Alien Life

[Raging Deadstar]

Hmmmmm after posting i thought a little deeper into this whole alien life thing (yep all my own!) and i kinda thought about the language barrier. Think about it, we have already met aliens and already managed to make contact with no reference point

Women can be soo hard to understand sometimes!

[CNCRaymond]

Haven't we had this converstation before?

I would have asked if you believe in life else where rather than if it was hostile or friendly.

I think it would be hostile. If Earth is as rare as you describe, then our world would be priceless. So if Aliens do come calling, I for one would feel that they are here for their own best interests, and our interests would mean nothing to them.

[disabled]

Life across the universe, I think there is life across this universe and I like to enjoy thinking that life is much more exotic and aline than anything our minds can imagine. I also believe that there is life across many different dimensions and realities (but I do not believe every dimension is a slightly different Version of our own).

I doubt life hasn't formed elsewhere. I suspect the universe is teeming with life.

Also, in a first contact situation, I think humanity would start any war simply from our B-Movie panic attacks at the thought of alien contact.

Besides, here's some food for thought...
Someday, in the future, we'll go out into space and setup colonies. After a few hundred or even thousand years, we'll find those humans aren't really related to us because evolution changed them.

[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