Are we alone?

Great Debates
1

Are we alone? i think if a rational person looks at carl segans formual ud have to be an idiot not to agree that no we are not alone… and when i bring this up in casual conversation im the “crazy” one… are we so egotisical and dumb to think that we are it??? also the universe (we think) is expanding… soo wouldnt the planets/galaxies farther out then us be more advanced b/c they have had thousands if not millions of more years to start off? so surley they must have the technology to see us right?
So what gives ? (aliens if your out there and can somehow see this you all suck, let us into the “club” )
Does anyone believe in the following ?

  1. mayains/egyptians/ etc have help? building stuff like the pyrimids, or was it just alot of slaves… and even still who gave them the designs to build that way back then why are they prefectly inline with celesital objects? why did ancient people have physical god like powers? (lightning bolts=lazers?)
  2. If we didnt have the “dark feudal ages” for 800 years when science was “the devil” would we be talking about this from the moons of endor? i mean think what if we had comptuers in 1250 ad? not 1950 ad …
  3. Have aliens visited us? i think so i mean if there is an advanced civilization out there somewhere watching us… (there has to be) and they start recoreding nuclear bombs going off dont u think ud pop in for an look see?
  4. when world war 2 broke out… .how did the nazis suddenly get almost stealth tech, and rockets… and we got the A bomb… also when we started nuking stuff thats when roswell happend… could the thing that crashed have been a probe? i dont see why not… and then suddenly things started to get really advanced
  5. why do the governments of the world keep stuff from us? i mean if we found out we were not alone are they afraid what would happen to society? i mean that would kinda shoot most religon right out the window
  6. why did we stop after getting to the moon, why has every other country not really tried?
  7. are we going to be on this rock forever? why is going farther not a national debate i mean where is the christopher columbus of our day? it makes no since to me that a nation and people here b/c of exploration have stoped… even the SETI mission has ended that the one where they look for extra territrial life… did they find something? i can see how it could really screw up tyhe power balance i mean maybe the aliens told us back in the day, we will come to you when your a unified government, when we are sure that you wont use our technology to kill yourselves over land/power/resources Could we be under some sort of prime directive?

Am i alone?

2

One part of the equation most people tend to ignore is time. The universe is billions of years old. Even if there has been more life out there what are the chances that is happening in the measly thousands of years we have been looking at the skies?

3

It could be that other civilizations have come and gone already, billions of years before we did. Maybe we’re the only ones in this corner of the galaxy, right at the moment.

It could also be that we are marked as a nature preserve, no trespassing.

4

More like “Warning: Rabies!”. :smiley:

5

Food farm. When we get enough people, they will come and harvest.

6

I don’t think we are alone in the universe at all. Until we are able to build a craft that goes the speed of light or faster we are not going to be able to travel far enough to find out.

7

“Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” -Arthur C. Clarke, 1999

8

It depends on what you mean by alone.

You decide, on a lark, to go mountain climbing. You ditch all your modern communication devices, drive 500 miles to a remote area, hike and camp for 3 days, then fall into a ravine, breaking your leg. Are you alone? I would suggest that, yes, you can consider yourself functionally alone. Even though there are billions of people on the planet, and countless billions of other beasts on the planet, you’re alone.

Right now, that’s the kind of alone we’ve got with respect to alien life forms. They’re not here, they’re not going to show up anytime soon, and we’re not going to travel to meet them. Even if they are out there, somewhere, we’re alone.

9

I think the historical answer must be that we are ignorant and egotistical enough to think we are “it”. But I fully believe that there’s more life out there in the universe, just based on the scales involved.

I don’t want to be dismissive or insulting but the numbered points you made below might have more to do with why people might be less than enthusiastic in agreeing with you.

Depends on a couple of things. Mostly; the universe isn’t really that old. Our planet has been around for about a 3rd of the age of the universe. We’ve only evolved very recently, but there’s no indication that life with similar intelligence has arisen here much earlier.

Ancient people did not have god-like powers. Pyramids were not build by slaves. Pyramids are actually about the simplest high-rise structures you can build. Observing prominent stars is not that hard. In other words: No.

If we really had been going full-throttle with scientific innovation since the Greeks, we might have gotten to the moon a lot earlier, but right now, it’s hard to even consider a plausible method (no matter how much we’re willing to spend) of bringing people to the outer reaches of our own solar system, let alone other stars. Reasons follow at the next point.

Everything we know about the universe right now points to the speed of light being a fundamental limit. I think you’re severely underestimating what that means. If the SoL is the limit, no matter how advanced other civilizations might be, if they’re far away enough, they will not only haven’t had time to get here, if they’re really far, they’ll never be able to get here (because of the expansion of the universe) or worse, they’ll never even know we are here at all.

Roswell was a balloon right? Anyway, the nazis (like the Russians and the US) had plenty of clever people working with the new insights in electrodynamics, sub-atomic theory etc. Most of the ground-work for all that stuff had been done by the 1920s ~ 1930s (by “ordinary” humans). The war just made it expedient to spend huge resources using that new knowledge to build practical applications to blow people up.

Governments keep lots of stuff from people for lots of reasons. Mostly, they can’t keep it secret for long. I can tell you that the Catholics have had some policies for dealing with extra-terrestial life (when it happens) for decades already, just like most religions have dealt with quantum mechanics, big bang theory (which was HUGE and mostly positive for serious religions) etc.

It’s expensive and we don’t need to impress anyone.

IMHO, no. But I might be wrong.

See the answer to # 6.

It hasn’t.

SETI is still running AFAIK.

There are no aliens here. We really, really would have noticed them.

Sadly, not at all.

10

Nobody who approaches the subject rationally can avoid the conclusion that there is almost certainly other life, and even other intelligent life, in the Universe. The relevant question is not whether they exist, but how close are they. If our nearest neighbors are, say, within ten lightyears away, then we may even be able to visit each other (eventually, with significant advances in technology), and could certainly exchange significant amounts of information, if they’re at a tech level at least comparable to our own. If they’re more like a thousand lightyears away, then visits are out of the question for probably at least the next million years or so, but some communications may still be possible (at least along the lines of “we are here” and possibly some cultural exchange, but without dialog, probably no significant scientific information). If, though, our nearest neighbors are a hundred million lightyears away, then there’s no chance we’d ever have a clue as to each others’ existence.

11

That is fantastic. Thank you!

polite golf clap

12

Just FYI, it’s the “Drake Equation”, which was popularized (but not authored) by Carl Sagan.

13

It’s not rational to believe things without evidence.

14

Let me guess; you’re an agnostic?

There is inconclusive/circumstantial evidence but that’s still evidence that should be considered. How much weight we should give the evidence is another question.

For instance, on the scale of the existence of our planet, life arose pretty damn quickly, built out of some of the most common normal matter in the universe. There’s also probably 10[sup]shitload[/sup] other planets out there. It’s not irrational to believe that life is likely to have originated elsewhere too. We certainly know of no mechanisms that would prevent it.

15

Suppose, just SUPPOSE the answer is “Yes, we’re all alone.”

Why is that so terrible?

The best take on the subject I’ve see is here:

http://markshea.blogspot.com/2007_12_01_archive.html

Excerpt:

"We*** are***, for all intents and purposes All Alone In The Universe. E.T. may exist. But if he does, he is so far away that he is not coming to save or enslave us and things like this only serve as wildly unrealistic reminders of Enrico Fermi’s famous question: “Where*** is ***everbody?”

"The Earth is, in fact, quite rare, intelligent life is not a dime a dozen, and we are effectively all alone in the cosmos with no Vulcan, no Klingon, no Ferengi, and no Romulan to keep us company as friend or foe. Moreover, we are not going anywhere, because there is nowhere to go that is not infinitely more hostile to human life and infinitely more difficult to reach than Antarctica. When we build New York there, talk to me about the thriving Mars colony that’s just down the road and the Treaty of Alpha Centauri and all the rest of the fantasies that fill the minds of folk who can’t bear the fact that relativity means “No United Federation of Planets”.

16

I don’t think we’re alone, but we may be unique in terms of ability to project ourselves.

For example suppose every human would get killed tomorrow, would the world end? Of course not, the other non-human animals would be just fine. In fact they’d probably do better, but who’d know? It’s very unlikely anyone would pick up human signals, but the signals of a dolphin or ape or parrot? Much less likely.

We may be living in worlds teeming with life similar to non-human animals or life that consist of bacteria type organisms.

17

No. It was a lot of slaves. And they didn’t have “physical god like powers” either… they were just people, like you and me.

And, personally, imho, implying that the Egyptians/Mayans needed help piling bricks together in a pyramid shape really insults the Egyptians and Mayans. Now if they had built a sub-space communicator, then we’d have a right to question it. But block-piling technology and theory isn’t all that advanced - a 2 year old can do it.

If we had computers in 1250AD, then we’d have computers in 1250AD. And science wasn’t “the devil”, it just did not exist.

Unknown. It’s possible, but if they did they didn’t leave any evidence.

Nazi’s got rockets from research and application. Same thing with the A-bomb.

As far as things getting “really advanced”, well, that’s something that is quite arbitrary by definition. I could argue that things got “really advanced” in the mid 1700’s once physics started to be applied to real-world problems, helping ignite the Industrial Revolution. Others would argue for a post-1455 definition of things getting “really advanced”, and others would argue for a different date.

These governments couldn’t keep secret the fact that Bill Clinton got a blowjob in the Oval Office.

Economics.

Many questions, but…

Exploration hasn’t stopped. Manned exploration has, but that’s because space is big. REALLY big.

Some comparable figures: Columbus took 2 months, 9 days to cross the Atlantic, approximately 3,000 miles (a whopping 1.76 miles per hour). Comparably, the Mars Rover traveled 302 million miles to get to Mars in a trip that took 5 months (76,000 miles per hour). A trip to the nearest star system (4 light years away, rounded) would take 8,749 years at Mars Rover speeds. If we could go as quick as the MR, we would be traveling at the rate of 75 million miles per hour.

I have no idea whether we’re under a “prime directive” or if such a concept would even make sense to an alien or not.

In the end, son, we’re all alone. :wink:

18

It’s also not rational to disbelieve things for which there is an abundance of evidence. We don’t have evidence for any particular alien civilization, but the Universe is so incredibly vast that statistically, the chances are overwhelmingly in favor of ETs somewhere out there.

19

I’m of the admittedly cynical mindset that any planet with intelligent lifeforms will find a way to destroy itself within a few million years. You know, like we nearly did during the cold war.

20

I don’t know, but imho, “nearly destroying oneself” is a little more involved than a bunch of sabre-rattling and proxy-wars like Vietnam and Afghanistan. I would at least expect the population to decline during the process of “nearly destroying oneself”.