I have no doubt that we are not the only planet in the universe that contains life. The odds of us being alone are, well astronomical.
I do however think that the odds of us contacting, or being contacted by, another life form are negligible. It would appear that travel at the speed of light for quite a number of years would be required in order to make contact with anyone close to us. Traveling at the speed of light is not going to be easy! Imagine the impact a grain of sand would have: E=MC^2 and all that.
Making this journey of multiple light years of travel, only to hover over Butt Crack Saskatchewan, and then leave seems very unlikely too. What would we do? Perhaps send a probe from the mother ship and investigate further? We certainly would not just hover and leave after say 12 light years of travel.
Also, nowadays just about everyone has picture/movie taking capabilities at their fingertips and still no conclusive evidence exists of alien spacecraft. Oh sure, there’s the usual blurry “something” but we’re not sure what, and some that appear totally fake, and others that have been divulged as military aircraft or even Jupiter or Saturn in the night sky, but you would think that - since the inception of the UFO craze 50’ish years ago - we’d have something conclusive by now.
No, there’s other life out there but it’s way too damned far away for us to contact, or vice versa.
Of course this is an opinion, and I solicit yours.
This is a bit of a hijack, but there was a UFO that crashed into Shag Harbour, Nova Scotia back in '67), and I’ve heard that something was hauled up from the bottom by divers. We’re still waiting to hear back on what it is, though, and I’m rather curious. I’ve heard speculation that it was a weapons test of some sort (which of course makes me extra glad that it hit water and not land), which would probably explain the lack of information from the government about what they found.
I don’t hold that it was an alien craft or anything, but I’m not dismissing that possibility either. I would think that if there was alien life that could make it here, they’d probably have the technology to hide from us as well, or view us as so inferior that they don’t really care. I doubt we’re being visited regularly, and most UFO reports are undoubtedly cases of mistaken identity.
There is no doubt in my mind that we are being visited and also abducted by these beings. I feel there are more than one type of species visiting us too. I have witnessed a UFO and at the time had a camera and took a picture of it. It was in the one o’clock position when I saw it, then it zipped to about the three o’clock position in a split second. I may or may not post the pic later.
There is too much testimony, video and pics of these visitors for this to be a hoax or some other type of phenomenon. THAT many people can’t be lying, mistaken or just plain wrong with what they saw. There have been WAY too many credible witnesses of UFOs for there not to be something going on.
I’ve read a lot of abduction books and testimony and these people are NOT lying or making up these experiences. Sure, some probably are sleep paralysis, but a vast majority are not.
There are too many galaxies out here for there to be no life.
You said it was pretty ridiculous to travel that far just to hover over Butt Crack Saskatchewan. But think about it, we go to other planets (and spend TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN THE PROCESS DOING IT) with mars rovers just to sit there and take rock samples. If we had the capabilities to travel to other planets in and outside of our solar system, you’d better believe we would be doing it too. These “aliens” that come to our planet are no more than some other planet’s NASA scientists doing their jobs. They are discoverers, Christopher Columbus’ from other planets.
Well, if diggleblop believes, it who am I to disagree :rolleyes:
Ignoring the whole problem of the distances involved, as an engineer, I just really have a hard time believing that any race capable of interstellar travel is going to a) crash or b) get shot down with our weapons.
Also, I just don’t think we are all that interesting.
I completely agree with you. There may be life on Mars although it has yet to be discovered and it would be very small and not what we would describe as intelligent. The same can be said for various moons in our own solar system.
One of your points is also one of my favorite ones. Interstellar travel basically violates the laws of known physics. Not only would we (or any other intelligent set of beings) have to spend thousands of years to travel to some place where life is believed to live but we would have to expend the same amount of energy to stop the ship and then do something…something…something.
Any tiny spec of a particle would destroy the whole ship along the way. It has already happened to a space shuttle window and that is only the tiniest amount of energy compared to a ship travelling at any significant fraction of the speed of light. It is almost inevitable that the ship would be destroyed in terms of human habitation along the way and, even if it didn’t, there is still no know way to stop at the destination let alone put explorers down somewhere, anywhere.
Of course, this all ignores the daunting task of keeping a ship and crew functioning for about the same time as the time of the pyramids to now with perfectly reliable systems and resources to make it happen. A single flu outbreak or even incestuous behavior could destroy the whole thing. We are talking about a really, really long time and the margin of error is insurmountable even as a flying biosphere experiment.
Extraterrestrial aliens have to contend with the same thing and there is no reason to assume any of them found a solution to the problem. The laws of physics are one of the things that we would all hold in common. This isn’t a scripted video game and it is likely that there is no solution to the problem of visiting other intelligent extraterrestrial life.
Oh, another thing-
When I was in High School, I had a mentor who was a really bright, if a little wacky, guy. He used to do lighting and theatre management around town.
He related a story to me once:
He was working on a conference for some UFO-believer group, and he was listening to all the testimonials of people who had seen UFOs, and he found many of the stories very convincing. Then, a guy gets up to the mic, and tells about how he say this amazing array of UFOs, way up in the sky, performing all sorts of very-un-airplane-like maneuvers. The guy was very convincing, and the audience was completely enraptured by his story, and it was very strong eye-witness evidence for intelligent UFOs.
Except.
My friend realized that HE had seen the same thing, at the same location.
At the time, his first thought was UFOs also, until something “clicked” in his brain, and he realized that what appeared to be large objects very high in the sky were really much smaller objects much closer to the ground, in fact birds swarming after insects attracted to upward-pointing building illumination lights. At that moment, he realized that essentially all of the UFO eye-witness accounts were bogus, a trick of people seeing what they expected to see.
The fact that there has never been a shred (no pun intended) of hard evidence leads me to believe ETs visitng Earth is just a fantasy.
While I agree that the odds of other life forms exist I also think 2 things would be preclude anal probing anthropologists:
1 - travel in excess of light speed may exist in some form
2 - if we can currently make camera’s that can be swallowed for diagnosis then surely an advanced race could make a probe the size of a pinhead. In that case, we could be observed through our entire history without the slightest awareness. Everyone of those damn mosquito’s could be nothing but little bio-robots checking our DNA.
And I’ve always been suspicious of my cats the way they just stare at me sometimes…
Y’all are forgetting warp travel, shields, and the prime directive. As soon as we figure out why Einstein was wrong, the rest of the interstellar world is going to take notice.
Dean Koontz’s book Strangers had an interesting idea about how aliens would get to our planet.
Oh, btw: I really liked this novel even though I’m not usually a Koontz fan. So if you’d rather read it, don’t look at this spoiler!
[SPOILER] In the book, the main characters encounter the first alien ship from a very ancient race landing on Earth. The aliens were thousands of years old and were being supported by suspended animation or some such on the ship, but the ship was so old that many of the systems were failing. All of the aliens but one had died because of those system failures. Fortunately, the automatic landing tech didn’t fail them.
What they discovered is that these aliens were like intergalactic missionaries. Their civilization was so old and so advanced that thousands of their species would leave their planet every year in these ships targeted at systems they thought might have life. 99.99% of the ships were doomed, their occupants sacrificing their lives for naught, but they were hoping for that 0.01% that would find someone out there other than themselves.
These aliens didn’t use faster than light travel. They just hoped that their ships worked long enough to get the message out.[/SPOILER]
In fact, there were reports of UFOs all over the country, with many people testifying that they met the pilots. Some were seen by large groups of people. Pretty convincing, right?
Unfortunately this happened in the 1890s, the UFOs were supposed to be airships, and the pilots were supposed to be Yankee inventors. Clearly, none of the stories were true. The Great Airship Mystery tells all about it. I recommend it to anyone saying lots of sightings must mean something is there.
Do you also believe in ghosts? Many of the arguments you have used to support the existence of UFO visitors to Earth could be used for paranormal events i.e. that many people can’t be lying mistaken or just plain wrong.
Hmmm…I don’t think one instance of disproving a UFO automatically means that all UFOs are bogus.
Personally, I would be very surprised if Earth was the only planet sustaining life, but I don’t understand enough about physics (and I doubt anyone on the planet really does right now) to even guess the feasibility of travelling the vast distances required between galaxies.
I think a lot of UFO sightings are weather balloons and other man-made devices, a lot of sightings are natural phenomena (viz ball lightening), but that doesn’t mean I disbelieve the posibility of actual alien visitors.
Answer: All of the above, and more. Donald Menzel, onetime director of the Harvard-Smithsonian Observatory, and the first major UFO debunker, wrote three books and numerous articles about UFOs, and came up with a list of possible explanations for unexplained sightings. It ran on for two pages.
Most “natural explanations” aren’t as exotic as ball lightning, or the often-lampooned “swamp gas”. They’re things like unexpectedly bright planets, especially when seen through clouds. (Robert Schaeffer, in The UFO Verdict, has a great plot showing the times UFOs were reported in John Fuller’s book incident at Exeter and the heights of Jupiter and Saturn – the correlation is damned near perfect). Or ice-crystal meteorological effects, like Sundogs and the Circumzenith Arc. I point there out to people all the time, and they’re weird looking and almost completely unknown. Then there are airplanes not properly identified, blimps, helicopters, and satellites, in addition to balloons.
There’s no shortage of things that are in the sky or which may appear to be there that can be misidentified. As Philip Klass points out, it’s realy a mistake to call them “flying” and “objects” – many of them aren’t flying, and aren’t physical objects.
I, too, find it highly unlikely that we’re being visited. But I want to point out that it’s certainly possible to imagine circumstances in which aliens might want to visit us and NOT land. Read Poul Anderson’s Brain Wave some time, for instance.
Simple logic proves that we have never been visited by aliens. Someone once explained it this way (my paraphrasing):
As noted by Shagnasty, it would take a mind-boggling amount of time, energy, and resources for aliens to travel from planet to planet in a Star Trek fashion. The challenges are almost insurmountable.
Suffice to say, if there *were * aliens that could pull it off, they would have to be highly, highly, highly advanced and highly, highly, highly intelligent. Many orders of magnitude more than us.
So we have concluded one thing: the aliens must be super smart.
Next, one of the following must be true:
Upon reaching Earth, the aliens *want * to be seen.
Upon reaching Earth, the aliens do *not * want to be seen.
If aliens have visited Earth, and #1 is true, then we would have lots of concrete, verifiable evidence that aliens have visited Earth. This is obviously not the case. Alas, #1 can’t be true. So this means #2 must be true.
If aliens have visited Earth, and #2 is true, there would be no reports of anyone seeing them - they would know how to visit us *without * being seen. (They’re extremely smart, remember?) You can’t (on the one hand) argue that the aliens are extremely advanced and intelligent, but (on the other hand) argue that they routinely screw up and are accidentally seen by us. “Oops, the farmer saw us again!! Have to remember to turn off those starboard lights.”
The first thing to ask if a spot of light seems to defy physics or gravity is, “is it just a spot of light?” Reflections can perform in ways that physical objects cannot, and reflections are everywhere, especially inside cameras.
If every observation of a number is faulty, taking them as a group doesn’t make them any more valid.
How about picking out the single, best example of a UFO and presenting it so we can discuss it? Surely if that holds up under scrutiny, there might be others to support your theory, but let’s start with the best first.
There is no simple answer. Each “sighting” can have different explanations, and it’s hardly worth the effort to track them down.
Some are natural phenomena, some are fabulations by the “witnesses,” some are man made objects that the viewer didn’t understand.
From my own experience, I saw something that some might call a UFO. It were three bright white lights in the sky by the airport. Not a tower or anything, and not an airplane because they hovered without moving. So if I believed in such nonsense, I would be giving that as evidence.
Except sometime later, I saw the same thing: three light hovering. But the sky was a bit brighter, and I could see what it really was: an airplane landing. It only appeared to be hovering because of the angle (I was driving by the end of the runway).
In fact, the biggest reason why people think they see UFOs is based on one fact: it is impossible to determine the size and distance of an unknown object in the sky.
In any case, UFOs make no sense. They would have to be piloted with creatures whose science is to beyond us that we couldn’t be able to comprehend it. If they wanted to stay hidden, we’d never detect them. If they wanted us to see them, they’d land in a major capital and announce their presence.
I love Star Trek and all sorts of Sci-Fi movies and books. But my personal belief is that there is nothing else out there that could be considered “intelligent life.” So it would stand to follow that I absolutely do not believe the earth has been visited by aliens. No ancient astronauts, no close encounters, no X-Files, and no anal probes.
Pretty much sums it up for me. Besides, my second husband swore he’d seen a UFO - and he was an asshat (and one of the biggest idiots I’ve ever known) so there ya go!
