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What the Hell are the "other" intelligent forms of life out there going to think

My statements do indeed say a lot about how I view the world, and they were meant to convey as much. They are also, as I directly stated in my re-statement, an `opinion', and not one I have always held, considering that about eight months ago I was delusional enough to believe I had actually encountered the menacing type of aliens you described in a hypothetical manner in your above post.

My opinion is just that, not a faith or something I'm considering as more supportable than any other idea.

You are making dramatic assumptions about the motives and meanings of my voiced opinions, not to mention the level of certitude behind them.
 
For all of you talking about how horrible the human race is from an outsider'sview, keep in mind that the outsiders, whoever they may be, have almost certainly evolved under very different environmental conditions than us. Our most base morals, those shared by virtually all civilizations, are a direct result of evolutionary conditions - eg, the benefit human populations reaped through individual respect and cooperation was advantageous in the evolutionary environment . There is no basis to claim that it is even likely that an alien race would hold morals similar to our own, and therefore there is no basis to claim that such a race would be disgusted by us.
 
uhk.

Petersko: you mean what am I assuming you're assuming? I'm assuming that's what your intending on throwing back at me. Haven't we had this conversation before?


To the topic at hand, then, I focus my assuming:

When you get down to it, of course we can't know how an alien race would interpret our civilization. They would've developed in a different environment -- perhaps extremely different than our own. They might also perceive reality through entirely different senses. So on the most fundamental ground we could be drastically different.

We could also be very similar to these creatures in some respects, which I don't find as `out there' as it seems many others do.

If we're not alone in the universe as an intelligent species -- if we're not `very unlikely' -- I would also find it hard to swallow that we were the first. In fact, I find it possible that there are many species out there of high intelligence, and if so, they would've started colonizing this galaxy far before we were scampering around on all fours.

From `Where Are They?’, by Ian Crawford in July, 2000, issue of Scientific American:
Any civilization with advanced rocket technology would be able to colonize the entire galaxy on a cosmically short timescale. For example, consider a civilization that sends colonists to a few of the planetary systems closest to it. After those colonies have established themselves, they send out secondary colonies of their own, and so on. The number of colonies grows exponentially. A colonization wave front will move outward with a speed determined by the speed of the starships and by the time required by each colony to establish itself. New settlements will quickly fill in the volume of space behind this wave front.
Assuming a typical colony spacing of 10 light-years, a ship speed of 10 percent that of light, and a period of 400 years between the foundation of a colony and its sending out colonies of its own, the colonization wave front will expand at an average speed of 0.02 light-year a year. As the galaxy is 100,000 light-years across, it takes no more than about five million years to colonize it completely. Though a long time in human terms, this is only 0.05 percent of the age of the galaxy. Compared with the other relevant astronomical and biological timescales, it is essentially instantaneous. The greatest uncertainty is the time required for a colony to establish itself and spawn new settlements. A reasonable upper limit might be 5,000 years, the time it has taken human civilization to develop from the earliest cities to spaceflight. In that case, full galactic colonization would take about 50 million years.
The implication is clear: the first technological civilization with the ability and the inclination to colonize the galaxy could have done so before any competitors even had a chance to evolve. In principle, this could have happened billions of years ago, when Earth was inhabited solely by microorganisms and was wide open to interference from outside.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0009CDEA-33FC-1C74-9B81809EC588EF21&pageNumber=3&catID=2

Which is typically where one brings up Fermi's Paradox. If they are out there, there's got to be a reason they aren't here. Do we simply not recognize them? Could UFOs be the answer to Fermi’s Paradox? Then why the fuck don't they land on the goddamn Whitehouse lawn and schedule an interview with Barbara Walters? They obviously don't want open contact, at least not immediately. And if UFOs are the answer to Fermi's Paradox, we should keep in mind that UFO sightings have occurred as far back as human history has been recorded, right back to Sumeria. If UFOs are evidence of ETs -- or if UFOs are not evidence of ET, and yet we are still not alone in the universe, and keeping in mind Fermi's paradox -- they obviously aren't landing for a reason. They would have to know we are here. So they have a reason for not establishing open contact.

Saying that extraterrestrials would be disgusted was more of the result of a consistent and ever-growing bad mood of mine, and a general pessimistic outlook on this civilization. It doesn't take reading too much of anything I write to come to the conclusion that I don't exactly have high hopes for humanity. But I don't think that an extraterrestrial civilization with a more empathic attitude towards us would want to contact us at this point, because it would not be beneficial to them or to humanity. As for why it wouldn't be beneficial to humanity: read into the Brookings Institutes report on contacting extraterrestrial life; look at what happened during the War of the World radio broadcast in 1938, and the re-broadcasts that followed -- regardless as to whether it may have had a lot to do with the tension and paranoia building between separate factions of humanity.

It seems plainly evident to me that with our rising technology we have an ever-increasing ability to benefit or obliterate ourselves in a global manner in all new and interesting sorts of ways. The more that technology grows, the darker the dark, the lighter the light in regards to one hand of the human super-organism stabbing the other or both interlocking fingers and dancing happy into the sunset. In short, we are growing forever more unstable. We haven’t successfully been able to live with ourselves as a species yet, and I don't think it's a leap to suppose that a more advanced species from another planet with a generally benevolent stance towards us would recognize that if we can't get along with ourselves and our environment, open, otherworldly contact with members of the galactic adulthood would be a premature graduation ultimately ending in catastrophe.

Trying to divorce myself from earth and it's people for a moment and peering down in this world with alien eyes, I am of the opinion that I would be disgusted we have not pulled our heads just a bit further out of our asses, peeking just a bit more beyond our measly human cheeks -- perhaps that is a less extreme version of what I was attempting to say in previous posts. Ultimately, anything said on this matter is opinion or assumption. That is presently mine.

If there are menacing civilizations out there, as it would seem logical to believe there would be if the galaxy is teeming with intelligent life, and all they wanted to do was kill us all and drain our natural resources, they would have done so -- as many of them would have probably evolved far passed our present state before we were scratching our pits and checking each other's heads for lice in-between biting chunks out of bannanas as we sat high atop the trees. This would imply such civilizations didn't make it as colonists, perhaps not even off their own planet, due to their destructive tendencies -- unless there was some long-lasting opposing faction hell-bent on developing advancing civilizations; some `galactic club', that served as protector of planets such as earth or at least a difficult obstacle for such menacing civilizations.

I don't find the idea that `they're all about but they just haven't found us yet' as credible. Either we're alone in the universe, or there's good reason our galactic neighbors haven't exposed themselves.

If ET life isn't rare, there are undoubtedly controlling, power-hungry, expansionist aliens. And they would have gotten to us already -- unless something/someone was blocking their path.

I'd say ones more benevolent towards us would look at us as adolescents. And I think we all occasionally look at children with a degree of envy and disgust, and for reasons that should be obvious.
 
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Petersko: you mean what am I assuming you're assuming? I'm assuming that's what your intending on throwing back at me. Haven't we had this conversation before?

I meant, what assumptions concerning your intentions did I make? I re-read my statements. I don't see where I assumed anything about your certainty, or the meanings of your opinions.

I don't understand the problem some people have with assuming that we're roughly on a par, technologically speaking, with the rest of the intelligent life in the universe.

What if life can only exist within very narrow parameters, and these parameters required a certain amount of galactic expansion, a certain amount of planet cooling, etc.., etc.., and couldn't have come about until quite recently?

If so, then there may be a great many civilizations staring at the sky wondering why the big bad aliens haven't come and laid judgement on their faults yet.
 
Belisarius said:
3.) Finally, they would probably care not a whit for things we consider stupid or simple. For us, porn is entertainment. What would it mean to a creature with a completely different evolutionary history and body plan? Probably no more than the the division of amoebae means to us. What of our movies and sitcoms? Just behavior that would probably mean nothing to them--do we fret over the wanton display of the mating calls of frogs? Or of ants fighting? Or caterpillars eating?

Gosh it is good to see some intelligent remarks on this subject by Belisarius and a few others here.

Our species is strictly a mammalian form of consciousness. We have a mammalian sense of humor, and our society and customs are mammalian through and through. And yet, when we look at a lost civilization, such as the Mayans, we have a hard time piecing together what they were like or what they were describing in their writings. And they have exactly the SAME BRAIN and evolutionary pathway, and are the same exact species as we are!!!

We are having a hard time understanding other intelligent (maybe) species which share our mammalian evolutionary heritage. For all of the work that has gone into studying human/dolphin communication, we still know very little about them (and it, at least, has the appearence of both sides trying to make a go of it).

I would suspect that a technical species ("highly-technical" is a relative term) would share some things in common with us. They would need to have produced some form of stored, widely available, communication (our first successful development along these lines was the printing press). They would also need to have the ability to share and work cooperatively toward commonly held goals. There may be a few more common characteristics. Very likely, they may share one social science that we do, "economics." But beyond that, anything that we can try to imagine (I feel) are simply projections of what and who we are, mammalian bipeds with remarkably adaptive survival strategies.

I don't mean this as a flame or criticism. But when I see people suggesting that another, non-earth based intelligent species, would make moral judgements on us, it is simply "us" judging "ourselves." We have the "context" to make such judgements. Someone else, outside of our sphere of evolutionary and environmental development would not have a context to make such judgements. That is, unless they saw us blowing ourselves up. And given the length of time we have existed, the percentage of time this has occurred is almost non-existant (as strange as that may sound). We talk about it endlessly, we have had occasions where we have done it. But looking at us from the outside, it almost never happens.

I'm not quite sure where the 'we are bad, they are good" idea comes from. Perhaps it is ingrained into our cultural minds as a result of our religions (especially those whose core beliefs are based on a notion of "a divine conflict between good and evil"). Or, perhaps, it is an "archetype" (like that described by Carl Jung) and is ingrained within the genetics and "expression" of our nervous system. I honestly don't know. But I have a feeling that before another species could begin to understand our "character" as a species and society, they would need to study our artifacts and communications for a very long time. And then, they would still have the limitation of attemtping to understand it as a complete foreigner to our species. I suspect many things, such as grasping our humor, may completely escape them.

I believe that there are a vast number of intelligent civilations that have, are and will exist in other star systems. Some may not have the benefits of a physiology which is condusive to manipulating the environment. Others, may have developed in an environment which is not rich in energy sources (oil, coal, wood, etc.) and prevents them from developing more unique forms of energy (hydrogen, solar, fusion, etc.). But if the mathematical models are correct, a percentage of them have (or have had, or will have) the physiology to effect change, the available energy resources to develop technically, and the sense of adventure to understand the universe around them.

And if one of "them" ever discovers "us," or if "we" ever discover one of "them," the excitement of an absolute proof that "we are not alone" will be so profound that placing value judgements on each other will be completely meaningless. :)

Tim
 
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Wasn't it the movie "Contact" where they said that the first tv signal strong enough to leave the earth's aptmosphere was Hitler speaking to the crowd at the Berlin Olympics?
 
I continually wonder if Carl Sagan made that transmission up for plot convenience. It's not that the technology for FM technology wasn't around in 1936--it certainly was--but I doubt there were more than a handful--if any--of FM receiving stations on the *planet*, let alone television sets to display them. Frequency modulation transmission only came into its own after WW II, and output came to more or less current levels by the 1960s.
 
^^^^
That means our FM transmissions have only ventured out 43 light years at this point. It will probably take a long time before somebody could pick up on our FM transmissions, much less respond to them.
 
There are probably tons of other intelligent life forms out there that have been getting our "signals" since minute one. :) My belief is that there are variances of how evolved some of them are, maybe some think we are horrible, maybe some are somehow trying to help us. Who knows?
 
^^^^
Any lifeform receiving out signals in the first minute would need to be less then the distance that light travels in one minute. And our earliest radio signals have not gotten much farther than a couple of star systems (there have not been any planets found on those to date).

So, unless they can exist inside of a star (and live in one of those stars)...
;)
 
the universe is amazing ... that is all i have to say for today

just talking about this makes me shiver ....

picture an apple and that is the sun .. then (assuming there is life out there) ... lets that these aliens are located at the farest reaches of the milky way galaxy (relative to the apple). .. fark !!
 
They will probably thing another evolving system of energy. Been there done that.
 
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