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Greywolf
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A question: We are the only people we know of

For decades, the search for extra-terran life has gone on - with many radio-telescopes searching the sky for any sign of messages of whatever sort out there somewhere....

We have tried everything we know to do to see if there are any other thinking life-forms that exist, and yet so far we have found nothing at all...

This doesn't mean that there are no others out there - it may mean that they use means of communication that we have no idea of yet.

But still - IF WE ARE ALL THAT THERE IS (and at this point it looks like it) wouldn't we be fools to keep on fighting one another?

Should we manage to kill one another off, in so far as we can see it would all be DONE AND OVER WITH -

The likes of intelligence gone once and for all....

I think that if there is a GOD, it would be highly annoyed at us.

It's about time we all got sensible.


~Dutch

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hendi_alex
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Since the beginning of 'rational man' we have taken an anthropocentric view of the universe. We exaggerate our importance as everything is merely supporting cast and setting for us, everything subservient to us. I think that we are merely part of a grand experiment, and we as a species will survive only as long as we both behaviorly and physiologically employ successful adaptive strategies. In a hundred million years, it will be interesting from some observer's standpoint, what evidence remains of this once dominant species.

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Kisal
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hendi_alex wrote:We exaggerate our importance ...
I agree wholeheartedly!

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tomf
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Humans are new to the Earth but we have already changed it very much. Are we alone? Of course not, the math plays that one out. Why do we not see other smart beings? They are to far away.
Will humans last for ever? Nothing lasts for ever. Change and adaption will happen.

Albert Einstein said “ if mans intellectual capacity does not keep up with his technological capacity he is a doomed speciesâ€

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(cautiously crawling out from under a very large rock)

I must be the last person in the Western world not to understand this phrase about "tinfoil hats." I see it all the time and it seems to be, in general, derogatory or (when self-directed) humorous.

Help?

Cynthia H.
usually Sunset 17 but right now...lost...

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Greywolf
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cynthia_h wrote:(cautiously crawling out from under a very large rock)

I must be the last person in the Western world not to understand this phrase about "tinfoil hats." I see it all the time and it seems to be, in general, derogatory or (when self-directed) humorous.

Help?

Cynthia H.
usually Sunset 17 but right now...lost...
There is a late night AM RADIO show, originally hosted by Mister Art Bell, called "AM COAST TO COAST" that explores odd and peculiar notions - it should be rightly taken with a grain or two of salt!

It is almost the "National Enquirer" of radio broadcasts, and yet some truly intiguing discussions come out of it.

But as you can imagine, especially on the topic of "UFO'S" a lot of crackpots call in to the station wanting to be heard...

DON'T MISUNDERSTAND ME HERE - I am not trashing or pejorating all that is said there, much of it is highly thought provoking, and if nothing else presents a new way of thinking about a lot of things.

But one of the notions from there was that you should wear a hat made out of "TINFOIL" to protect you from being "MIND SEARCHED" by aliens or whatever... :lol:

(Misbegotten logic if I ever heard it)

"I would look at you, but you always have those pink hair curlers on - it makes me think you are trying to listen to a radio station in Atlanta..."
~Burt Reynolds, from the movie "Smokey and the Bandit"

While I have written a fair amount about what might be, and what once may have been - I hesitate to post it here.

For example - if 100,000 years ago a race existed that had their land destroyed by a catastrophic change in the earths crust - what would remain to be found?

I would tend to think almost nothing.

So how could their existence ever be proven?

I doubt that it could be.

(RE: Atlantis)

All of the remains would have been well ruined

So then what may have happened in the remote past is beyond our knowlege

The histories we have are considered not to have reliably recorded that.
(He states, carefully)

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https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Douglas_Adams

"Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.' "

"The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be. "

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There was a guy Carl Sagan used to talk about named Drake who came up with what a lot of scientists thought was a good number of possible colonies with a high enough tech we might run into them. SETI Lab used the[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation]Drake Equation[/url]alot, which says there should be 10 active communication capable civilizations in the Milky Way at a given time...

So the answer is ten... :lol: :lol: :lol:

HG

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Kisal
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The Mahabharata contains some interesting material, and there is some fairly definitive evidence of periodic bottlenecking of human populations throughout the world.

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hendi_alex
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Kisal, love your quote!

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Kisal
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Thanks, Alex! :D

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Some consider the passed down verbal tradition of the Dogon tribe of Africa to be telling; the Dogon believe humans were bred from Terran apes and "frog people" from the Sirius system. For thousands of years they have passed this tradition down in one of the strictest storytelling regimes known to man...

Sure it all sounds pretty far out until you know that they have also passed down that Sirius is a tertiary solar system for thousands of years. We spotted the second star back in the 30's and finally had a strong enough telescope to see the third one in the 70's...

nutz:

But the Assyrian tradition and the Babylonian Gilgamesh epic suggest the same sort of arrangement. Throw in some Von Daniken for good measure and whotta ya got?

An enigma wrapped in a riddle surrounded by a paradox...

I dunno...

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Cynthia Graywolf got it right it is joke.

I was in my yard and I saw some shinny thing in the sky and it landed out in my East field. It turned out to be a UFO. Well there was an alien in it and he spoke English; said they have been studying us. The alien was from some distant star, they were here studying plant life and wanted to see my garden. I had my wife take a photo of us together as I knew no one would belief me when I tell people; so here is the photo. I may send it to the Coast-to-Coast radio show.


[img]https://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e57/twistedtomf/grayandtom.jpg[/img]

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Greywolf
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I think you would fit right in.

(no other comment implied)

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tn_veggie_gardner
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Come on now, Greywolf, you worked for the government. You should know about certain things. ;-)

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tomf
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I took a photo of Bigfoot's wife, check it out. Pictures don't lie. :lol: :roll: :wink: :shock:


[img]https://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e57/twistedtomf/missbigfoot.jpg[/img]

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I'm not buying it - what really was going on there?

For one thing - she has a sunburnt face....

That can't possibly be real!

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tomf
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You know photos do not lie. :roll: :lol:

[img]https://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e57/twistedtomf/dead-man.gif[/img]

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Greywolf
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This does have a certain "E-FACTOR" (Entertainment)

Keep 'em coming!

What the heck, it's at least as intellectual as "AM COAST to COAST" :lol:


"THIS is ART!"


I don't really care where this goes, so long as it is always fun and intellectually stimulating :roll: Let's never rail at one another over personal feelings or opinions, OKAY?

We can "Agree to Disagree", and thus it should always be fun and in good humour.



~There again we could "FART", but nobody else would smell it... So we ourselves would be trapped in a room in front of a computer with what we had done :shock:

(seriously)

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tomf
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Many scientists predict that the first contact we make with an alien life form will be microbes. This makes sense as microbes are predominate form of life and the easiest to get started.
As far as space ships arriving at the earth; until there is a way to travel faster than light it would take a very long time to go between stars, even close ones. Relativity states that the faster you move the more energy it takes, so to approach the speed of light it would require an extreme amount of energy. Look at how much power an atom smasher uses. There is more to this topic as by adding energy to a particle you add mass to it making it a larger particle to be seen easier when smashed. This adding mass would be what would happen to a space ship traveling close to the speed of light. Also the physics state that mass will become energy at the speed of light so basically you become vaporized. Relativity also states the higher your speed or energy level the shorter the distance becomes and time also changes relative to the out side world. We may not know all there is to know about physics yet but it is still a long ways between stars.
As for receiving radio waves here on the Earth; if you think of how many light years stars are from us then you realize we are looking at history, some of it going back billons of years. So if we did get a message they are most likely close as far as stars go and it still would take years to get here.
If you think about how much energy a star puts out and how it is that they are only a point of light in the sky you can understand the vast amount of energy it would take to transmit to the Earth. So communications with ET may not be physically doable.
Still I do not think we should broadcast “here we areâ€

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All of that operates under the usual human assumption that we know everything there is to know already... despite having been wrong about that a few million times before...we are still trying to figure out how the redwood gets water to the top hundred feet, or how a bumble bee can fly (aerodynamically it doesn't make sense), so the finer points of quantum physics might not all be readily available to us....

There's a professor at UCONN working on time travel; that would solve the lag time issue... and Tom why not radio beacon? You seem pretty sure we are here by ourselves right up to that point... :wink:

HG

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Though I think that the existence of multicellular life or even intelligent life elsewhere is a very strong possibility, for practical purposed we ARE alone here in the universe. If there is any intelligent design at work, then I would say that the extreme separation is for a reason. If the separation is simply by chance, then I would say that the separation could be due to more of a natural selection kind of reason.

Can you just imagine the rammifications of stepping foot on a biologically developed world. Just think of the consequenses of a single spore, bacteria, or virus being introduced into that environment or of being transferred to the traveler. I think that War of the Worlds had a pretty realistic ending, as infection from some biological agent eradicated the invaders. In my mind, even if technology allowed, there could never be any interaction between one biologically developed world and another, not without extreme long term, most likely disasterous consequences.

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Interesting thought for Earth Day Alex...

So let's take it DOWN a notch. How about organisms from one continent to another? How about from one ecosystem to another? Where do you draw the line?

HG

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hendi_alex
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The earth is essentially a closed system. Whether we like it or not the flora and fauna will be disbursed between various continents and regions. We only have a minimal control over mankind's participation in the redistribution and have zero control over all other forces that contribute to the process. It seems reasonable and desirable to have measures of control in place, where practical, but those efforts can only slow the transfer and will probably have no meaningful impact over the longer term.

Most living things on the earth either have a common ancestor at some point, or have enjoyed co-evolution such that the organisms adapt to one another in a more or less successful way. That can not be said about the exchange of organisms between two completely separated systems. In that case I think that the exchange of organisms would have far greater potential for disaster.

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Always interesting and more.
The comment that Other Life may be microbes or similar may be the best.Well, to have carbon based life forms as we have. Does that life form walk and talk and drive an SUV? Where do we get that notion?!

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Most every niche has its occupant. So where there is a suitable environment, that has been brewing long enough, my question is [why wouldn't there be some occupant that walks and talks and drives an SUV.] Of course for the SUV part, they may not do that because these creatures might be a little smarter than we are!

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In our (assumedly) closed system, Men's dispersal and who he brought along for the ride seems to have been a pretty pivotal turn of events for every other species trying to coexist in said closed system. Who am I talking about?

Norwegian rat? Staphylococcus aureus? Cowpox? Dogs? Cats? Brown tree snakes? Leete's comb jellyfish? Asian longhorn beetle? Kudzu? Burning bush? The list goes on for hours in every kingdom. Jared Diamond does an amazing job of detailing a good portion of this in Guns, Germs And Steel.

We are responsible for many moves and vectors we might have thought harder about, and on this day above all others I just wanted us all to pause and have that thought... we gardeners are responsible for so many...

HG

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I have a problem with conclusions based on philosophy. They are simply to philosophical for me. We live in a world of facts. As a species, homosapien's have made a mess of this planet. We will continue to do so irregardless of laws, conferences, international agreements; or anything else. The simple fact is the natural resources of this planet are insufficient to continue to support an exploding world population in the manner we have become accustomed to. I don't know if intelligent life or just "life" exists outside of our universe. I don't think I even care. I don't plan on getting on a teleporter or space ship and traveling a few hundred light years to visit my biological cousins for a free meal. We can present all the philosophical probabilities and mathematical equations we want, but when all is said and done; we just don't know. It is also possible we will never know. Doesn't it just tick you off when you want an answer and you can't get it. After all, inquiring minds want to know.

I think the confusion of this world may be the reason I enjoy gardening. It seems to have a definitive finality that I can observe and partially understand. I look at the miracle of life and the circle of life in my garden and keep asking myself "can this possibly be an accident?"

Happy Gardening! :D

Ted

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Helpful Gardener first quantum physics or quantum mechanics is about sub atomic partials, I was talking relativity. There are some speculations as to String Theory connecting vast distances but speculation is all it is at this point. String Theory being a theory of quantum mechanics has some evidence, mostly theoretical math but is far from a fact at this point. As I said we do not know every thing. What I did say is that according to what we do know about physics it is a very long way to any star. What we do know is that it would take a very long time and a vast amount of energy to get here. What we can prove by measurements and scientific observation we can say exists, relativity has been measured and proven.
The logic dictates there is life out there and some places there are more advanced life forms, civilizations or even machines or a combination of some thing.
I do not think it is a good idea to send a radio signal due to looking at our history the more primitive civilizations did not fare well at the hands of more advanced civilizations so why say here we are come get us.
What we know of time is that it has only been observed moving in one direction that being forward. The idea of a particle moving faster than the speed of light and given a theoretical name of a tetrion particle is just an assumption at this point as one has never been found. The theory is that it would be traveling back in time. Relativity states and is proven that matter or particles traveling at high speeds or under large gravities travel at a time different than what is normal to us on Earth, but to the person traveling at that speed time passes the same to their observation. A quantum singularity such as in a black hole according to theory would have time stopped. Some very accurate clocks were synchronized and one was put on a fast plane and when the were brought back to where the plane started from the plane’s clock was different than the ground's clock, there for in a way the plane did time travel relative to the ground. Time and space are of course variables and the only known consonant is the speed of light in a vacuum, of course the speed of light changes with gravity and passing through different media such as a lens.

Alex and The Helpful Gardener I think we see the same issue on ecosystems, as some others have pointed out man has brought different forms of living things in to environments they are not native to. This fact has been the largest reason for the increase in spices extinctions after the arrival of humans. By fossil records it has been determined that the rate of extinction due to humans is 1000 times the natural rate of extinction. One would never know what an organism from outer space would do.

One more point not directed at any one in particular; I love Sci-Fi and it stirs the mind but it is fiction not science as the old adage goes “Any thing is possible but not every thing is probableâ€

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Might I point out that nearly every major scientific idea has been precede by it's utilization as a future tech in science fisction writing? What do we use today that Jules Verne, or C.S.Lewis. or Azimov or somebody hasn't seen before it's advent? The human race dreams and then conceives time and again when it looks to the future...

Einstein's thinking about relativity was not just about faster than light travel; the C in E=mc2 is just as mutable as the mass and energy. He thought you could wrinkle time and I thingk magnetics has something to do with it. [url=https://www.wbabin.net/science/anderton8.pdf]Einstein actually was stepping away from quantum[/url]and back to classical physics for his unified field theory when he passed, and there are [url=https://www.allanstime.com/UFT_private/final2.htm]some who think this may be the right path...[/url]

What about Tesla's work on energy fields? He was hinting at something big when he died, and there was some pretty interesting stuff he was doing. His anti grav machine took this unified theoretical approach, joining magnetism and gravity as the same energy (still debated, but [url=https://peswiki.com/index.php/PowerPedia:Tesla's_Dynamic_Theory_of_Gravity]being given more serious attention nowadays[/url]). Could Tesla' proposed "anti grav engines" allow us to warp time with gravitational fields generated electromagnetically? If you shun the quantum and embrace the unified field theory, I think the answer is...possibly... :wink:

I agree, wrapping noggin around the occasional big idea does help blow out cobwebs. One should maintain an open mind as closed systems tend toward stagnation... :wink:

So if time becomes mutable, speeds are no longer the big issue, we have just conquered space travel. Just because we can't do it yet doesn't mean it won't be done. Don't be the guy saying "Man isn't supposed to fly/split the atom/insert scientific acheivement of choice here." They are almost universally proven wrong...

In time... :lol:

HG

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tomf
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Please do not misunderstand what I am saying; we do not know every thing but if it has not been proven one can not actually say it is true. Speculation on what we may some day be discovered is fine but a line must be drawn between reality and fiction. Fiction some times is a for-runner of things to come. But most of the time it also has so many holes in the knowledge of real science that it is funny, the problem is most people do not know the difference. Now you obviously have read some on the subject and I would say are capable of differentiating between speculation and fact. One thing I do know is that much of what will come to be may take us by surprise. I like to play at being an armature futurist my self. The situation with the grand unification theory is no one understands gravity on a quantum scale, quantum being subatomic.
I personally feel the future we need to look out for will be at our own making.


This does not give you all the information that I get working for them and having an inside network. You may find some things that were once sci-fi here, this is the site open to the public. [url]https://www.boeing.com/[/url]

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The present we have wrought is already so full of holes in pet theories that it calls every bit of speculative blue sky mining into question. Weren't we supposed to be feeding the world from the ocean by 2000? I remember hearing all about that when I was a kid, that and my flying car that still isn't here... :roll:

Our main issues in the human condition are not matters of technology but morality. We know about the stuff that is wrong, we have alternatives, we just choose not to utilize them. We fight and argue about changes we know we need to make; I can't get the wife to switch to a safer dishwashing soap because the stuff I want to get is twice as much. Why? Because the harsh chemical detergents are cheap, not because the other is SO expensive... if we all stopped using the detergent and started using soap (and the 7th Generation soap I like works great; the suds last even longer), we would drop the prices as economies of scale allowed for greater production. Not to mention we would lose the associated clean-up costs for the water pollution to our lakes and streams from the phosphorus. But no...

If there is life from other planets (I am convinced there are UFOs, just not convinced they are necessarily from elsewhere; as noted above, Einstein seemed to think time travel would be easier than intergalactic travel, so maybe not spaceships but timeships?), they would do well to avoid us; we are a rough and tumble lot, given to shooting first and asking questions later. We show no respect to other species, don't show ourselves any respect really, seem to ruin most things we take an interest in, and aren't smart enough to not poop in our own food and water bowls, as it were. Perhaps it is in the best interest of the universe to let us finish ourselves off? (we really are on the right track there... :roll: )

If I was an advanced race able to cruise the stars, I'd look at this hot mess and just look for a better neighborhood... or maybe it's like bad reality TV; they just can't look away... :lol:

HG

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Aliens may exist but contact would hurt humans: Hawking

[url]https://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100425/sc_afp/scienceastronomyextraterrestrialhawking[/url]

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So funny Tom; I heard this today and was coming to post it and there you are...

He's a smart guy, so you can't just ignore his thinking, but I think it's seems a little dark. I do agree with the microbial contact scenario being the most likely; we are just finding out how extreme some microbes can be, so even vacuum seems surmountable to me...

HG



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