Alien Life

[Phoenix-D]

There is a rather signifcant gap between interstellar flight and spaceflight; especially if FTL travel isn't possible.

Phoenix-D

[Taz-in-Space]

I'm not sure I'd like to have advanced aliens landing here even if they are friendly. Consider what has happened to more primative cultures, right here on Earth, when confronted with a more advanced culture. Usually the more primative culture is damaged or destroyed.
American Indian vs European or the Zulus. Borneo cultures or the amazon cultures in more modern times.
SO I say to any alien culture studying us: Go ahead and study us covertly, but leave us alone to develop to at least interstellar capability.
And this a little OT: to those that say we have a wrecked spaceship at Roswell - SO WHAT? Even if true, it would be like a caveman finding a wrecked automobile. What would he do with it? He certianly couldn't fix it or build a new one! The most he could do, perhaps, would to get the principle of the wheel from it. And even that wouldn't be particually useful to a CAVEMAN!

[zen.]

I think that a wheel would help us, though--it's all about the time it takes for development. I remember playing an old Civilization game. It starts out where each turn is decades' worth of time. As you get more sophisticated, more major things are discovered in less time. Essentially, as we get more advanced, so do our tools for analysis. If alien technology is similar enough to our own concepts, we could possibly reverse-engineer it. Of course, whether we can do that without destroying the object in question or ourselves is a whole other debate.

Personally, I don't think we'll achieve Star Trek-like societies for quite a while, if ever. We're too factional as a planet to get our act together and unless we discover the interstellar equivalent of gold, there's no financial gain in it for people. Just look at some of the space programs around the world. Everything from development of future technology to tracking NEOs is afforded a fraction of the funding it would cost for a single military jet. Some bombs we've dropped have cost more than the annual budget of research and development teams. Between that and the fact that close-minded, lazy people breed more than the intelligent/open-minded ones do, and science fiction will most likely remain so.

zen

P.S. Oh yah, [/rant].

[Lemmy]

...unless we discover the interstellar equivalent of gold,...

wouldn't that be water?

[Lemmy]

Seriously though, I think that any aliens that visit Earth would probably be friendly - any race developed enough to have interstellar travel would probably not be warlike, or they would have destroyed themselves sooner. On the other hand, we're on the verge of achieving spaceflight, and we're pretty warlike...

they wouldn't have to be warlike throughout their entire development, maybe they had time of good leadership and lots of wealth, so that any war can be avoided, then the economy collapses, leader is assasinated, big alien empire on the verge of civil war, evil alien people with big evil mojo weapons come to earth, and think conquering earth and a new batch of slaves will boost their economy

[rdouglass]

Hrumph! Punny hu-man "bags of mostly water"! You know not what universe is like. Hrumph! You only observe 3 dimentions! What you know!

You can't figure how many species are on your own planet - never mind how many planets there are. Next contact we make will instruct you as to where to go to be harvested....


Here's one attempt to calculate how many planets could contain intelligent life - the Drake Equation. Many of you know it already but here it is for those of you who don't.... Drake Equation.

By the way - who determines if life is intelligent or not? ...hopefully NOT my brother-in-law...

[disabled]

While on the topic, has anyone read the martian chronicles? As soon as mars was colonized, earth became expendable.....

By not venturing into space, we might be PREVENTING out own extinction..

[Baron Munchausen]

Expendable? How do you gather from the Martian Chronicles that Earth became expendable? Every time there was a war on Earth the various colonies on Mars would become ghost towns as people went home. Not only did they want to help defend their native countries, but there was a good stretch of time when no space ships were even available to make the trip to Mars and the colonies were left to their own barely self-sufficient resources. This was a major plot point in some of the stories, of course. Vast, empty distances, long travel times, etc.

Personally, I think Bradbury is a Short Story writer who just happened to mix some SciFi elements into his works. The 'Mars' of the Martian Chronicles is more like the American West than a new planet.

[ August 13, 2002, 01:36: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

[jimbob]

Friendly Aliens: I voted that they'd be "Aggressive" towards us, not so much because they would consider themselves aggressive, but because we would. Consider the biologist studying Elephants (or any other animal for that matter) in the wild. The biologist means them no harm, but the Elephants don't know this, and will run/charge/attack in an attempt to end contact. And lets face it, a lot of the 'good' things biologists do include shooting, trapping, drugging, radio collaring, banding, blood sampling, other liquids/solids sampled, etc. Now a race that can travel to Earth from another location is going to be a little more advanced in all areas than we are. They'll likely make Vulcans look like school children

Drake Equation: In My Not Nearly Humble Enough Opinion (IMNNHO? ) the Drake Equation is only slightly less "black box" than the original statement by Azmov that there'd be life every thousand stars (I believe he said you needed the correct star type... 1/10, the presence of water... 1/10, and something else... 1/10). Now Azmov was shooting from the hip in the interview but the stuff you see in the press (like Discover, Sci. American, even Science and Nature) is just about that simple still!

I'll look through a few books at home and blather more tomorrow...

Cheers

[ August 13, 2002, 01:45: Message edited by: jimbob ]

[disabled]

You have to realize, humanity still had limited information on mars beyond observation.

I gathered earth was expendable from the usage of nukes. Also, pay attention to the chapter with the empty house.