Plus, the inhabitants of Improbablous IV, being methane-breathing spheroids, may never bother sending a probe to some too-cold too-water poisonous-atmosphered planet around a crappy yellow sun.
After all, that doesn’t give any sign of supporting any of the “life” they expect to find.
-Joe
I’m quite surprised by the opinions of many on this thread.
I mean, sure, I agree with the bottom line: there’s no reason to suppose we’ve been visited by extraterrestrials.
But the reason many of you are citing is that interstellar transport is impracticle / impossible.
I think this is a pretty poor reason.
Think about it: there are people alive today who were born before the Wright brothers’ famous flight: and in that time we’ve had supersonic passenger aircraft, manned missions to the moon, probes flying by (all?) the other planets of the solar system, probes / robots landing on our neighbouring planets, a global satellite network etc.
The Universe is billions of years old.
So a hypothetical extraterrestrial intelligence could easily be the equivalent of, say, 1 million years ahead of us technologically.
I find it very difficult to believe that the lightspeed barrier would be insurmountable to humans of the year 1 million. Remember we’ve only known about the problem for a century, and even now we can contemplate ways it might be overcome (wormholes, hyperspace, folding space, space expansion + compression, etc).
Given the extreme credulity and widespread magical beliefs of the time (strictly “religious” or not), it’s not surprising that they had their own “sightings”.
If there really is intelligent life on other worlds, you’d think they’d be smart enough to stay the hell away from us.
Unless they’re desperate to rescue Dennis Kucinich and take him home.
No, we’re saying it’s highly improbable. In large part, it’s reaction to how much interstellar travel there is in science fiction and pop culture (which we’re mostly avid fans of, and even creators of, on this Board). People get the impression that interstellar travel is WAYYYY easier and faster than it, in fact, really is. And the fact is that, the laws of physics and other sciences being what they are, easy and fast interstellar travel doesn’t look likely.
It MAY be that new physical discoveries will give us hyperdrive/friendly and common wormholes/teleportation/something unimagineable in the future that will change that. But I’m not betting that way.
Don’t bother stopping me if I’ve told this story before because I have.
My uncle spent his life in the spook biz and never, ever talked about his work. What we do know is that, at the time of the Roswell incident, he was in Air Force Intelligence and stationed at Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton, which legend says the “wreckage” and “bodies” were sent. Shortly before he died he and my father were looking at the stars and the conversation turned to life on other planets. Uncle said quietly, “They’re real, you know.” That’s all. Four words that might’ve revealed a vast coverup, or might’ve just said that, based on his independent study, he was convinced of the reality of extraterrestrial life. My point is that I do not find the argument that “someone would talk” completely convincing. The people who would know something often do not talk. Their lives have been built around the necessity of keeping their mouths shut.
On the other hand, the idea that creatures would travel vast distances to buzz the Earth is pretty silly, isn’t it? Still, it is theoretically possible and scientists have created hypothetical mechanisms to make it work, though the energy and time requirements are immense. This thread probably won’t crash and burn like the ghost one because even the most skeptical will usually admit it’s possible if you throw enough money, time, and energy at it. Whether it’s silly or sensible is something for the aliens to work out for themselves. They’re the ones paying for it.
I won’t rule out the possibility that with sufficient technology the lightspeed barrier can be surmounted, but it’s still stuck in the “very very very unlikely” box.
For it to happen, our physics has to be wrong. Our physics doesn’t say “we can’t do that with technology at our disposal”. Our physics doesn’t say “we can’t do that with any technology we can imagine”. Our physics doesn’t say “we can’t do that because there’s not enough energy source”.
Our physics says "objects cannot move faster than the speed of light: not an observation but a law, a fundamental property of how things are. Period, end of story.
That means the likelihood of faster than light travel is not akin to the possibility of heavier than air travel thru the sky was 100 years ago. It’s more akin to the possibility of telekinesis. A smidgeon less likely than time travel. Etc. I would not suggest harboring the expectation that of course we’ll figure it out eventually, or that more advanced ET species know how to do it.
We aren’t infallible and our physics could be wrong but all the physicists I’ve spoken to or read put c on the list of stuff they’re pretty damn sure of at this point.
Pffft can’t be that hard I used to nail whomp rats on my t-16 back home there not much bigger than [del]two meters[/del] tribbles.
But, with the existence of the Internet, it’s hard to tell what you find there is the digital equivalent of an article from the New York Times and what is the equivalent of the National Enquirer. Secrets can be published and still kept by burying them in a morass of published bullshit.
Weeeeelll, not ALL physicists say our physics doesn’t say those things.
A couple guys from Baylor disagree (PDF), for instance, disagree that our physics has to be wrong and hypothesize a warp drive based on what we know and what we’re pretty sure of, even if we don’t understand it yet.
Then we have our pals at NASA who looked into the problem and disagree (another PDF*) with your second and third points.
So yeah, it’s not around the corner, but it is within the realm of practical imagining. What could be right around the corner, though, is near lightspeed, which would make sending probes to other stars quite a bit faster.
Please don’t. My computer still hates them, and I’ll have to close all the bittorrents if I want to read your cite or the computer will need to be restarted. I’d rather take your word for it and not click. And thank you for the warning!
You know what would really mess with skeptics? A Grey alien who could talk to ghosts.
Now that would be a TV show! (Especially if Cindy Williams and Macauley Culkin are attached.)
Could they both play ghosts? Of course, for maximum believeability, they’d need to be dead, but that’s do-able.
How about the ghost of a dead grey alien?
I want to believe. I think extraterrestrial life exists, but I’m torn on whether it’s visited Earth.
Non-PDF links:
An article about my first link: Subscription Offers From Just £3 | Computeractive
My second link in HTML: http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/bpp/overview.html
Re: the NASA cover up angle, what credible reason would they have for doing so? This has never made sense to me. I write it off as a convenient way for believers to keep the faith.
Who says that aliens arriving here have any idea what to do when they arrive? Aliens first arrival might very well be that…a first arrival and they may not know exactly what to do.
Now it’s been years [possibly millennia] that vehicles of some sort have been visiting earth, supposedly. I would think one or two of those vehicles gathered some information about us sometime…
I’m afraid you’ve been whooshed. I can’t imagine why someone working for NASA would have that high a security clearance, or why he’d tell random people about it if he did.
Roswell did happen. It was a classified balloon launch, which they wanted to cover up. They even know the factory in New York which made the material with the “alien” writing. People involved with the project have come out and confessed, with evidence.
I heard about a guy last night, I think he’s written a book, who claims to have been abducted into a UFO by a psychic bigfoot.
After travelling for 50,000 years I’d probably like to stretch my legs and do Number Three before I got down to business.