http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a4_040.html
Since I saw the movie Independence Day (years ago) this have made me curious. Maybe the government keeps something secret, wich is both exciting and scary at the same time, and even if they don’t it’s still a nice tall story.
If there really would be intelligent creatures out there, it would be no way that some humans can keep it secret, and why would the aliens hide?
No, I don’t belive this, but still a nice mystery story!
Which is why almost no one believes that “UFOs” are aliens in the sense that astronomers and scientists use the word to mean hypothetical life from other worlds. For UFOs in the flying saucer/ alien abduction sense to be real, you have to buy into a sort of “X-Files” mindset, which depending on who you talk to covers a spectrum including government conspiracies, secret societies, paranormal phenomena, psychics and ESP, Atlantis, ancient astronauts, mysticism, … in short, you would have to believe that reality as we know it is a giant lie or illusion. Scientology is based on straightfacedly claiming that this is true, and the Church of the Subgenius is a parody of the whole thing.
Now I can imagine scenerios where (1). Non-human intelligences of one kind or another are monitoring us (2). They could have reasons for keeping (mostly) hidden, and (3). The government knew about this and kept it classified. But those scenerios are based on rational plausibility, which eliminates 99% of what’s been reported.
As far as I can tell, the kind of expertise you’d need to study alien artifacts eliminates any chance of secrecy - these guys would be university-educated types who’d find it irresistable to publish papers based on their work.
The way I see it, any race capable of interstellar travel would have the option of whether their presence would be known by a primitive society such as ours.
If they chose to reveal themselves, they could present themselves in such a way and with such technological wonders that there’d be no doubt in any human’s mind of their existence and their technological superiority.
If they chose to hide themselves, no doubt they could do so very easily. Not just with “cloaks” or whatever, but with fallback measures (e.g. auto destruct) on the off chance that their ships should somehow crash land.
The scenario of them visiting, and making a half-assed attempt to stay hidden, or just chatting with a few yokels with little useful knowledge in a field somewhere, simply doesn’t add up.
And this is the opinion of someone who’s actually seen a UFO…
If there would be any aliens out there, and they saw our society, I do not think they would see it as primitive, on the contrary, they would be pretty impressed by it.
Let us take ants for an example, they organize thier society pretty smart even if thier society is way more “primitive” than ours, we humans still gets impressed by it. Just because aliens might have laser cannons, cloaks and robots “oh yeah cool” doesn’t mean that they would think we are totally primitive.
Just saying that a society is “primitive” is a primitive thinking. What values NOT as primitive? A society with high technology? A society with peace? A society there we protect mother nature and with that the earth?
Let us take the aliens in the movie Independence Day as an example. They may have unbelievable tehnology, but they are still one of the most primitive creatures I have ever seen, they go from planet to planet and kills everything, they have NO sense for sympathy or anything. Feelings for other creatures is a must-have in a non-primitive society.
However, If we now just would aim for to be as much effective and advanced as possible, we could develop high technology and start with cloning and the orginal humans would in the end be totally worthless and we could just be robots with no unnecessary feelings, we would just work to build up a even more advanced society.
Sounds pretty boring huh?
Yes! There you see the problem, humans have feelings, that is a burden for our “primitive” society and that needs to be removed as also the feelings for love, since we can make artificial childrens with test tubes or something, wich is way more effective.
No, I don’t want that type of a society, our feelings is absolutely most valued, we live for them, that mixed with some intelligence makes our society not as primitive as you think it is.
A perfect and non-primitive society for me is a world there humans cooperates, have feelings, do not exaggerate any unnecessary technology apart from new medicines to save peoples lifes and other necessary things. And of course, the most important… protect our nature, we all comes from it and we will not survive without it.
I could go even deeper into this, but now I feel that I’m out of energy to type more english. =P
There are a lot of peoples who states that, so it doen’t makes any sense for me.
A UFO is any apparently-flying object that you cannot identify - it doesn’t necessarily mean ‘flying saucer’. Perhaps that’s the sense Mijin meant.
Well, then I have seen a lot of UFOs myself =))
Because I can’t identify all airplanes I see in the air.
The word “primitive” needn’t have negative connotations.
I meant it in the sense of earlier, simpler, etc…
Just as we can look at a settlement from 3000 years ago, and call it primitive, but still be impressed by the handiwork, and still acknowledging that humans have not become more intelligent in the intervening time (actually there’s some evidence that we have in recent years, but that’s off topic).
It’s not your first language, but I should point out you aren’t being consistent in how you’re using the word “primitive”.
Exactly. When people imagine extraterrestrial visitors they often imagine them as having simple, collective motives and technology only slightly better than our own.
The reality is, it’s difficult to imagine a race peaceful and cooperative enough to make it to interstellar status nonetheless deciding to nuke a race that poses no threat on a tiny rock somewhere.
People may say humans have been this malicious in the past – but a modern society finding and attacking a helpless species across the vast expanses of space…personally I find it very hard to imagine.
But if they were to attack, they wouldn’t ponce about lasering the white house. We’d probably be dead before we even knew we were under attack.
Like many people you’ve assumed that an advanced race would dispense with emotions and presumably art, variety etc. I see no reason why this should be.
To elaborate slightly, I saw something in the sky that I cannot readily explain as being a plane, star or whatever. Such an observation might make some people more inclined to believe that we’ve been visited. Not so in my case; it such a difficult thing to believe that I would much sooner believe, say, that it was a hallucination than aliens.
Did you see your “strange aerial object” whilst alone? If you’d have had company who saw the same thing, would you still suppose you ALL were hallucinating?
I saw it while I was walking my dog. Sadly, he’s unable or unwilling to corroborate my story 
Against the hypothesis of an extraterrestrial visitor, yes.
Several people all having the same hallucination at the same time is still more likely, in my opinion, than extraterrestrial visitors carelessly making themselves known to a select few humans.
But in reality I would start to favour other hypotheses such as a test of a new military technology, deliberate hoax or even “some physical process that mankind is not yet aware of”.
Or just shrug my shoulders. Which is always valid.
One thing I think is funny is the human propensity for believing that an interstellar-travelling race of beings would even find us remotely interesting.
Or that we even could be found by an advanced race, no matter how hard they were trying to find us. The Universe is a pretty damn big place and it isn’t like we haven’t been beaming “Here We Are, Come Visit!” into space for quite some time now.
I disagree, just because they know enough physics and engineering to make the journey to us doesn’t mean they know anything about stealth or subtlety. They may have never needed it before in their society for whatever reason. Maybe they said “pretty rock” and then went “oh SHIT, wasn’t expecting life here.” Research could very well be pending, until then they make due trying to dodge us, screwing up on occasion. Just because they’re smart doesn’t mean they can’t screw up. They’re intelligent life, more advanced than us for certain, but not gods. They don’t have every angle perfectly covered, and they’re bound to make errors now and again.
That said I really don’t believe we’ve been visited by Extra-Terrestrials, but hey, I just want to put out their if WE were the aliens on someone else’s planet I wouldn’t expect us to think of everything or do it perfectly every time.
To quote an XKCD mouseover text:
“Seriously, there’s LOADS of intelligent life out there. They’re just not constantly screaming in every direction on the handful of frequencies we actually search.”
I’ll allow for the possibility of course.
But I was talking probabilities.
Do you consider the inconsistent reports of mostly American, mostly oddball observers as good grounds for believing an intelligent race has come to earth versus other explanations? If the aliens screwed up, or haven’t tried to be stealthy, then why does no better proof exist?
I concede they probably could avoid us quite easily. Like I said I don’t believe we’ve been visited. But on the off-chance we have I’d say they’d screw up at least once, and that 99% of sighting would be crap anyway. I highly doubt any good portion of the volume of sightings, even ruling out the obvious lies, are true. I just think that it’s a little strange to believe they’re necessarily THAT good. I could be the first (only?) true sighting was their first explorer ship which wasn’t equipped with the tech necessary because they weren’t expecting it to be needed. Or it could be some time the device malfunctioned. The chances they had this angle fully covered are pretty dependent on them running into life every five minutes before they get here.
But overall you’re right, they PROBABLY could avoid us quite easily.
How would you go about transporting people, supplies, and fuel 10 million light years or so?
Regarding Contrapuntal’s last statement, it could be that an unmanned probe (the interstellar equivalent of Viking 1) could land here, fly in our atmosphere, or fly through our solar system, rather than a manned mission. That would be far more likely, in fact.
That device may not know what to do if it encounters life.
Even if manned missions (considering we’re talking aliens, “manned” isn’t the right term, what is?) did arrive here, they may not immediately recognize us as life, or sentient life.
I think you mean ten light years, not ten million. Still an impossibly great distance though.
I just do not get this argument.
I know people can keep secrets; people can keep secrets for generations until they are lost in time. [How do I know, if they are lost? DNA.]
Once a person commits to a lie, they can keep it.
Still, I don’t believe we have been visited by space-faring aliens.
Eek! I most certainly do. Thanks.
How would it carry the fuel?