SuperstarNeilC Posted October 4, 2019 Share Posted October 4, 2019 The type of girl you’d be delighted to take home to meet Mother  Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Loki Posted October 4, 2019 Share Posted October 4, 2019 On 9/23/2019 at 4:28 PM, David said: I find it to be a bit more of a stretch to believe that we're the only life forms in this galaxy. Just us, surrounded by lots of fuck all? This is a really interesting topic actually, and one I think surprisingly ignored by the mainstream recently. SETI in its various guises has been going, what, nearly 40 years now.  We've scanned the visible universe with increasingly sophisticated techniques, looking for the sort of evidence that our civilization emits, to prove that there's life out there. And we've seen nothing. Nada.  There's an increasing school of thought that says... if there was life out there, we really should have seen SOMETHING by now. Fermi's paradox states: "The size and age of the universe incline us to believe that many technologically advanced civilizations must exist. However, this belief seems logically inconsistent with our lack of observational evidence to support it. Either (1) the initial assumption is incorrect and technologically advanced intelligent life is much rarer than we believe, or (2) our current observations are incomplete and we simply have not detected them yet, or (3) our search methodologies are flawed and we are not searching for the correct indicators, or (4) it is the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself." 2 and 3 have been driving SETI for years. 1 and 4 deserve some more consideration at this point. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members ReturnOfTheMack Posted October 4, 2019 Paid Members Share Posted October 4, 2019 The Fermi paradox fascinates me, but SETI will be the first to admit they havent come close to covering even a fifth of what they could. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Undefeated Steak Posted October 5, 2019 Share Posted October 5, 2019 I think the sheer diversity of life forms on earth, and the relative extreme conditions under which they can survive gives strong hope that there is other life out there on planets/moons. However, I don't think we're likely to have any contact with it anytime soon (a few hundred years or so). We might detect evidence of an incredibly advanced civilisation if they were to do something on the scale of destroying a star or galaxy or something, but I doubt we're going to see space vehicles that are anything like what we'd imagine. The scale of the universe is just far too big. If we think of Newton's work on gravity as the beginning of modern science, then there has only been a few hundred years of what we consider science. There are still people living now who were alive when we thought there was only one galaxy, and now we know there are trillions of galaxies out there. I think people struggle to understand the actual vastness of the universe when discussing whether we'll contact other life forms. The size of our own solar system is almost impossible to compute logically in our minds, and that is absolutely tiny when compared to just our own galaxy, and what's beyond. The largest galaxy we've found to date is a billion light years away. To put that into perspective, if we had the ability to communicate at light-speed, it would take billions of years to have the most basic of conversations. "Hey, is there anyone there?" - "Yes, where are you?" - "We're in the Solar System" "We're in XYZ galaxy". Obviously a daft example but it would take 4 billion years for that conversation - the entire the age of our planet. And that's just a hypothetical light-speed chat with a random galaxy, the largest we've found, not the furthest away. Having said that, it's one of the primary reasons I don't believe we've seen UFO's or space ships. Space ships and UFO's are okay for relatively short distances, but that means they can only be arriving from nearby, so in a local planetary system. It would take an immense amount of energy and power to get something like a space ship to our planet, so I don't think that any life form would come all this way just to get a closer look. If they have that type of technology, basically things that we use but more advanced (which is what most UFO videos tend to lean towards), then they'd surely have the technology to observe us through an incredibly powerful telescope or observatory system rather than wasting energy and resources and massive lengths of time just to whizz around our skies. If they're coming this distance, they're sure as shit landing and making contact with us. So, if any civilisation is to contact us from far away, it must be done by warping and manipulating the universe itself, through worm holes or teleportation or whatever, which means that they would be so advanced that they're incomprehensible to us as humans - they wouldn't fly a UFO like the ones in YouTube videos through a warping of space-time, and start flying around in front of video cameras. Not a chance. If you're looking at it in terms of odds and probabilities, due to the sheer number of galaxies out there (trillions), the odds are stacked massively in favour of there been life forms on other planets. In fact, I think in a few hundred years people will look back on our current understanding of the universe and think we were insane for ever thinking we might be the only ones. But I don't know whether we'll have direct contact with other life forms. I think there's a far more higher chance that the human race will become extinct long before we get to the point where we can manipulate galaxies, planets, space and time in a way that we're able to travel across the universe.   Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
King Coconut Posted October 5, 2019 Share Posted October 5, 2019 Considering the ease with which life started here and the vastness of the universe (so vast that we don't even know how vast) I think it's safe to assume that there's life elsewhere and that we'll never be able to prove it. In a fortean sense though, there's no such thing as aliens. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members BomberPat Posted October 5, 2019 Paid Members Share Posted October 5, 2019 The first chapter of James Lovelock's new book explains why he thinks we're alone in the universe, and it's pretty close to my own reasons for believing that. The universe may be incomprehensibly vast, but it's also incomprehensibly old. We're not just looking for a planet of roughly the same physical characteristics as Earth, we'd have to look for one that, at broadly the same point in the development of its solar system, experienced the same sequence of random geographic effects, where the climate developed at roughly the same rate. Off by a few degrees, or a few years, or a slight distance from its Sun, or whatever, and the conditions are wrong. On the other hand, maybe all that happened. But it happened 20 billion years ago, and all life on this hypothetical planet has since died off. Or maybe it won't happen there for another 10 billion. The chances of life having sprung up elsewhere at a similar enough time as it did on Earth for us to be able to find it? Staggeringly unlikely. It's true that life has blossomed in every possible niche on Earth, but as far as we know, "life", as a base concept has only sprung up once. That's our only frame of reference, so we don't know if life is an inevitable, essential feature of the universe or a one-off freak occurrence. I think the best way to prove an increased likelihood of there being life elsewhere in the universe would be to find evidence that life had come into existence more than once here, as that would give us a better idea of how and why it exists in the first place. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
King Coconut Posted October 5, 2019 Share Posted October 5, 2019 (edited) When you say we're alone in the universe and then start talking about time, you get into relativity and all sorts of fucked up shit. If something happened 20 billion years ago and was 20 billion light years, 3 feet and 2 brexits away, we'd only just be finding out about it, thus rendering it "now". But this is really something for the real science thread. Edited October 5, 2019 by King Coconut Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Loki Posted October 5, 2019 Share Posted October 5, 2019 7 hours ago, BomberPat said: I think the best way to prove an increased likelihood of there being life elsewhere in the universe would be to find evidence that life had come into existence more than once here, as that would give us a better idea of how and why it exists in the first place. Which is why I think the search for life inside the Solar System is still such an important and fascinating project. Â Even if we found a single microbe living on another body in our system, it would completely transform our understanding of the universe. Â And we can actually get to those places and check them out remotely with robots, so it's achievable. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guy Bifkin Posted October 5, 2019 Share Posted October 5, 2019 If it wasn't for that awful hipster Jeremy Corbellend I'm all on board with Bob Lazar and this real American hero.  Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Egg Shen Posted October 6, 2019 Paid Members Share Posted October 6, 2019 whats everyones problem wigh Corbell? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guy Bifkin Posted October 6, 2019 Share Posted October 6, 2019 For me it starts with his beard. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SuperstarNeilC Posted October 6, 2019 Share Posted October 6, 2019 This might not be a conspiracy, British Army Warrant Officer Simon Bean on EU Army  Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Loki Posted October 6, 2019 Share Posted October 6, 2019 Personally, I get all my important and verified breaking news from a boss-eyed slaphead filming rain bouncing off his head. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Carbomb Posted October 7, 2019 Paid Members Share Posted October 7, 2019 This is more for the Brexit thread, but it's also related to the above. Whilst I'm not in favour of the EU as a consolidated superstate as opposed to a confederation of sovereign states, I have heard very few people put forward any actual reasons as to why that would be a bad thing - every time the subject comes up, almost always they seem to think the basic statement of it is an argument in itself, i.e. "the EU is pushing us towards a European superstate", "there's going to be an EU army", etc., etc. Given that the most powerful nation on the planet is the USA, a superstate, and the next most powerful ones are also superstates, I'm not sure why so many people from various points on the political spectrum are so opposed to the idea. Personally, I'm opposed to it because at its base it's a corporatist, neoliberalist system designed to facilitate capitalism (including its worst excesses) on a macro-economic scale, and curtail the development of any socialist policies. I prefer, at the very least, that we either leave and stay in EFTA/EEA, or remain as it is now. But this wouldn't be a problem for right-wingers, centrists, and soft-left people, and I've never heard any of them state why they're opposed to it, aside from a few vague statements like "our cultures are just too different". More in relation to what's being discussed above, the idea of an EU army, the pooling of the armed forces of over 28/27 states comprised of over 350 million people and all the resources thereof, should be a right-winger's wet dream. I've got a fairly strong idea that the reason why so many British/English people oppose it is down to the British Empire delusion and British exceptionalism that's still hanging around, but you'd think the concept of it would have a bit more traction than it does. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keith Houchen Posted October 7, 2019 Share Posted October 7, 2019 Worth pointing out as well that we are giving up our veto so if we wanted to stop the “EU army”, we could. But we are giving that up. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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