Author Topic: Do you belive?  (Read 18432 times)

Offline Aldorn

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Re: Do you belive?
« Reply #15 on: June 23, 2014, 07:34:14 pm »
Excellent ;D

Offline Sharp

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Re: Do you belive?
« Reply #16 on: June 24, 2014, 01:39:17 am »
One thing that I find interesting and not very common in sci-fi is the thought that 'What if humans are the most advanced species in our galaxy?' I say galaxy because as Falko's pic has shown, the universe is a pretty big place, and it's going to be a long while before we even get to the Solar Interstellar Neighbourhood let alone to Andromeda (although I believe Andromeda is coming to us pretty quickly, although in some billion years).

Not to say that life doesn't exist outside of Earth, but intelligent life? Life advanced enough to travel into space? maybe humans are the first to do so in our little part of the neighbourhood. Although Kepler-22b is hopeful to be Earth-like but seeing as it's 600 light years away there might be intelligent life on it who are also in space, if they have telescopes looking at us they won't know we are space capable for another 600 years.

Space is a big place, knowing if there is intelligent life out there is interesting but honestly until we get anything actually FTL we won't know for many hundreds of years. We might see intelligent life with telescopes but they may be completely un-contactable due to huge distances

Offline Murmur

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Re: Do you belive?
« Reply #17 on: June 24, 2014, 04:57:28 am »
following: loooong picture that tries to visualize the amount stuff in the universe
Spoiler...with a joke at the end - hope you can take one:

Oh my god... I was not ready... I made it to the end and nearly died. Thanks for the laugh!

Offline redrat9595

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Re: Do you belive?
« Reply #18 on: June 24, 2014, 05:22:18 am »
It's almost silly to think that there isn't ANYTHING out there, even if it's just basic life. Consider the Hubble Deep Field.

SpoilerHubble Deep Field:

(Full resolution here, at ~14 MB)

"[The image covers an area of] about one 24-millionth of the whole sky, which is equivalent in angular size to a 65 mm tennis ball at a distance of 100 metres... [A]lmost all of the 3,000 objects in the image are galaxies, some of which are among the youngest and most distant known."(Source) It's nearly equivalent to looking at the sky through (an oddly shaped :P) straw (which is an area much smaller than the size of the moon) and remembering that the sky you can step outside and see right now isn't even a quarter of Earth's entire sky. Also note that some of those galaxies are over 13 billion light years away, meaning that Earth didn't even exist for over half the time the light was on its way here.

Don't forget that these are galaxies we're talking about. While the Milky Way is larger than most other galaxies, it alone contains between 200 and 400 billion stars.

There's also the HDF South (which helps to establish that the HDF isn't anomalous in the amount of galaxies it contains) and the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (or HXDF, which adds another ~5,500 galaxies to the HDF even though it only looked more closely at a portion of the image). And that's just the observable universe. According to Alan Guth's cosmic inflation theory, the entire universe's size is at least 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (3x1023) times larger than the observable universe. Unless we travel FTL, we'll never see most of that because the universe itself expands FTL.

The human mind can't truly grasp the vastness of these numbers, but even from the little bit we can comprehend we should be able to realize how little of a chance there is that we're completely alone.

Isolation, however, is an entirely different issue...
« Last Edit: June 24, 2014, 05:25:19 am by redrat9595 »

Offline Solarius Scorch

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Re: Do you belive?
« Reply #19 on: June 24, 2014, 01:39:46 pm »
First of all: UFOs are not necessarily from the outer space. Many ufologists assume they are more likely to come from the future or some parallel universe. Or perhaps from past Earth, which they left at some point (the most popular time would be the Cretaceous).

Now, let's concentrate on actual aliens from another planet. There are countless estimations, more or less scientific, like the Drake equation. I personally would like to point to the following necessary assumptions:

1) Life is not a one-time event.
Claiming that life is unique to Earth would be pretty heliocentric, since its chemical processes aren't particularly exotic. Even the development of DNA, or some equivalent, seems fairly probable to me, given enough time (and there is much time available).

2) Any cradle of life can create intelligent life.
However, highly organized life is a different story. Rising above bacteria level is extremely difficult for energy management reasons, and on Earth it worked only due to a miraculous and highly improbable symbiosis of cells with other cells, which evolved into mitochondria (otherwise it would be simple cellular life only). This is explained further in this short article. And it is rather safe to say that complex life is necessary for intelligence as we know it.
Therefore, while I have little doubt that there is life out there, I am hesitant to say the same about aliens with plasma guns.

3) Alien intelligence is comparable to ours.
X-Com aliens are, well, alien, but are they really? Their physiology, society, culture and artefacts are parallel to ours - they understand transportation, engineering, warfare and so on. But is this true for a hypothetical alien intelligence out there, assuming it had the chance to appear at all?
The answer is, I don't know. However, I do know one thing: all living things must manage limited resources, and therefore understand such concepts as competition and hostility, but also economy, cooperation and trade. Therefore, no matter how alien they are, we can always communicate with them by exchange of resources (unless we have nothing to offer them, but I find it unlikely). I can't say anything more about other aspects of alien intelligence, because there is no data; refer to good sci-fi books for more elaboration (S. Lem, A. C. Clarke, W. J. Williams and more).

This perspective may not seem overly optimistic about meeting our space cousins, though it's not overly pessimistic either. Still, even there is none, there is still the parallel universes theory and other sources of weirdness that can also be taken into consideration as for the source of aliens, so do not despair! I would say that if our universe indeed keeps forking into other universes, then the existence of aliens is not just probable, it's inevitable. Of course many of these aliens - those from the nears regions of the multiverse - are completely like us, but that's another story...

Offline Souljah1214

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Re: Do you belive?
« Reply #20 on: June 24, 2014, 02:57:12 pm »
for me personally is hard to accept the fact that multiple dimensions can live together... it sounds for me sooo absurd... but then again... who am i to rule out this things? my friends and i have a theory that, what if the human race is the only "breed" that knows and uses war.

I strongly belive that we were visited back in history by aliens.... i just cant think how an ancient guy/girl would paint hawkheaded people claiming they have descended from the skies... if we look around in ancient mythologies, by some strange coincidence, we always find the same old signs again and again. It doesnt matter if the civilizations are diveded by a lot of water and land.

But the question is so large and so unseeable (this word exists in english?) like the universe... but i know for sure i saw once something very strange... but before that people have to understand when i say UFO (as posted before me) is not neceseraly from outer space piloted by ET....

you guys probably have seen a satelite swiming through the night sky. So i saw similiar little dot flying from W towards E. And then all of a sudden, it made a very shar 180 degree turn and flew soooo f.cking fast away that i know it wasnt a normal airplane... this happened sowhere around 99-2000. so a long time ago, but never-ever have seen anything like that.

So yeah... anything is possible i guess. Maybe the Mole-people are up to something.

a bit offtopic:

have any of the programing gurus thought about an alien race, who would be earth based but living underneath the surface?

Offline Warboy1982

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Re: Do you belive?
« Reply #21 on: June 25, 2014, 03:37:04 am »
what if the human race is the only "breed" that knows and uses war.

we already know that's false. ants wage war all the time.

Offline Solarius Scorch

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Re: Do you belive?
« Reply #22 on: June 25, 2014, 03:51:35 am »
we already know that's false. ants wage war all the time.

Exactly. As I said before, pretty much any life form understands warfare due to competition.

Regardless, not knowing war is an interesting thought experiment in any sci-fi work.

Offline Mr. Quiet

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Re: Do you belive?
« Reply #23 on: June 25, 2014, 04:25:23 am »
The Hollow Earth theory is the main reason I'd avoid exploring caves. The main idea is that the Earth has huge open areas to create cities and dwelling places with dangerous species of creatures that may be as aliens to us. Just think of the Underdark, same idea.

Also had an article from a 1950's NatGeo magazine about a group of school kids that went missing after exploring an ancient catacombs they let people tour in Rome. The catacombs were very deep and areas still unexplored. Before that someone reported seeing a strange looking humanoid while exploring a restricted area. I read all this on /x/ years ago and the Nat Geo mag does exist, I downloaded the issue from an archive site, although I don't remember the issue date :(

Offline Solarius Scorch

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Re: Do you belive?
« Reply #24 on: June 25, 2014, 04:27:43 am »
Also had an article from a 1950's NatGeo magazine about a group of school kids that went missing after exploring an ancient catacombs they let people tour in Rome.

I've been there when I was 11. I saw no aliens. :(
(but there was plenty of skeleton dust, so it was still OK)

Offline Souljah1214

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Re: Do you belive?
« Reply #25 on: June 25, 2014, 08:49:03 am »
ok i know ants wage war against each other... but they dont do it with nuclear weapons.... thats the strange in human race, that we are so creative when it comes to harm or kill to other!

there are a lot of underground caverns which are strange... I dont know its name, but in turkey for instance there is a "city" underneath the surface which can host like more then 10.000 people. And the strangest feature is that its doors can be operated only from the inside. So probably this was some kind of shelter...

so yeah.... something must be out there... i know there are a lot of bullsh1t reports about this kind of stuff, but some of them seems true and confusing

Offline Falko

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Re: Do you belive?
« Reply #26 on: June 25, 2014, 12:00:59 pm »
so yeah.... something must be out there... i know there are a lot of bullsh1t reports about this kind of stuff, but some of them seems true and confusing
too bad nobody ever delivered any convincing evidence (witness != evidence: in the middle age people genuinely saw witches fly in the sky even with multiple witnesses .. do you believe them?)
i have no problem with "something must be out there" my problem is with "something must be out there (besides us)" and i admit alien make for a really good story .. and we all love a good story

Offline Warboy1982

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Re: Do you belive?
« Reply #27 on: June 25, 2014, 12:40:24 pm »
oh, undoubtedly, i don't think we've ever been "visited" and i don't think we will be any time soon, but i'd love to be wrong.

Offline Aldorn

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Re: Do you belive?
« Reply #28 on: June 25, 2014, 01:01:47 pm »
oh, undoubtedly, i don't think we've ever been "visited" and i don't think we will be any time soon, but i'd love to be wrong.

Suppose we are the most advanced, we will visit others

But as it is likely we are not, others will visit us

As others are more advanced, it could be they already came, but we did not suspect anything, as they use improved technology, making them undetectable

Just 2000 years in the past, get a cellular phone, a tablet, ... to someone... electricity, energy, technology, image, sound, ... he cannot even unerstand what you are, what you want, what you say, you are just a god

Only 2000 years ago, with our ridiculous technology level, we are aliens...

Offline Warboy1982

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Re: Do you belive?
« Reply #29 on: June 25, 2014, 01:07:31 pm »
sure, they may visit us, or we may visit them, anything is possible given enough time, the problem is we gotta FIND each other... and there's a WHOLE lot of ground to cover, not to mention that any stars/planets that we're observing today may have died millions of years ago, further compounding the problem...

as for us being the most advanced, i kinda highly doubt that. we're a fledgling race at best. i mean considering how long the universe has existed compared to how long the planet has existed compared to how long life on this planet has existed compared to how long WE'VE existed... we're insignificant.

we're certainly highly advanced compared to anything else on our planet, but it's possible that some other species hit this level of advancement some 65 million years ago, and we probably couldn't even form a basis for comparison in that case.
« Last Edit: June 25, 2014, 01:18:52 pm by Warboy1982 »