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bloatedsack wrote:

Iommic Pope wrote: I agree, with the exception of contact.
There's a fair chance that anyone more advanced than ourselves that had survived the filters we have no before us may be actively "blacking out" the!efforts we make to communicate.

Look at our own world for an example. There were plenty of "lost" tribes in the world, but even when outsiders try to not to influence them we do. You're suggesting that we're at the "cargo cult" stage of alien interaction? Then we'd still have more something to prove contact.

In other examples, once the "outside" discovers a lost group of people, we go in and fuck with them. It might be minimal, but we still do it enough to influence and make it clear that we (outsiders) exist.

If there were aliens bopping around Earth, there'd be signs. We don't need them to land a craft at Devil's Tower and swap ambassadors, but there'd be something. We've got enough people looking into the sky, enough radio antennas picking up everything, and enough interest that if there were aliens here, I suspect we'd know something more.

It's a nice idea, but I don't think it's happened. It's a big universe, and I simply don't think we've stumbled over each othe ryet.

Mudfuzz wrote:

neonblack wrote:Fair enough. I entertain the idea that aliens exist.

Are we talking intelligent or like anything at all? Microbial life seems much more realistic.

from a statistical point of view I think sure, possible but as for the they are visiting and probing us.. no sorry I lived in Sedona.. had to meet many people that thought they were walk-in and people that saw stuff and were abducted and probed… and I think a lot can be said for drugs and wishful thinking...

Iommic Pope wrote:

bloatedsack wrote:

Iommic Pope wrote: I agree, with the exception of contact.
There's a fair chance that anyone more advanced than ourselves that had survived the filters we have no before us may be actively "blacking out" the!efforts we make to communicate.

Look at our own world for an example. There were plenty of "lost" tribes in the world, but even when outsiders try to not to influence them we do. You're suggesting that we're at the "cargo cult" stage of alien interaction? Then we'd still have more something to prove contact.

In other examples, once the "outside" discovers a lost group of people, we go in and fuck with them. It might be minimal, but we still do it enough to influence and make it clear that we (outsiders) exist.

If there were aliens bopping around Earth, there'd be signs. We don't need them to land a craft at Devil's Tower and swap ambassadors, but there'd be something. We've got enough people looking into the sky, enough radio antennas picking up everything, and enough interest that if there were aliens here, I suspect we'd know something more.

It's a nice idea, but I don't think it's happened. It's a big universe, and I simply don't think we've stumbled over each othe ryet.

Agreed, I don't think it's happened, let's be clear on that.
But your biggest flaw here is that you are comparing what we do to a Type 3 level of advancement.
Alien behaviour and psychology, particularly one far, far more advanced than ours, may not resemble our own in any way, shape or form.

actualidiot wrote:soo..yeah

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkhNM4pIKog[/youtube]

goroth wrote:We can't communicate with ourselves, within the same species, let alone with aliens. Shit, we can't even understand each other within the same country, as evinced by the last American election. Thar fact, coupled with 4.5 billion years of history leaves me to believe a)there is no reason why we should recognise alien communication, and b) why we should assume that said communication should have occurred under the minuscule period of time that humans have some understanding of.

What if the last bunch of aliens swung by a billion years ago and where all like "Fuck this, let's play some Slayer and hit Alpha Centauri". Or what if they arrived 3.7 billion years ago and where like "dude, let's throw some fuckin amoeba down there and see what happens? I'll give you 5:1 that intelligent life doesn't arise"
Then the other alien is like "fucken Arise dude, that's a choice cut"
Then the other one says "eat shit Gwxarfbr"

Then they swing by in 2016 and are all like "play some fucken Iron Reagan idiot" and the other one looks at us and says "dude, you totally owe me your 1994 Upper Deck Gretzky card because that planet does NOT have intelligent life yet"

That’s why discussions of extraterrestrial civilizations, no matter how learned, have historically boiled down to mere expressions of hope or pessimism. What, for example, is the fraction of planets that form life? Optimists might marshal sophisticated molecular biological models to argue for a large fraction. Pessimists then cite their own scientific data to argue for a fraction closer to 0. But with only one example of a life-bearing planet (ours), it’s hard to know who is right.

Or consider the average lifetime of a civilization. Humans have been using radio technology for only about 100 years. How much longer will our civilization last? A thousand more years? A hundred thousand more? Ten million more? If the average lifetime for a civilization is short, the galaxy is likely to be unpopulated most of the time. Once again, however, with only one example to draw from, it’s back to a battle between pessimists and optimists.

But our new planetary knowledge has removed some of the uncertainty from this debate. Three of the seven terms in Drake’s equation are now known. We know the number of stars born each year. We know that the percentage of stars hosting planets is about 100. And we also know that about 20 to 25 percent of those planets are in the right place for life to form. This puts us in a position, for the first time, to say something definitive about extraterrestrial civilizations — if we ask the right question.

In our recent paper, Professor Sullivan and I did this by shifting the focus of Drake’s equation. Instead of asking how many civilizations currently exist, we asked what the probability is that ours is the only technological civilization that has ever appeared. By asking this question, we could bypass the factor about the average lifetime of a civilization. This left us with only three unknown factors, which we combined into one “biotechnical” probability: the likelihood of the creation of life, intelligent life and technological capacity.

You might assume this probability is low, and thus the chances remain small that another technological civilization arose. But what our calculation revealed is that even if this probability is assumed to be extremely low, the odds that we are not the first technological civilization are actually high. Specifically, unless the probability for evolving a civilization on a habitable-zone planet is less than one in 10 billion trillion, then we are not the first.

In other words, given what we now know about the number and orbital positions of the galaxy’s planets, the degree of pessimism required to doubt the existence, at some point in time, of an advanced extraterrestrial civilization borders on the irrational.