ok, i am new here so i don’t know if you have already discuss that subject…
so, what is your opinion about all the ‘evidence’ that prove that aliens have visited our planet? like the strange marks on land and the pyramids? and what about planet x?
i believe that somewhere out there other civilasations exist and maybe they have visit us, but i dunno about planet x.
so, what is your opinion? and generaly about aliens and staff.
There is no evidence for planet x, unless you are happy to lower the standard of acceptability so low that you listen to the unsupported rantings of crazy people.
The best argument against the presence of extraterrestrials being here (IMO) is that interstellar distnaces are really really difficult to cross; the universe doesn’t really want you to go star-hopping - everything is stacked against it.
The pyramids? Impressive, but you’d think that the aliens would have left behind just one plasma ray blaster, or dropped just one Galactic credit coin in the sand, etc…
BTW, welcome.
i don’t believe what it is said about planet x either, but what about the black holes of a specific type which i think they call ‘wormholes’. and why do you think that everything is stacked against? maybe after 100 years we will find the technology to go even to another galaxy. don’t forget that some people thought that going to the moon would be impossible but it happened.
Welcome to the Straight Dope, natalia.
Your question isn’t really a question, exactly; because it’s asking for people’s opinions, it probably belongs in the In My Humble Opinion forum.
Even so, there has been a lot of discussion on here of the concept of alien lifeforms and other mysteries of the universe. It’s such an encompassing subject, in fact, that it’s probably among the most-discussed subjects on here, simply because it covers so much ground.
If I were you, I’d use the search engine here to look through past threads. You could look in the In My Humble Opinion, Great Debates, and General Questions, searching on such keywords as “aliens,” “pyramids,” “extra-terrestrials,” and “UFOs.” (You can’t search on “UFO,” because the search engine recognizes only words of four or more characters.)
These are only suggestions, as I am not one of the Powers That Be. But you might learn a lot from searching past threads.
A pretty good chance that life of some kind (if only bugs & worms) exists somewhere in the vast expanse of space & time. Problem: are they near enough to our space and time to even stand a chance of running into us? Very very very very unlikely.
Very.
As for the “evidence”, well, there isn’t any. Marks on the ground and stones arranged in the shape of a pyramid are evidence of intelligent design but the statistical likelihood is overwhelmingly in favor of the responsible party being local rather than extra-planetary.
No planet X
People love to doodle; some just do it bigger than others.
While it may be possible/likely that life can occur on other planets there is no evidence that complex/intelligent life must exist there. The problem is we have a piece of data. That’s not enough to project anything from. Now some people will come along and mention the Drake equation which is suppose to guess-timate how many civilization likes ours exist. Problem is you’ll get numbers ranging from 1 to 100,000 which makes it useless in my view.
Once you get past the potential of complex life existing you have the problem of going anywhere. The distances and energies required to go anywhere are staggering. And that’s for using current physics. Exotic stuff like negative energy/mass quantum foam wave riding space dragons will likely take even more energy but get you there faster. Maybe.
My view, it’s a lonely universe.
I’d go with the lonely universe alright-
there isn’t any evidence that convinces me that
any UFO is associated with extraterrestrials,
any unusual archaeological or geological phenomenon was produced by extraterrestrials,
any human or other species has been genetically altered by extraterrestrials in any way,
any information has been passed to humanity by extraterrestials in any way including by ‘channeling’ or abductions.
And I do empatically believe in extraterrestial intelligences, and believe there are trillions of them up there-
they just ain’t here.
Sci-fi worldbuilding at
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html
What grey said; everything we currently understand about the universe points in the direction of interstellar travel being prohibitively expensive(in energy terms) AND downright difficult in terms of making the journey possible for organisms such as ourselves.
Sure, some weird wacky innovation might turn up tomorrow and overturn everything we currently know, but I think it is unlikely in the extreme.
On the upside if its lonely, its ours. It would be interesting to see how we deal with that.
Welcome to the SBMB!
The sort of evidence I like is scientific.
There’s no scientific evidence for UFOs.
I do believe in gravity, even though I can’t explain it.
I don’t believe aliens make crop circles because I know how humans can do it.
I believe that lots of Egyptian labourers, guided by a few smart mathematicians and engineers built the Pyramids.
I don’t believe in Planet X because I have read the Bad Astronomer’s pages (he’s a fellow poster, and he’s really a good Astronomer!)
Aliens may well exist elsewhere in the Universe. (We exist on one planet, there are masses of planets, therefore mathematically other life-forms are likely.)
A staff is a long piece of wood, or people who work for other people. (Yes, I know you meant stuff!)
As Douglas Adams observed: you might think it’s a long way to the chemist’s and back, but that’s just peanuts to space.
When I was an undergraduate I had an astronomy professor who liked to use this illustration: suppose one built a scale model of our “neighborhood” of the galaxy, using a baseball to represent the sun. If we placed that baseball on the pitcher’s mound at Busch Stadium in St. Louis, the Earth and the other bodies in our solar system could be represented by marbles, bits of gravel, etc. in the infield. (We were in St. Louis at the time).
Where would we place the baseball which represented Proxima, the next nearest star? Would it be in the outfield? In the bleachers? Across the street from the stadium?
It would be a bit farther than that. One good place to put it would be Utah.
In space, most places are no place. Most places aren’t even near a place that is near a place. And that is one is considering the confines of a galaxy, a locality where, relatively speaking, things are crowded in.
Still, there are a lot of stars out there so, for all we know, the universe might be fairly teeming with life. Maybe some of the life out there at present is intelligent. Maybe some of that intelligent life is smart enough to attempt space travel. Maybe they even have a solution for the problem that it would take years, even at the speed of light, to go from one nearby star to another.
If we grant all that–and that is an awful lot to grant–we are confronted with the problem that they would have a whole lot of other places to go exploring besides here.
BTW, what is this “planet x” talk? IIRC, this was the name given to Pluto when it was viewed as a hypothetical possibility. I have occaisionally heard the term used to refer to a possible tenth planet as well. Neither Pluto, nor a planet even further from the sun, seems a likely place to sport intelligent life. I am assuming people are using it to refer to some other idea which I am missing.
One used to hear talk of another planet possibly existing “behind” the sun, so that our view of it was always blocked. Planets move in ellipses, and they do not move at an invariable speed. It has been demonstrated that any planet which “hid” behind the sun, even if it shared the Earth’s orbit, would come up in plain view within a matter of decades.
As for the wormhole idea, it sure sounds cool, but one still has to contend the problem of the scale of the universe. First, one has to start out sort-of near the entrance to a wormhole, and then head to a place which is sort-of near the other end. The existence of wormholes is still hypothetical. In any case, if they do exist, it does not appear that our planet is near one.
Thanks for the link!
It’s great reading.
And since this is GQ:
UFOs are real. I see lots of stuff in the sky that I don’t know what they are. Of course, my friend who is an airplane mechanic can identify them. But they are UFOs to me.
natalia, may I recommend the book Captured by Aliens by Joel Achenbach?
The title is somewhat metaphorical; it doesn’t mean the book is about alien abductions (though those enter into it), it’s more about how alien life has captured our imagination, despite there being no concrete evidence for it. The book is sort of a travelogue of the UFO field, from the rationlists like Carl Sagan (who believed “in his bones” that there are intelligent aliens “out there,” but never saw any plausible evidence of their presence here) on to pseudoscientists and con artists like Richard Hoaglund, all the way out to complete loons like Marshall Appelwhite (head of the Heaven’s Gate “comet cult”).
If you want to know the real deal about our collective alien fascination without any unanswered deceptions by wishful thinkers, and you want to have fun while reading, it’s hard to do better than Achenbach’s book.
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but what about the black holes of a specific type which i think they call ‘wormholes’
[quote]
Others probably know better than I, but at the moment I think wormholes are ‘party talk’ - that is, they’re an intriguing possibility, but there’s no evidence that they exist (far as I know).
Interstellar distances are such that… well, any kind of interstellar travel would be hard. Andromeda is 2.9 million light years away. Assuming it’s possible for some other civilization to cock up a way to travel at light speed, they’d have to have insanely long lifespans to make it here anyway. And all kinds of weird crap happens when you go that fast.
In an infinite universe, little is impossible. But it sounds like aliens visiting Earth ain’t too probable. Crop circles, the pyramids, and things like that have completely acceptable terrestrial explanations, and you know what Sherlock Holmes says about that stuff. There’s no reason that aliens had to do those things, and who knows why they would. If they’re so smart, what’re they doing hanging around a bunch of microcephalic biped losers like us anyway? 
As Carl Sagan once said concerning the “evidence,” “It’s pretty crummy.”
imagin that there was instant travel in the future… look at how many stars their are… and how many galaxys… even if an alien could jump from star to star instantly it would take an amazeingly long amount of time to visit them…
and instant travel… not super likely anyway
Dibs on Rigel!
It is very nearly certain that life, and even intelligent life, exists elsewhere in the Universe. Even with the most pessimistic estimates for the unknowns in Drake’s Equation, the Universe (even just the portion of it we know to exist) is so damn big that it still overwhelms all the small terms. But the chances of any of them ever having visited us are slim, and the “evidence” is worthless. At the absolute most optimistic, the closest aliens could be to us is about 20 lightyears, which means that you’d still need some fairly advanced (at least) technology and a lot of resources to cross it.
Now, suppose that the aliens did come here. Either they want us to know about them, or they don’t. If they wanted us to know, it would be very easy for them to just send us a radio message, loud and clear. We wouldn’t understand the language, of course, but they could definitely send something which indicates intelligence. In fact, they likely could have done this without even leaving their home system to begin with.
By contrast, if they didn’t want us to know about them, we absolutely would not know a thing. It is not hard to hide in space, even without any technological effort at all. We’re currently not even sure if there are any dino-killer sized asteroids in the inner solar system capable of hitting the Earth, and asteroids don’t care who sees them. A naked-eye detection of an alien craft is just absurd.
So when you look at the Pyramids, or lights in the sky, or whatnot, you’re definitely not seeing signs of aliens. If they wanted to leave signs, they’d be a lot more obvious.