Yes. It shows that life can adapt to more extreme conditions that we used to think. But it doesn’t prove that life can easily appears at the first place. For instance, there has been some study showing that the Earth orbit would be very unstable on the long term (large variations in the distance to the sun) without our gigantic satellite, hence that life wouldn’t have been able to appear without the presence of the moon. And the size of the moon makes it a peculiarity in the solar system. The curently most accepted theory for the origin of the moon is a titanesque collision between Earth and another stellar body which happened very early during earth history (the moon being , IIRC, a big chunk of Earth ejected due to the collision).
Given the exceptionnal nature of such an event, if the first theory is right about the moon being necessary to stabilize the Earth orbit, and for life to appear, it would significantly reduce the likehood of life appearing somewhere else. And anyway nobody knows what could be this likehood in any case , stable orbit or not.
You’re equating life and intelligent life. Even if life is very common in the universe, there’s no obvious reason to believe that intelligence is likely to appear. And even less an intelligence race which would be similar enough to us for sharing the same interests (like exploring the galaxy).
Personnally, I would say I’m an agnostic about the issue of the existence of extraterrestrial life in general, and intelligent life in particular. There’s just not enough datas to make one’s mind, in my opinion. Even if we found life in the solar system (and I would be very excited if we did) it wouldn’t necessarily be an evidence that life is wisepread everywhere. If life can be dissemitated by meteors, etc…, it could be possible that, say, bacterias found on Mars would have the same origin than life on earth. It would be vastly easier for life to “jump” from one planet to another, within a “reasonnable” distance, than from one stellar system to another, dozens of light years away.
So, perhaps life is blossoming on millions of planets through the galaxy (though there’s always the question : if intelligent life is common, how comes that none of these numerous races has visited us openly?), or perhaps we’re the only intelligent beings in the whole universe. It’s seems to me that favoring one hypothesis or the other is just an unsupported belief.
a propos of nothing, I must say that would serve as a wonderfully poetic creation myth for a number of religious persuasions that believe in an impersonal but active life-force.
(Please understand I mean that in the fullest sense of myth; as containing truths that mere facts don’t)
Those of you old enough to remember Pogo may recall a discussion between the Zen possum and the porcupine, regarding just the very subject. The porcupine (who name escapes me for the moment) said “It means either we’re the most intelligent species in the universe, or we’re not. Either way, its a mighty sobering thought.”
For me, the issue isn’t whether there can be life on other planets. There most certainly can be. The problem is interstellar space travel. Space is big, really, really, really, REALLY big. Even at the speed of light (which is still, as far as we know, as fast as it is possible to go) it would still take dozens of years to get to the very closest stars, hundreds of years to get to the closest detectable planetary systems, and thousands of years to travel between galaxies.
This seems to make it unlikely taht little green men are zipping around much between planets, and if they WERE going to make a decision to spend, say, a mere 80 years in suspended animation to visit Earth, I find it hard to believe that they would be motivated merely by a desire to see the inside of the human asshole.
Not to mention the ever-lasting question of time.
We are a dot on the face of the history of the universe, currently. Call it five thousand years of history. There may be hundreds of intelligent species out there. Thousands. But how many of them get off their planets? And of those that do… how many exist in the time period that we exist in, and not a million years earlier, or a million years later?
Space is vast, but time is deeper.
If NBC or CNN published reports with documentary evidence: substantiated videotape, reliable photographic evidence, radar traces, etc. I would accept it because I don’t believe those organizations would publish such material without very strong evidence to back it up. Look at what happened to CNN over the nerve-gas-in-Vietnam story: they had a plausible story that got ripped to shreds by their competitors for lack of compelling evidence. They have a high enough standard of evidence for me, especially in a freaky story like “aliens land!”, that I would believe it (not totally at first, but if the story survived and got picked up by others, I would be hard pressed to doubt it).
Likewise, if a substantial portion of the scientific community accepted a particular incident or event.
The OP was what would it take to convince me that UFOs are actual visitations by intelligent life.
A press conference would be nice. It’s hard to believe that an intelligence species would go to all the trouble to come here and just hid out. As was pointed out in the previous posts space is big, very likely so big as to make travel between systems impossible. Intelligence live is fragile. We, and all the others that are probably out there, possess the means to destroy ourselves. How would they find us? We have been sending out radio signals for 80 years. That gives an 80 light year sphere in which we are recognizable as a possible planet to visit.
It would take a lot more than what I’ve seen so far, which isn’t a lot, to convince me. One evening, while driving across Wyoming, a friend of mine and I saw a bright light in the sky. It was moving, best we could tell, erratically and at widely variable speeds. Most interesting was the way it changed shapes and brightness. We finally stopped on a hill to get out and take a better look. After 10-15 minutes we still couldn’t make anything out of it. By the time we passed Laramie we could see it was a bi-plane circling the football stadium. It had lights along the bottom wing that spelled out various ads. Not recognizing or understanding what you are seeing isn’t the same thing as the thing seen being unknown or unknowable.
Furt = substantial daylight sighting/substantial weight of academic opinion
partly_warmer = a ship subjectable to testing
hansel = major news coverage/substantial weight of academic opinion
SandyHook = Alien press conference
Thanks for the feedback. Maybe this is more of an IMHO poll, really. The rest of you are focused on issues (i.e., the engineering difficulties of interstellar flight, the psychological motivation of alien beings, the commonness of life in the universe, Fermi’s paradox, the very true fact that 90% of sightings are mundane and explainable) that are totally irrelevant to the OP.
OK, the OP is not about extraterrestrial life or extraterrestrial intelligence per se – the first one of which I am inclined to consider quite likely, the second one of which I would not be surprised by, for both of which I’d be absolutely delighted to see hard proof in my lifetime – but specifically about UFOs as manifestations of ETI visiting Earth.
Even if tomorrow the guys 40 miles west of here at the NAIC Radio Observatory verified that they’re receiving signals from 40 Eridani that show their favorite TV show is “I Love Yx`QZ”, that there is lots of traffic in their alt.binaries.nude.ty’zZ^M newsgroup, and that the citizenry is annoyed at the preaching of q^ZùgÄ’s Witnesses, that would still not address the OP issue directly.
I’d have to go with earlier posts: Best evidence would be actual object of alien technology --actual aliens a bonus (hey, it could be an automated ship!)-- accessible to multiple independent observers.
Observation of “impossible” vessel – raises the question of how impossible. A disc the size of my house doing hypersonic maneouvers at 100K feet and then going off the radar still has the possibility of a “secret weapon” type object. Something the approximate size and shape of the Atlanta Airport swinging in, doing three orbits of Earth and blasting back away into space in sight of the world’s telescopes and radars, that’s ET origin (or one heck of an Illuminati plot!).
This (raised by JDR and DrDeth) is one definite setback to anything short of aliens sitting down with Barbara Walters being sufficient for most people. We can always just say, “the military has stuff we can’t imagine.” Which may be completely true, but it basically eliminates any sighting at all as being sufficient evidence.
And though the sightings of the post-WWII era, in which the objects performed far beyond the capabilities of any even theoretical aircraft–and totally freaked the MILITARY out–are beyond such doubts, their evidence is now purely historical in nature, and therefore impossible to reproduce.
I go along with hansel. How good of an analogy is the evidence of the moon landing (for those of us who believe it wasn’t a hoax!)?
I would also probably believe if I had a personal experience such as Fairblue’s, (tho I hope I would retain sight of the possibility that I might be mistaken or have imperfect or incomplete info.) Would take a heck of a lot more than unusual lights in the sky, tho. And the possibility of daydream/hallucination/manmade explanation would prevent certainty.
Also, along the lines of my first paragraph, I might well believe something based upon consistent affirmations by multiple people I know and respect purporting direct and specific knowledge/experiences.
Well the Arizona lights incident convinced me that it was something,not ready to say alien but it was something unexplained and captured on video.
But has anyone else noticed that even when you take the most credible sightings the craft described are vastly different.
So either aliens are into custom mods,or we’re being visited by hundreds of different species.
And most “abductee” stories reveal more about human psychology than anything else.
Seems aliens aren’t interested in our brains,lungs,hearts,but go wild over our genitals and rectums!
And if we already have the tech to do full body scans,you’re telling me these advanced beings are still using physical probes?!
The government does a lot without telling us, and I think that UFO’s are probably just more experiments from the government. However, as Elucidator mentioned, life is very abundant, and we are fools to believe that our planet would be the only spot in the universe which contained life. I think that they are probably in our scenario…sitting on their planet without means to travel the galaxies and wondering if there is life elsewhere.
What convinced me most that the “UFO’s are alien spaceships” premise is flawed is how technology has not helped them.
Back in the 60’s-70’s there seemed to be boatloads of alleged spaceships caught on film. It was the heyday of the UFO phenom.
In the 80’s, home video cameras started to become extremely cheap. So now there was a chance that anyone who saw an alien spcaeship could videotape it.
The result? Sightings actually went down. What few there were were lit dots (Arizona) and nothing more.
In the early 90’s, when computer graphics started to come of their own, groups like CSICOP openly fretted that image fakery would result in a plethora of fake spaceship photos and video.
What happened? Sightings went down even more. Things got so bad that a British UFO group folded its tents. What groups that are left are busy playing with 20-50 year old accounts, with retellings growing their legend. Look at how Roswell is clung to, and its bordering on antique.
Why? My guess would be that our ability to spot a fake increased, but our cynicism about a fake grew dramaticly. In the past, UFO supporters would say that so-and-so was not bright enough to fake a photo. Now we know any kid with a modicum of Photoshop skill can make all sorts of fake stuff.
Fakery tried its trump card with a full fledged production: The Alien Autopsy. Even most woowoo’s weren’t taken in by that one.
“UFO’s as alien spacecraft” is bankrupt in my opinion.
I think the point that you’re looking for, Toadspittle, is that the answer to the question “what would it take to make you believe?” is “a lot more than there currently is.” The ‘I want to believe’ crowd believes for that reason: they want to.
What you won’t find (and I think that you partially expected) is widespread denial.
Absolutely NO evidence would be sufficient for me. Since it is impossible for aliens to be at our planet right now, then anything that pointed to the conclusion that they were would have to be fraudulent or otherwise erroneous. Since our first radio signals that might be identifiable as artificial in origin have only been escaping our planet for 50 years, and not at much strength, I doubt any other civilization would even know we were here yet. Once they did find out, even if they had immense resources to power a ship at an amazingly fast speed (such as 0.1c) it would still take them a looooooooooooooooong time to get here.
Logically, there cannot be alien spacecraft in our solar system. Therefore, any evidence pointing towards that conclusion must be either a misunderstanding or an intentional hoax.
Well, it could be that Uncle Albert is right, the speed of light is absolutely it, end of story, the ultimate quarantine. But what if that isn’t the whole story? Not saying he’s wrong, mind you. Newton wasn’t wrong, it just wasn’t the whole story.
If I win the lottery, or if one of you does and gives me the money, I think I would fund the Niven approach: look for lights in the sky, red shifted (going away) or blue (headed this way) that have spectra for elements not likely to be naturally produced, say, beryllium. Even if they’re not coming here, look for the “exhaust” trail.
And Bosda? Forget it, she ain’t that great at it. Few things in life are more disappointing than a lame hummer.
RexDart
“Since it is impossible for aliens to be at our planet right now…Logically, there cannot be alien spacecraft in our solar system.”
I wouldn’t go quite so far as to say impossible. I’m sure there are scenario’s that could be put forth which could be logically possible. If you are of the notion that it is possible for intelligent ET life to exist at all.
After all, it’s not a requirement that WE make first contact and then wait for a response.
