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Have we already been visited by aliens?

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Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#161

Post by runjake »

lo_fye wrote: post #158

Many people have seen them so near that there's no possible way it's a misidentification. For example, standing in the same room, indoors, in their homes... or outside in groups with many other corroborating witnesses (Google "Ariel School Zimbabwe mass sighting"). They're not all lying. In fact, if even just 1 is true, then yes we are being visited by aliens.

Many people genuinely believe they have seen Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster (almost entirely disproven at this point), magic, and miracles happen before their eyes.

It doesn't make it true.

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#162

Post by 7thaccount »

throwanem wrote: post #32
StavrosK wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should try DS9 when you're done with TNG. It's very different, but still great. I think they're some of the best shows ever made, especially because they didn't tiptoe around ethical dilemmas, they made them a main part of each episode's plot.

After DS9 (or maybe before it), also take a look at Babylon 5, the show that arguably inspired DS9 and certainly did a lot of things that no Trek show to date has been bold enough to try. It's a bit camp by today's standards, and the first season struggles a bit in places - but the same can be fairly said of TNG, and the depth of B5's narrative and characterization remains in many ways unequaled since its original ru…

B5 is arguably the best scifi show ever in my opinion. Amazing story, acting, ship battles, and philosophy

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#163

Post by godelski »

PoachedSausage wrote: post #136
gfxgirl wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the idea that there are gazillions of advanced aliens has been pretty much disproven by the fermi paradox. If there are gazillion, at least one out of all the diversity out there should have already colonized the entire galaxy and evidence should be plentiful.

Maybe there has been some sort of accident of scale, like the intergalactic fleet in Hitch Hiker Guide to the Galaxy that arrives to destroy Earth but is eaten by a dog. There could be a banging ET party going at the Planck scale and we would never know, they might as well be on the other side of the universe.

The problem with this is that mechanics is not scale invariant. This puts bounds on creatures. Unless there's some crazy different way to compute I wouldn't expect a being to be able to have strong cognitive functions and be the size of a fly. They would also have a difficult time building advanced machinery to get to galactic travel scales. Similarly I wouldn't expect a creature the size of a Brontosaurus to become space faring. Because of their sizes they would have to consume significantly more resources to build simple things. A two story house probably couldn't be created out of wood or other basic biological materials making it difficult to transition into even the stone age. They also require higher food because energy requirements aren't linear. But think how much it costs to send a pound to space. Their first to space would be significantly more expensive.

This doesn't mean these things are impossible because maybe there are ways around them, but it certainty shifts the probabilities by quite a bit. Given our current understanding of biology and mechanics it makes it much more probable for creatures to be within the ballpark of our size (let's say crow to elephant?).

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#164

Post by hntrader »

xattt wrote: post #96
eloff wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very common in science. New theories are usually rejected and ridiculed until/if they develop enough evidence behind them to sway people. Some careers are destroyed. Some scientists are only vindicated posthumously. The process can take many decades. Scientists, like most humans, are not that open-minded and are subject to the same group-think blind spots. I think if we could get better at being open-minded a…

The most recent event that comes to my mind is the lead up to the discovery of H. pylori causing gastric ulcers.

Another: Many World's Interpretation of QM. Not known to be true but less ridiculed and more widely subscribed.

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#165

Post by Coriolis3 »

wait_a_minute wrote: post #39
mrbonner wrote: post #17

I just started to watch the 1993 series Star Trek new generation. The show has some interesting ideas regarding advanced civilizations vs the primitive ones. One of which is called the prime directive prohibiting any star fleet from intervening with the evolution of primitive people. In one of the episodes “who watches the watcher” the USS enterprise travels to planet Minkita 2 for a rescue mission and encounters a p…

That's one of the biggest problems I have with Star Trek. If we were literally gods by comparison to some fledgling species, the only ethical approach would be to elevate them and cure their diseases and advance their knowledge as quickly as humanly possible.

Check out Iain M. Banks's "Culture" novels for a sci fi society that takes that approach to other civilizations. The Culture tries to raise up every lesser species of aliens to their own level of hedonist, post-scarcity wealth and technology. "The Player of Games" is both a good introduction to the series and an example of their cultural outreach at work.

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#166

Post by 7thaccount »

cpuguy83 wrote: post #43
wait_a_minute wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one of the biggest problems I have with Star Trek. If we were literally gods by comparison to some fledgling species, the only ethical approach would be to elevate them and cure their diseases and advance their knowledge as quickly as humanly possible.

The ideals behind the Prime Directive were from Vulcan influence. The theory behind it is they tried to do exactly that and it led to disaster in every case.

A lot of scifi shows have been influenced by this. In Stargate SG-1 (spoilers):

The Tollan civilization were humans taken from earth millennia ago that developed science faster than us and ended up being one of the most advanced races in the galaxy. They gave a source of limitless energy to more primitive aliens on a nearby planet in their solar system (think Mars versus Earth) and those aliens weaponized it and blew up part of their own planet. It messed up the Tollan's own planer's orbit, so they had to find a new planet and now don't share any technology.

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#167

Post by resource0x »

openasocket wrote: post #123
eloff wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very common in science. New theories are usually rejected and ridiculed until/if they develop enough evidence behind them to sway people. Some careers are destroyed. Some scientists are only vindicated posthumously. The process can take many decades. Scientists, like most humans, are not that open-minded and are subject to the same group-think blind spots. I think if we could get better at being open-minded a…

It's not just science, I can think of an example from pure mathematics. Cantor's work showing the uncountability of the real numbers was derided by prominent members of the mathematical community for decades. This despite the fact that he was able to boil down his argument into a proof so simple it's taught in introductory undergraduate classes. Now, this was at a time when mathematicians were still trying to rigorou…

Bad example. Cantor's theory is controversial to this day.

"Classical logic was abstracted from the mathematics of finite sets and their subsets …. Forgetful of this limited origin, one afterwards mistook that logic for something above and prior to all mathematics, and finally applied it, without justification, to the mathematics of infinite sets. This is the Fall and original sin of Cantor's set theory."

-- Hermann Weyl

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#168

Post by princekolt »

As soon as the article mentioned von Däniken in a serious light I stopped reading. von Däniken is a fraud and embezzlement convict and has admitted to fabricating lots of his fantastical stories and has no place in serious scientific research. I should have expected less from a lifestyle magazine, I guess.

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#169

Post by johnisgood »

princekolt wrote: post #168

As soon as the article mentioned von Däniken in a serious light I stopped reading. von Däniken is a fraud and embezzlement convict and has admitted to fabricating lots of his fantastical stories and has no place in serious scientific research. I should have expected less from a lifestyle magazine, I guess.

Of course. Even PubMed is ridden with ridiculous stuff. PubMed! To give you an example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3068791/

Thankfully we can do our own research, see by whom it has been cited, in what journal it has been published, and so forth. You can easily tell that this is quite an unimportant and incredible one. Of course you could tell it yourself after having read it that it is nonsense.

Re: Have we already been visited by aliens?

#170

Post by gfodor »

gfxgirl wrote: post #90
6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There seems to be a giant mismatch about what side is open minded. People who think its most likely aliens think it’s closed minded to assign that low probability, presumably because we’re this tiny corner of the universe. People who think it’s most likely not aliens Think it’s closed minded to assign everything else low probability, presumably because aliens are a tiny corner of everything else. Is it a misapplicati…

I thought the idea that there are gazillions of advanced aliens has been pretty much disproven by the fermi paradox. If there are gazillion, at least one out of all the diversity out there should have already colonized the entire galaxy and evidence should be plentiful.

Paradoxes are paradoxes precisely because they fail to disprove two contradictory claims.

For the Fermi paradox, the paradox is that the immensity of the universe leading to life seems obvious, yet the complete absence of that life around us seems to show it's not there. So it disproves nothing, but actually highlights the difficulty of disproving either claim given the other.

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