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Do You Believe In Aliens?

So if aliens start showing up, how would they have gotten here?

presumably from a galaxy far away, they would have to have a really fast ship that could travel really really far and support life or...open a portal/wormhole or something?

seems eventually you have to start talking the same kind of crazy when discussing these things.

I watched that documentary on netflix on SETI recently and it talked about how meditating helped them to make contact, there was a whole scene where it looked like they were all tripping balls and meditating and ufos started popping up lol. plenty of bs but worth a spin.

IMO aliens are not going to be a good thing for us. I think this whole idea of aliens is something that has been put into our heads for most of our lives. I think 'aliens' have been sharing secret knowledge with us for a long time. I think the ancient cultures that have been involved with 'aliens' destroyed themselves. I think they are a lot smarter than us and know things about us that we will never understand. Throughout history I think they have been sharing things with certain folks and have had significant influence. Aliens are bad news lol.

I am of the unpopular opinion that 'aliens' are the offspring of fallen angels and man. soul-less detestable beasts. i know that sounds ridiculous, but i think its the reality of the situation. i think the abduction scenarios illustrate how benevolent these beings are. plenty of abductees are beyond horrified. only one name stops it from happening. I think in the next few years, 'first contact' will be revealed to the public. this will be way past the beginning of the end.The vatican being involved with 'aliens' should make you concerned. something to keep an eye on.

I see UFOs where I live pretty regularly. it kinda creeps me out tbh. other people I know have seen them too so im not just making that up. when I start talking about them my ears start ringing in a distinctly different way then from loud music or something. happening right now. don't know what to think about it really.

so if the greys are real...whats next? reptilians? usually seen in the same visions and talked about in the same breadth. reptilians and greys can also be linked to the occult. teenage mutant ninja turtles (note what their names are), bowser, and other seemingly benign pop culture fads. plenty of artwork by certain artists that have reptile paintings and statues, etc. seems to be some weird references is all. cant help but feel 'aliens' are part of a much larger picture with some pretty dark intentions.
 
jammin83 said:
when I start talking about them my ears start ringing in a distinctly different way then from loud music or something. happening right now. don't know what to think about it really.
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I believe in aliens as well, and I have also seen UFOs. However, I honestly think the ears ringing thing is just your own fears talking. Your ears ring because you are expecting your ears to ring when you talk about them. It sounds different because you expect it to sound different. I'm not saying your crazy or anything, because honestly I can understand where you'd get paranoid like that and I have too on occasion about similar sorts of things. Aliens are scary and very mysterious, and when something is scary sometimes people imagine things and/or jump to an even scarier conclusion.
 
I've actually had very similar experience and conclusions as jammin regarding the ear ringing. Its just for a few seconds when it happens, and its not like tinnitus, my hearing is damn good. But when it happens it seems to be like a signal I interpret using intuition based on the circumstances around it.
Or its just a glitch in my head, a resonance from a feedback loop, divide by zero etc.

The question for me anymore is not whether I believe aliens exist, the question is in what form do they take (I suspect it could be weirder than we think of humanoid aliens in 3d form) , what is their role and intentions for humanity and/or Earth, and their greater significance in the Universe.
 
That's weird, because when I was a kid, I became convinced that we were being invaded by aliens. They were invisible but I could see them as sort of heat-distortion outlines, and they could be killed with loud noise. I could tell they were around when my ears would suddenly start ringing.

I don't believe I was really experiencing aliens, I was a kid with a wild imagination. But strange that the ear-ringing thing has been mentioned.
 
I've seen tons of UFO's. Unfortunately I never had a camera to capture them.
 
LSD-Magic said:
I've seen tons of UFO's. Unfortunately I never had a camera to capture them.
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I've seen them too. I saw one in Sedona, Arizona while on vacation. I saw others where I grew up in upstate New York. I haven't had a camera either, but they were there :)
 
You'd think there would me a huge amount of UFO footage given the prevalence of camera-phones these days...
 
And youd think wed finally have something more than grainy unidentified lights.

UFO= unidentified.

Unidentified doesn't mean its aliens, it means we don't know what it is. Not the same.

I think many people are way way too imaginative when they imagine aliens. And it's because of an ignorance of physics. If you have no understand of physics, the chemistry of life, etc, every insane notion seems equally plausible even if it's not.

Here's where I'm placing my money.

1. Aliens exist.
2. They haven't ever visited us. It's a logical fallacy to say we advanced too quickly, we have no basis for comparison with other intelligent species and it has the same problem god has. If the aliens gave is knowledge, who gave them it? More aliens? Or perhaps they discovered it on their own like I think we did.
3. They are almost certainly carbon based. And if they are intelligent macro organisms like us they're definitely carbon based.
4. They are not interdimensional, because most people who suggest that can't articulate what the word dimension means either in a scientific sense or even what it means to them. Of if they can vaguely say what it means to them, again it is so wildly out of the box speculative as to be like discussing what came before the big bang. So speculative with no evidence and this a waste of brain time.
5. There are probably intelligent aliens throughout our galaxy and substantially more microbial and similar life. You got any idea how freaken big the milky way is? Or how far away other galaxies are? Although on the other hand once you beat the speed of light in a practical way, I suppose there's no immediately obvious reason you need consider distance as much a factor as we conventionally would.
6. They are probably a lot more like us than most people would expect. I just hope that in order to become advanced enough to travel to other planets assuming it can be feasibly done. That by that point most intelligent races will have either worked out their violent impulses by that point in their technological development or blown themselves up before they got there. And so hopefully they aren't a threat to us. Apart from that though they'll be a lot like what we see in animals on our planet.
 
^ good post, Jess. A few things I don't necessarily agree with.

JessFR said:
6. They are probably a lot more like us than most people would expect.
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Why so? I'm not saying you should open your mind so that your brains fall out, but sometimes we're very limited in our imagination of what could be because of the environment we live in - we try to base it off things we know/see. If another life were to start on another Earth, then, small fluctuations in environment conditions aside, it would probably evolve to be similar or even identical to us (I mean our whole ecosystem). However, the problem is, we don't really know for sure what environments are conducive to life. Yes, we look for Earth-like planets, but even then, do we really know how much of an impact on evolution small differences in environment would have?

I guess a strong point in your favor is that for a species to be intelligent, it has to have the ability to alter its environment, and the better it can - well, the better. The reason is simple: the thing we call intelligence in us is in essence our ability to use our brain to predict future physical events, and use our limbs to construct/orchestrate such events to our advantage (which are among the most advanced for this purpose among life). A simple example is to take seeds/whatever of a plant, and place them into the ground with certain intervals - our brain knows that that will result in the plants growing and producing food. Basically everything we do is just re-arrange our environment. Cooking: place an object on a hot plate for a period of time, then remove it, to have it cooked. Anyway, point being, without the physical ability to alter one's environment, there is not much use for "intelligence", so the two have to go hand-in-hand. And having an organism with limbs like us seems to be pretty top-notch, so it's likely that another intelligent species would have to look similar.

Still, I don't know.

3. They are almost certainly carbon based. And if they are intelligent macro organisms like us they're definitely carbon based.
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Again, I'm just playing devil's advocate, but this may not be true either. I'm not talking about ridiculous concepts such as silicon-based humanoid life. Silicon chemistry is wildly different from carbon, especially its compounds with itself, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen. However, the reason I'm not certain your statement is true is because, first, how do we define life? Again, to us the easiest, and pretty much onliest, possibility is something similar to what we have on Earth. A self-replicating chemical chain reaction, to put it simply. Are there not any other possibilities, though? As long as it self-replicates imperfectly (so as to allow evolution), then it could work, and there's no telling what kind of "contraptions", be they simple chemical systems, or something even more far out, are actually able to do it.

So yeah, if I were a betting man, I would bet on carbon, but I'm also interested in other possibilities. Chemistry is carbon's domain, so to speak, at least in earthly conditions, but our universe has all kinds of environments...

4. They are not interdimensional,
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I'm interdimensional. I can traverse the x dimension, but also the y and the z. I'm special like that.
 
Surely you knew what I meant by number 4. I mean they aren't interdimensional in the sense of that vaguely if whatsoever defined term some people use to speak of aliens that seem to defy any understanding of physics because they exist in another layer of reality on top of our but not entirely the same as ours. All I'm saying is that the alien life will exist in the same 4 regular dimensions we talk about.

As for what is life? Well that's a good question. In my opinion, life is as you said, self replicating chemistry akin to rna and dna. My opinion is that viruses are not life, they are more like a protolife which can infect and hijack the components of life, but not replicate on it's own without life. Life based on other elements like silicon, sulfer, etc, might be possible but only in a very primitive sense. This is simply because of the characteristics of carbon and what it can do as opposed to other elements, even ones that come close in the requisite characteristics.

The only other conceivable life I can think of that might qualify as life, at least in some ways, is virtual life. An emulation of sufficient physics of the universe to replicate the behavior of life but in the form of a digital replication in a virtual universe contained in a computer. I probably still wouldn't call that 'life' in the way we usually think of it. But it may be similar enough to be entitled to the rights we consider living entities to possess.

As for why life will be like us? Simply because the characteristics of the universe push it in that direction. Only just the right characteristics permit anything weve conceived of as being alive to come into existence and multiply. Those characteristics ate relatively rare and no accident. It's a bit like asking how can I be sure life couldn't exist in 0 kelvin temperatures. Because the physics simply says it can't.

Note I didn't say life would require oxygen. I'm sure intelligent need not rely on O2 like we do, and perhaps not CO2 either. So life can certainly be different to us. Just not quite so radically different as some people suggest. To the point that some suggest it is literally inconceivable. Or when people ask how do we know aliens use radio waves like we do and this can hear us? Simply, that's what the universe provides for us to use. If there is something better as yet undiscovered, no doubt such sufficiently advanced aliens would still monitor photon based communication.
 
JessFR said:
Surely you knew what I meant by number 4. I mean they aren't interdimensional in the sense of that vaguely if whatsoever defined term some people use to speak of aliens that seem to defy any understanding of physics because they exist in another layer of reality on top of our but not entirely the same as ours. All I'm saying is that the alien life will exist in the same 4 regular dimensions we talk about.
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Yes, I know. My response was a lighthearted joke.

As for what is life? Well that's a good question. In my opinion, life is as you said, self replicating chemistry akin to rna and dna. My opinion is that viruses are not life, they are more like a protolife which can infect and hijack the components of life, but not replicate on it's own without life. Life based on other elements like silicon, sulfer, etc, might be possible but only in a very primitive sense. This is simply because of the characteristics of carbon and what it can do as opposed to other elements, even ones that come close in the requisite characteristics.

The only other conceivable life I can think of that might qualify as life, at least in some ways, is virtual life. An emulation of sufficient physics of the universe to replicate the behavior of life but in the form of a digital replication in a virtual universe contained in a computer. I probably still wouldn't call that 'life' in the way we usually think of it. But it may be similar enough to be entitled to the rights we consider living entities to possess.
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Viruses are definitely life in my opinion. They're a chemical system which reacts (chemically) with its environment, and in certain conditions (such as in proximity to certain living cells), it can react with it so as to replicate itself - it even has genetic information. The fact that a virus can't reproduce using not-alive environment is just a special case of (chemical) environmental requirements for that particular organism. Animals require other forms of life to perform photosynthesis for them (to collect EM energy into chemical energy to be harvested), viruses require live cells to do their business for them. Same difference in my opinion.

As for virtual life, I'm of the same opinion that a "contraption" using mainly physics, not chemistry, to live and replicate, would be considered life.

As for why life will be like us? Simply because the characteristics of the universe push it in that direction. Only just the right characteristics permit anything weve conceived of as being alive to come into existence and multiply. Those characteristics ate relatively rare and no accident. It's a bit like asking how can I be sure life couldn't exist in 0 kelvin temperatures. Because the physics simply says it can't.
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Yes, life can only exist if it's in line with laws of physics, but we simply cannot exclude unknown possibilities. We have probed, for all we know, only a portion of the universe for its behaviour. As time goes by, we discover more and more new possibilities, some of which were thought impossible before. The fact that we haven't observed something yet doesn't really mean it can't exist. We can make predictions about something if we have sufficient existing information about similar systems. You can say with certainty that regular carbon life can't exist at 1000 K because organic compounds aren't stable at that temperature, that's because we know a lot about carbon's behaviour at that temperature range. There are things we don't really know much about though, still. That's why I think there may be other possibilities. Or maybe I'm a little too optimistic.
 
I suspect most aliens are actually helium-based.
 
belligerent drunk said:
Yes, I know. My response was a lighthearted joke.



Viruses are definitely life in my opinion. They're a chemical system which reacts (chemically) with its environment, and in certain conditions (such as in proximity to certain living cells), it can react with it so as to replicate itself - it even has genetic information. The fact that a virus can't reproduce using not-alive environment is just a special case of (chemical) environmental requirements for that particular organism. Animals require other forms of life to perform photosynthesis for them (to collect EM energy into chemical energy to be harvested), viruses require live cells to do their business for them. Same difference in my opinion.

As for virtual life, I'm of the same opinion that a "contraption" using mainly physics, not chemistry, to live and replicate, would be considered life.



Yes, life can only exist if it's in line with laws of physics, but we simply cannot exclude unknown possibilities. We have probed, for all we know, only a portion of the universe for its behaviour. As time goes by, we discover more and more new possibilities, some of which were thought impossible before. The fact that we haven't observed something yet doesn't really mean it can't exist. We can make predictions about something if we have sufficient existing information about similar systems. You can say with certainty that regular carbon life can't exist at 1000 K because organic compounds aren't stable at that temperature, that's because we know a lot about carbon's behaviour at that temperature range. There are things we don't really know much about though, still. That's why I think there may be other possibilities. Or maybe I'm a little too optimistic.
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No I said they can't exist at 0 kelvin. Because there is no thermal activity. Nothing. And ergo no life. Some things are just absolutes unless were wildly off on our understanding of countless accurate observations. I doubt life can exist at extremely high temperature's either, but I'm not sure enough to stake a claim at any particular temperature.

You're right that we can't know for sure, there is much we may not know yet. But all we can do is predict based on what we do know, and fairly reasonably exclude some ideas people propose for violating well established understanding of the universe. That's all I'm getting at really.

It's fine if you consider viruses life. This is not a question that has a solid Yes or no answer yet. We can define life for the purposes of specific discussions or experiments or data analysis, etc. But it's not a clear answer one way or the other. I don't consider them life, you do. Both are valid assertions with valid arguments that can be made for them. All that really matters is that in the function or communication everyone has a common accepted definition so there is not confusion. In the end that's the main thing that matters.

Regardless of if it is single celled organisms or viruses, even if they are both life they are both simple, primitive life. Thankfully removed from more serious arguments about ethics and morality and contained within the realm of hard science. I don't agree that viruses are life, but I agree that believing they are life is a legitimate viewpoint.
 
^ it is true that what one considers life depends on the definition, there is no universal rule for what is and isn't. However, in the grand scheme of things, I think we both agree on the same definition for life, but maybe apply it somehow differently - I don't know. What is a more puzzling thing to answer the same question about are prions. It is, in essence, a chemical system, which forces its specific environment (certain proteins) to replicate itself (induces geometric structure change to imitate itself). It has no genetic material, it's just protein, and yet it can replicate and transport itself around. I guess this case is more of a criticism against this simple definition for life, because according to it peculiar things like prions would also be life. Or maybe it's fair to call them that? Seems like more of a matter of taste at this point to me.

But I think considering that our world behaves according to quantum world principles, it's fair to try to define things as close to the microworld as possible - it allows for simple definitions as well.

(I know you were talking about 0 K, I was talking about an analogy at 1000 K)
 
I see, but my point was very intentionally 0K because that solidly precludes life. Whereas high temperatures are iffier in terms of where life can no longer exist. My point simply was that, in relation to people having extremely broad, virtually inexplicable ideas of what aliens might be, that people with those views often have them born from ignorance of physics and certain physical absolutes thay we can safely use to presume what kind of alien life might exist and what most certainly doesn't.
 
Fair point. It is somewhat frustrating that a lot of people tend to think that because we don't know much about something, that anything goes, even the most ridiculous concepts, which are clearly against known laws of nature.
 
Like I said before. If you don't know much about how the universe works, you don't have much of a way to tell apart the crazy and fantastical from the logical and consistent. It's all equally valid because they don't have the education to know why one is very likely and the other nonsense.
 
belligerent drunk said:
I'm not talking about ridiculous concepts such as silicon-based humanoid life.
Chemistry is carbon's domain, so to speak, at least in earthly conditions, but our universe has all kinds of environments...
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Silicon based humanoid life may be absurd, but the idea of non-carbon based life is actually somewhat plausible. To find non-carbon based life, you need not look further than Mono Lake in California. Bacteria based in arsenic can be found, and this was a very revolutionary discovery as it had never been found on Earth. It's entirely possible that non-carbon based life could become something intelligent in some fashion. We just have no idea what it would look like or if it is even possible. It wouldn't use the same DNA as us, but it may have something else just as advanced.
 
^ the "arsenic life form*" is not what people mean by non-carbon based lifeforms. Carbon-based means that almost all of the molecules, including polymers like proteins and DNA/RNA, are formed from compounds containing carbon skeletons (carbon-carbon bonds). DNA monomer (or link) is itself composed of different parts, but 2/3 of them are derivatives of carbon compounds:

-modified sugar (which itself is a polyalcohol, meaning that it's a carbon skeleton, of for example 5 carbon atoms, with many hydroxyl groups) like ribose (RNA) or desoxyribose (DNA)
-nitrogenous base - a cyclic molecule containing many nitrogen atoms, but still based on carbon - cycles containing only nitrogen are not stable
-phosphate linker, the only part not containing carbon, but its only purpose is as a linker and the "outer" side of the double helix

The "arsenic life form" means just that the phosphate linker is replaced with an arsenate linker (phosphorus replaced with arsenic). The other 2 components of the polymer are still carbon-based sugars and bases. Besides, that goes only for the genetic information, the rest of the compounds that the bacterium is made of (the phospholipid layer, the proteins, the signal molecules etc) are still based on carbon skeletons. If we talk about a silicon-based life form, then it must mean that the "skeleton" of compounds comprising the organism must be made of silicon atoms.

*the arsenic life form claim has been disproven.
 
Couldn't be more correct ^^

And the thing is there are properties unique to carbon as an element that make it the most suitable, perhaps the only suitable element for life as we define it.
 
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