused broadcasts will be quickly attenuated to nothing, compared to the background noise, so all our broadcasts will be hard to pick up when the distance is measured in light-years. Communication would be hit or miss even for an alien civilization that's actually trying to do so, with highly focused signals aimed at our Solar system..
is there any proof that there needs to be oxygen or the other exact elements humans/earth's organisms had to evolve? Why can't other lifeforms develop with different surroundings/adaptations. Also, you make the assumption that they would evolve the same as us, same cell division same intelligence. As long as I've studied physics, I've never come across some universal intelligence constant, if you have contact someone! I don't doubt that there is life out there, it is a very very very exact science for life to form...not gonna argue that. But in the insurmountable amount of stars/galaxies/planets we have no clue exist and the one's we do know...I have to figure that there's something which has adapted to its surroundings. There are actually theories/books written or maybe just quacks, who wrote about the eventual survival of humans. I think we're like at level 1 intelligence or something according to the scale and need to get to level 3 : P.
what if these aliens dont use FM frequencies? what if they are telepathic? I mean, these guys have an inifinite # of ways to have evolved. maybe thy dont need water? maybe they live off methane? or somethign completely wild? also it has been proposed that, what if these guys are still in the stone age? not everythign has to be how we know it, or think it has to happen. and thats why i know we will be dead if we ever met these aliens. we won't get it, and they will be like 'Fuck yo shit nigga!" and rub their proverbial dirty boots all over our proverbial couches.
