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Do you really believe a ranch would kill it's own animal by using a laser powered corer (does such a thing even exist?) and then claim some ET did it?
No. When you get robbed, you're usually not the robber. Although the exceptions do tend to make great copy.
Hmm. I never thought of cow tipping as a gateway crime, but I can see how it might lead to a life of cow coring and other steak-related vandelism.
Do you think that's how the aliens got started?
"We go big, or we don't go." - GCNRevenger
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Nah, they probably started out like most other aliens, with nuisance ufo graffiti in the corn fields.
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Life from elsewhere doesn't really seem that extraordinary. It's all just meat.
Which begs the question, why then would they really be interested in coming here?
For the fresh meat.
I accept the possibility of aliens. To call it a belief is giving it too much weight.
I take the same viewpoint. It drives me crazy that so often you're expected to either believe that something does exist or that it doesn't (aliens, ghosts, god, whatever). When something is neither proven nor disproven, why should you have to think you know the truth when you really don't? In my view the best course is to admit your uncertainty and, if it is sufficiently important to you to know the answer, research the topic. One can have hypotheses, one can look at what data there is and draw some preliminary conclusions, but if one wants certain truth he needs proof and there isn't enough data for that yet. And one must always admit that he may be wrong.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
-The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
by Douglas Adams
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What I always found facinating is that those who do not believe in god will still usually believe in aliens.
Ironic really. :laugh:
What do you think God is? God is a being not from this planet, otherwise known as an alien. And the angels? They are by definition aliens as well.
Don't assume aliens are all little green men.
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Life from elsewhere doesn't really seem that extraordinary. It's all just meat.
Which begs the question, why then would they really be interested in coming here?
Hell, most here want to get away. :laugh:
I don't know, I've read crazy ideas they are coming here to get our DNA because they are dying as a race but they would only need to get one blood sample and they should be able to duplicate the code from there on.
If they are coming here I find the following the most plausible:
-Our planet is beautiful compared to most other livable planets in the galaxy. I would bet that many planets that bear life are dark, bathed in radiation, lack water and plant life.
Or,
-There is something about us. If they are abducting humans and conducting experiments then it's likely that they are not trying to fix their DNA but ours. Why, I don't know. It's tough to guess whether this would be a good thing, or bad thing for us.
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I always liked the alien origin story where they were really time travellers from our future, travelling back to catalog the biological diversity that did not exsist in their time.
Of course I heard that from some nut at a green-peace rally.
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What do you think God is? God is a being not from this planet, otherwise known as an alien. And the angels? They are by definition aliens as well.
"If your god is in the sea, then in heaven you would have fish before you. If your god is in the sky, then in heaven you would have birds before you." A very appropriate quote from the Gospel According to St. Thomas.
If your god is in outer space...
"We go big, or we don't go." - GCNRevenger
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As long as we think of ourselves as "down here," phenomena witnessed "in the sky" can be interpreted as not of Earth. But, from "out there," such phenomena turn out to be e.g. weather balloons, meteors, space junk, auroras, all of which are part and parcel of Earth. No flying saucers or suchlike have been reported by astronauts/cosmonauts, observing Earth events from above the atmosphere for months on end. Seen from cis-Lunar space, we of Earth are incontrovertably alone on our utterly unique home planet. Get real!
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If they are coming here I find the following the most plausible:
-Our planet is beautiful compared to most other livable planets in the galaxy. I would bet that many planets that bear life are dark, bathed in radiation, lack water and plant life.
Or,
-There is something about us. If they are abducting humans and conducting experiments then it's likely that they are not trying to fix their DNA but ours. Why, I don't know. It's tough to guess whether this would be a good thing, or bad thing for us.
It seems likely enough to me that if they are coming here there isn't anything special about our planet. They're just the research team sent here, one of many sent to many planets as part of an attempt to explore and catalogue the out of the way planets of the galaxy. They have a mission to complete and then they can return to their homes on some more popualar world. I think the description in my signature sums up our solar system pretty well. ("Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.") Of course I doubt we're really being visited anyway.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
-The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
by Douglas Adams
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Why in the hell would aliens be interested in talking monkey’s?
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Hey, lot of people pay silly prices to talk monkeys at the Zoo!
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Why in the hell would aliens be interested in talking monkey’s?
Why not? I would be very interested in talking monkeys. Talking monkeys with high explosives would bear even more scrutiny, though for different reasons.
"We go big, or we don't go." - GCNRevenger
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Talking monkey's still throw poo.
Anyway, imagine that we receive a message from aliens and they ask for a response, "Who speaks for your people?"
How do we answer? I think the fact that we cannot answer is answer enough.
Who speaks for all of you? Well, no one. And if anyone tried to say they spoke for everyone, espeically in a situation where we are responding to an alien, can you imagine the fallout?
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Anyway, imagine that we receive a message from aliens and they ask for a response, "Who speaks for your people?"
By what criteria do they define "your people?"
Build a man a fire and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
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An alien species makes contact across light years to what, talk to just one group of humans versus another?
The fact that we have to define who are people are demonstrates that any alien would be foolish to contatc us now.
If they tried now, they would eventually get caught up in our internal struggles.
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The fact that we have to define who are people are demonstrates that any alien would be foolish to contatc us now.
Which assumes that they would be a unified group themselves. I see no reason to make this assumption. It may well turn out that the first signal received from extraterrestrials will be from a specific group of them, a nation-state or rough equivalent. All this "unified species" stuff may turn out to be total bunk.
So we could have some "peoples" of Earth communicating with other "peoples" of another world, neither truly representing their entire respective species.
Build a man a fire and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
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*kicking a dead thread, but...*
Somehow, Cobra's idea of independent alien nation-states (or equivalent) has always struck me as the most plausible scenario. To a unified, impossibly advanced alien species, a bunch of fanatic territorial intelligent primates has no redeeming use other than entertainment value, and thus would probaby be avoided like the plague except for the aliens' equivalent of National Geographic. ("Tonight, on Galactic Explorer, angry monkeys with nukes!")
On the other hand, independent alien nation states could always use some new members of the Coalition of the Willing, *especially* if they are fanatical-tending territorial killer apes.
Now, getting away from woo-woo UFO stuff... Personally, I wouldn't find it surprising if we were being monitored by aliens in a low-key means. Low-key, here, means a quiet, extremely long-lifetime interstellar probe which get sent to any star with a planet that 'looks right', has detectable signs of life via spectrum of its atmosphere, etc. Send them out, do a preliminary survey with a dropped probe or rover on the surface, then put them in some sort of semi-hibernating state unless they pick up radio signals or whatever. An alien rover dropped on Earth 12000 years ago, or whatever, is rather unlikely to be found. Heck, the aliens who sent it might have wiped themselves out in a war in the intervening time period. But I figure there's a reasonable probability of aliens having made at least an attempt at monitoring our planet.
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On the other hand, independent alien nation states could always use some new members of the Coalition of the Willing, *especially* if they are fanatical-tending territorial killer apes.
An interesting question then is: Would we join them?
Suppose an alien civilization contacted us and said they'd give us their propulsion and other technology and make us a spacefaring civilization with an equal standing among all the planets in they're aliance/federation/whatever if we'd help them wipe out the other big spacefaring civilization/coalition. Would we take the risk? Would the morality of they're cause matter? Would we go for or against it as a planet or make separate decisions as nations? Would one nation such as U.S. or China attempt to win the aliens' favor and gain dominion over Earth.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
-The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
by Douglas Adams
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if we'd help them wipe out the other big spacefaring civilization/coalition.
I think this is a ridiculous supposition. Any civilization capable of large scale interstellar travel would have to be centuries if not millennia ahead of us. Asking us to help them would be like the Kiwis asking for help from the penguins against the Japanese.
Bob
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I think this is a ridiculous supposition. Any civilization capable of large scale interstellar travel would have to be centuries if not millennia ahead of us. Asking us to help them would be like the Kiwis asking for help from the penguins against the Japanese.
Perhaps. Perhaps not. Most militaries can use more people since they tend to go through them pretty quickly. Assuming that the aliens are about as intelligent as humans, we will simply be untrained but not innately less capable. Therefore they may see a need to train us and give us access to weapons and spaceships. Of course it's most likely that they'd discriminate somewhat, using humans only as infantry and not as commanders. I don't expect humanity to turn the tide of an intergalactic war, but it's not impossible that someone would want us as one more ally. Of course this is all extremely far-fetched, not something we should actually be worrying about, but I think it makes an interesting thing to think about anyway.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
-The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
by Douglas Adams
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Bah, any civilisation advanced enough to go truly interstellar must fall into one of two catagories.
A) They use some sort of STL (Slower Than Light) travel, and have developed a society stable enough to remain cohesive despite the decades to centuries of seperation bettwen systems. This seems to prohibit large scale warfare.
B) They use some sort of fast STL of FTL travel and thus have weapons of incredible scale. If you can harness the kinds of energies/physic manipulation to quickly make transit bettwen systems, then warfare could get really messy. Planet smashing and the like. This also seems to proclude warlike civilisations. But even if they did still exist, the level of warfare they would engage in would not be very manpower intensive, so humans wouldn't have much role in it. Indeed, their warships and weapons would probably be entirely automated. If we were usefull at all, it would be as slave labor.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
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From another fellow space forum blogger...
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22656172/
Check out this recent sighting report from Texas.
Any speculation on what it could have been?
Description from observers...
flat, metallic object hovering about 300 feet
Debunking what they describe...
object may have been an illusion caused by two commercial airplanes. Lights from the aircraft would seem unusually bright and may appear orange from the setting sun.
Now the search for physical evidence....
One man has offered a reward for a photograph or videotape of the mysterious object.
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