Alien Life

[Raging Deadstar]

Very scary thought now. We eventually make it out to colonizing planets. Imagine how much weaponary,science etc will have advanced? If humans on other colonised planets become more advanced through evoloution, or we become more advanced imagine the ammount of terrorism acts caused by these small enw colonies that will eventually want to break away. Instead of Countries we'd have planets, and thinking about how much technologically superior weapons would be that far down the line i'd probably say we wouldn't Last 10 years in space! like in MIB "A person is smart, people are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals!" I don't think that Human life will exist by the time "First Contact" is ever achieved. We'll have blown each other up, and if aliens found artifects of our existance imagine what they'd think of us, they'd probably blow us up just to be safe! Just a few ideas...

[oleg]

If everything goes as planned, we might have the definitive answer about existance of alien life in 40-50 years. I refer to the project of building space-based interferometer telescope. It should be able to detect Earth-sized planets around nearby stars and even suuply information about atmosphere composition which should give us some ideas about the presence of life forms.

[capnq]

The way I see it, you've got several billion years with no intelligent life on a planet, followed by a couple million years of intelligent life with no more than Stone Age technology, then a few thousand years ramping up to interstellar travel, and the rest of the existence of the universe to explore.

The odds of a starfaring race encountering a race still inside that tiny window of technological development, where we are now, are so low that I think the aliens would see us as an unprecedented opportunity to study how a pre-interstellar society functions and evolves.

[PvK]

As someone posted, we don't know anything about intelligent alien life, so we can only speculate. In general, I'd say that despite our fatally selfish and despicable tendencies, it's probably going to be a long long time before we're able to pose any kind of a threat to most aliens that would be in circumstances to visit us, unless they're stranded or something. Imagine you extend the SE4 tech tree to allow research for another thousand turns or so, and 200 billion systems, so expansion and exploration can be constant. Play the game for a thousand turns without meeting any other players. Then you find a player who has just entered the game - a homeworld with no ships or units and essentially zero tech. Do you feel threatened?

As capnq pointed out, the dimension of time and the vast time distance of evolutionary development, combined with the absence of any reason to think we evolved at the same time as another intelligent species, implies that we're unlikely to meet them at anywhere near "the same position on the tech tree". If we do, we'd tend to meet them more like half-way to their homeworld, and not here at home.

Also, it looks like we may be too selfish and short-sighted not to kill ourselves off (directly or through ignorance), so aliens who have not killed themselves off would tend, I would think, to be less selfish and short-sighted.

PvK

[Ragnarok]

I voted for "Other" because I don't believe there are aliens out there. I also don't believe in other demintions either. I mean if you think about it earth is a rare planet indeed. It's the only one that can sustain life. If the earth was moved just a fraction of an inch closer to the sun, we'd burn up in under a minute. If we moved a fraction of an inch further way we'd freeze to death in a matter of moments. Scientists have said this themselves. Humans will eventually become space travelers in time, but not for over 100 years. When and IF we develop the technology to colonize planets it'll be tough to do that when you consider the point of the earth being the EXACT right distance from the sun down to the smallest number of measurement. They'd have to build Domes to live in, but even then it'd still be next to impossible. But that's just MHO

[Phoenix-D]

"f the earth was moved just a fraction of an inch closer to the sun, we'd burn up in under a minute. If we moved a fraction of an inch further way we'd freeze to death in a matter of moments."

heh. Sorry, but this is wrong. Because if this was true we'd all be dead, the Earth's orbit isn't perfectly cirular. It's about 1.7% off.

"In January when we're closest to the Sun (perihelion), the distance is 147.5 million km. This weekend we will be 152.6 million km away--a five million kilometer difference."

from second article.

http://www.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF8/825.html
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2...l_aphelion.htm

Phoenix-D

[oleg]

Although Capnag comments are essentiually corect, it takes leap of faith to suggest that we or aliieans in same position will enjoy similar progress in future. After all, it is 30 years since we get to the Moon and to my best knowledge, there've been no major progress in human expansion beyound our Homeworld. And somehow I really doubt that it will ever occur - it is just too costly and has no direct financial and political (like reelection in 4 years) benefits. It is entirely possible that we reaching new sort of technological plateu.
I have no doubt about immense future progress in computer scince and biotecnology but it will only keep us ancored to Earth, ever more dump and playing computer games of galactic conquest instead of actually sucrifice excesses of our hedonistic life in order to actually do it !