e-wok
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Joined: 9/25/2006
Msg: 26 | |
| Should we keep a low profile?
Posted: 3/13/2007 4:22:13 AM | So, Hawkings is suggesting we now shut down all radio transmissions and
hide in our basement in hopes that the Jackie Cleason Show didn't
draw any attention from ET. For somebody purported to be smart, he
sounds like an idiot.
ET is MILLIONS of light years away...if he even exists (personally I don't
think so). If they were to even pick up our co-ordinates and start
packing a lunch for the 2 million light year journey, I doubt very much
they'd survive the long journey...they'd either starve, or die of
mind numbing boredom. | |
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| Should we keep a low profile?
Posted: 3/14/2007 8:25:37 PM |
For somebody purported to be smart, he sounds like an idiot.
Since SH probably won't be frequenting these forums, I feel compelled to do my best to defend his position, even though he would be able to do it much easier and with more clarity. I'm sure he could easily cornhobble any denigrator on this subject.
First, I think SH would agree with Sombient that there is only a small chance that sentient beings are anywhere near our position in the solar system. But if they happen to be there, then I see that there are only three possibilities.
1. They are neutral towards us and probably will ignore any signals sent to communicate with them.
2. They are friendly towards us and may or may not wish to communicate at this time.
3. They are hostile towards us, and/or anything else that moves.
This last possibility (one in three chance?) would be SH's concern. My personal opinion is that we will find the conditions in trans-solar space too daunting to life to overcome. I suspect it will be the same for any lifeform that has evolved in the relative safety of a planet's atmosphere. But that still doesn't protect us from them if they are determined. Depending on the degree of paranoia or protectiveness they may have, it is feasible that they could send out mechanical drones that could sense signals and home in on them to "police" the neighborhood of unwanted competition.
There is also the unlikely possibility that an intelligent entity could somehow evolve in space. Polluting its neighborhood with coherently pulsating electromagnetic radiation may irritate it enough to take action... who knows how it thinks?
The point is that we have much more to lose if we get door number three. If we get door number 2, the only possible positive outcome, we only get to communicate with them with over a hundred thousand year time lag. Not that much of a plus to balance that big negative.
Hence, we probably shouldn't be trying to contact ET. | |
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| Should we keep a low profile?
Posted: 3/14/2007 9:38:18 PM | I believe that if a highly advanced civilization lives somewhere in the universe, I think that they would be as curious about us as we would be of them. Maybe they would be peaceful. After all, in order for they to have been able to survive, they would have to had evolved a cosmic understanding and justice.
Perhaps I am being somewhat naive, but it would not make any sense for them to harm us if life is so rare in the first place. | |
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| Should we keep a low profile?
Posted: 3/14/2007 10:14:22 PM |
Perhaps I am being somewhat naive, but it would not make any sense for them to harm us if life is so rare in the first place.
It could be very logical for them to want to eliminate us if they consider other life to be dangerous to them. It all depends on the habitat that they evolved in. If they evolved in a dangerous cutthroat environment on their planet where it was kill or be killed, the "winner" would be one heck of a killing machine. That sociology would be used to judge other lifeforms elsewhere. | |
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| Should we keep a low profile?
Posted: 3/15/2007 12:07:16 AM |
He advocates that we colonize other planets, because the odds of our species being wiped out
ahhhh...the great diaspora :) necessary and they wont stop until they find a way for the chosen few to escape, leaving the rest of this place pretty much uninhabitable for the rest of us. Of course, the course being taken by science itself is the cause in many cases. Flip sides of the same penny.
Back to the topic. I seriously would be more afraid FOR any other inhabitable planet and or its inhabitants, if the current form of humans find it. Opportunists and violent little creatures we are. With resources running out here, I have no doubt if they found something worth grabbing, they'd try anything to take it for themselves.
As someone else said, expanding territories and conquering things and other peoples is all about resources. For an out of control race that has no preditory factor outside of disease and the odd fungus and parasite.
"Innumerable voices have been asserting for some time now that human society is passing through a crisis, that its stability has been gravely shattered. It is characteristic of such a situation that individuals feel indifferent or even hostile toward the group, small or large, to which they belong. In order to illustrate my meaning, let me record here a personal experience. I recently discussed with an intelligent and well-disposed man the threat of another war, which in my opinion would seriously endanger the existence of mankind, and I remarked that only a supranational organization would offer protection from that danger. Thereupon my visitor, very calmly and coolly, said to me: "Why are you so deeply opposed to the disappearance of the human race?" -
-- Albert Einstein | |
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| Should we keep a low profile?
Posted: 3/20/2007 6:57:16 AM | At this point, most of our minds are limited to seeing the universe in a tunnel vision, from our perspective; unless one is a Quantum Physicist, yet even they might be limited in their ideas, because they still use human brains.
Anyway,
Would Extra Terrestrials be friendly, or would they eat us?
My way of looking at this question is this. Why would they wish to harm us, or even eat us?
When all the wars of man kind are boiled down to the nitty gritty, they are a result of need for land, food, or fought over because of ideals such as religion.
One might expect that an advance race of beings who can travel faster then the speed of light, or bend space so that they can leap from one universe to the next, would have already been able to settle the things which we fight over.
It is unlikely that they would need our planet, because what does it have to offer them? Chances are they would not be physically adept to the systems of planet earth. Even if they needed a place like earth, the odds are that they would be able to find other such planets that have not developed “advanced” life forms such as us.
Your comments make very good sense to me. As for Hawkings, really, I don't think that guy knows what he's tallking about. In fact anyone can speculate anything about anything.   | |
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| Should we keep a low profile?
Posted: 3/22/2007 11:44:26 AM | There are 2 topics here:
A) The existence of other humans in other planets
B) Hedging our chances of survival as humans by inhabiting other planets.
Assuming there were other humans in other planets, would they be interested in hosting us?
Are we looking for humans in other planets or other planets most suitable for us to live on - settle?
I think the latter. In case this Planet needs to be demolished to make room for an inter-gallactic highway (with or without tolls). | |
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| Should we keep a low profile?
Posted: 3/22/2007 9:46:08 PM |
Dr.Stephen Hawking stated that he felt humans shouldn't be trying to get the attention of ET's,assuming there are any out there listening.He said that we as a species should keep a low profile.
Doubt it. Any intelligence smart enough to listen to us would themselves have sent out indisputable signals of their own intelligence long before us. We would have received their signals by now.
As far as "not trying to get the attention of ET's,' well hell, it's a little too late for that. Earth puts out as much radio flux as a small sun, so all an ET would have to look for is a solar system that spews out more AM/FM than it theoretically should, and BOOM, the implication of our existence is already there. | |
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| Should we keep a low profile?
Posted: 3/26/2007 7:23:34 AM | | This whole debate seems pointless to me. For starters, why is it usually assumed that "highly advanced races" have ships and travel around the universe? Isn't it fairly obvious that our evolution will take away the need for a physical body? Once we evolve into higher dimensional beings, accessing the activities on planets at any time in history will be no more difficult than opening a book. To worry about sending our signals out, and attracting unwanted attention seems like another silly fear that humans have. They don't need our minerals. They don't need slaves. They don't need to stick probes in our butts. We're not that important. | |
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| Should we keep a low profile?
Posted: 3/28/2007 6:50:54 AM | Been reading this thread with great interest! :) Just thought I'd add a couple of things:
Firstly, there's an assumption that alien life would think in terms we recognise - i.e. desires to conquer, or devour people... or to be friends... but if lifeforms did evolve in a completely alien environment - possibly one completely different to our own - would they not think in completely different terms? In alien terms, perhaps?
So we're saying they may want to conquer, etc. - well, maybe but there's also the possibility that they'd have no understanding of these concepts. Maybe they'd have no concept of territory (which could be good or bad for us depending on how you look at it) or even of communication. Maybe they simply wouldn't know what communication is... Remember this life would be alien - maybe beyond what we could possibly imagine. So, although it seems silly to us that a race of beings may have no concept of communication (I can hear all sorts of questions like "How would they..." and "How could they..." being asked) to them it may seem incomprehensible that we do. Being alien, they may even find the concept of communication offensive! lol We could be chucking something out into the universe in all innocence and annoying the rest of the inhabitants of the cosmos - a bit like a neighbour who won't turn their TV down at 3 a.m.!
I guess my point is that the whole thing is mind boggling. Aliens could behave in any way we imagine - and possibly in ways we can not! Could we ever truly be prepared?
- Gord | |
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| Should we keep a low profile?
Posted: 3/28/2007 8:01:21 AM | Advances in technology does not necessarily make living organisms more "humane". Thus a living species with the ability to come here may not be more "human" or civilised than us. On the contrary. Will they come here "for business". as "tourists" or
for pleasure". Whose business, and whose pleasure? Just sightseeing? Dating? LTRs? Or Activity partners? Intimate encounters or as friends with benefits? Philosophise on that, dear fellow POFers!
PS. Should we Keep a low profile" or should we "remove our profile" from the Universal/Gallastic map: Go into "stealth" planet mode? Or make earth capable of relocating to other places in the universe (like companies are around the world) - A universally mobile Earth? Or invent "cloaking" (??) or shields technology (a la Starship Enterprise)? Just in case!!!!???
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| Should we keep a low profile?
Posted: 3/28/2007 9:12:08 AM | We should not keep a low profile because it wouldn't do any good against a highly developed species.
Since we are limited by our senses in that we are only aware of a thin slice of existence, it is possible that invisible to our senses ET's are among us now. In fact it is highly probable given parallel universes, number of galaxies, millions of planets, and even possibilities of potentially negative and positive replicas of ourselves either here on earth or at other universal dimensions.
Since we have not become an edible in terms of how we define an edible with our primitive receptors, then there are two possibilities. Either invisible ET's are friendly, or they are nourishing on our thoughts and bodies. They could be doing this by reorchestrating both to make them more palatable by causing us the stresses and psychological difficulties we experience in the face of our environment and human interaction, and causing our bodies to grow old and debilitated by their action upon and removal of fluids and cells.
Although such thinking as above currently borders on science fiction because present science does not support some of the conclusions, that doesn't mean the suppositions are potentially invalid over time. It merely means science hasn't caught up with the conclusions presumed from existing disciplines like quantum physics, biology, and so forth. | |
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| Should we keep a low profile?
Posted: 3/28/2007 9:27:30 AM | | Friendly or Enemy: We do not eat animals' meat cause we are enemies. We do it to feed ourselves. The friends vs enemies analysis may be missing such a point. | |
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| Should we keep a low profile?
Posted: 3/28/2007 3:42:17 PM | I also think that the likelihood of encountering other intelligent species while we're still alive and still what we now consider human (I think we're rapidly reaching a point where we will begin altering ourselves - err, more than we already have...) is incredibly small. But, if it happened, most likely we'd actually come into contact with their machines (that may be all that's left, of course), so how that goes depends on how they programmed their machines.
And the machines need not be from unimaginably advanced civilizations, imo. I don't think we're really that far away from being capable of building Von Neumann machines (devices that could venture into deep space and self-replicate when they encounter the proper materials) ourselves. I don't mean we'll be doing this in the next few decades. I'm looking at the whole of our existence and thinking it's a smaller step than, say, going from living in caves as Homo Erectus to driving the first automobiles after evolving into Homo Sapiens and building up our societal infrastructures.
A society need not be past their violent tendencies to get to the point of building such machines, I believe. And then they may die out due to nuclear conflicts, bio-war, etc., possibly leaving their machines behind programmed to do who knows what. Still, even coming across these seems unlikely. | |
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| Should we keep a low profile?
Posted: 3/28/2007 4:03:42 PM | We don't want any more illigal aliens from other planets here too.
You forgot migration of jobs to other planets!
Plus: The impact on the US trade deficit, house prices in NYC and the extention of globalization to "universalization" (free and/or fair inter-gallactic trade) and of course the impact on the USD/Marsian currency parity! Will they adopt the Dollar (Mars-Dollar) or will they try to enforce their pop culture, currency and "ways of life" on us?
I think we are safe, cause the fear of contamination with SARS, avian flu, anthrax, greed, capitalism, reality shows and the critique of them by Michael Moore will surely keep any existing aliens away, fer sure!! We can all sleep tranquil, no need to build "panic rooms" (aka "safe rooms").. Jodie will in any case deal with them effectively! LOL
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| Should we keep a low profile?
Posted: 3/28/2007 7:21:38 PM | I agree w/ Gordimus ~ it shows just how unprepared we are to even grasp the concept of an alien life form. I think it's pretty arrogant of us as humans to think that everything else in the universe is relative to our lives ~ even the concept of time and deep-space travel and the effects they play on an alien life form is nothing more than speculation on our part.
I'm no genius, but Stephen Hawking is ~ if he says to back off on the long distance calls, maybe we might want to take heed | |
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| Should we keep a low profile?
Posted: 3/29/2007 4:56:05 AM |
I think it's pretty arrogant of us as humans to think that everything else in the universe is relative to our lives
While reading through all the posts here, that same thought came to mind as well. Most humans, not scientists, assume everything revolves around humanity. The only thing they understand about the numeral billions is in a monetary concept. I'm no math genius, but I have a pretty good grasp on probability. With the billions of stars in just our galaxy alone, along with all their planets, then add to that the billions of other galaxies in this universe, the odds that we are alone is impossible for me to grasp.
Besides it gives me better odds at finding a date!!! | |
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| Should we keep a low profile?
Posted: 3/29/2007 5:36:35 AM | I can understand the caution, the Idea of a kick me posted on our back zipping through space does unsettle to some degree, but I think that the great distances that must be traversed in any intergalactic endeavor would negate the concern, if someone left alpha centauri now it would take eons to arrive here and by the time they arrived we would have probably already destroyed ourselves or reached a much greater level of technology. Now that being said there are variables that would come into play, first our understanding of space travel the propulsion systems that we would even be considered even remotely powerful enough would be inadequate for such a voyage, so an alien race would have to have conquered the vastness of space by bending space and time logic dictates that a civilization would have to be very advanced to have that ability. Secondly what if they left their home galaxy eons ago....also SETI listens and doesn't transmit signal that I'm aware, the radio waves of our society and technology is what goes off into space at the speed of light...so in closing I think that we don't have a choice, all we can hope for is if there is a civilization seeking out new worlds for whatever reason that they are more humanitarian than we tend to be... | |
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| Should we keep a low profile?
Posted: 3/29/2007 5:53:50 AM | | backing off the calls is a little late, damage is done, if any..I have read a few posts that I agree with, we as humans are very egocentric and as a result judge everything by our paradigm and as a result we have not adequately given credence to other possibilities, with regard to what little we actually know about the universe...and ourselves for that matter... | |
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| Should we keep a low profile?
Posted: 3/29/2007 8:49:35 AM | | Frankly, the universe is just so big that I don't think we'll ever have to worry about meetin aliens. There is a whole other thread about UFO's and the vastness of the universe, etc. | |
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| Should we keep a low profile?
Posted: 3/29/2007 10:58:20 AM | Using the same limitations of time and distance, the aliens would not know about us until we are far advanced, extinct, or possibly de-advanced. On the other hand, or perhaps simultaniously, we have been spotted, observed.... and laughed at for some time. If one is to think it terms of Murphy's law, then highly advanced beings are already here.
As for our future, when aliens spot our radio waves, it may be that the conscience of our species or individuals will occupy machine ships and be traveling the universe. We may technologically "evolve" ourselves into something like data packets and travel space and time with many other formerly organic life forms as seemingly random vibrations of nuclear foces. We may leave our planet and allow it to evolve its other life forms and start over simply for our own intellectual entertainment along with others from elsewhere. Perhap we merge with them. To physically transport ourselves the great distances involved does not make much sense for us or other physical beings but our thoughts, reasonings and conscience do not have to have such physical limits. | |
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| Should we keep a low profile?
Posted: 3/29/2007 3:20:20 PM | Why??
The more information we give about ourselves the better. Why should anyone keep a low profile.?? | |
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