News Story - UFOs in real life

[Darkpriest667]

regardless  I never thought it was a wise idea for SETI or NASA to broadcast our homeworld location to the public in space..

its a 50/50 chance they will be benevolent or malevolent  lets hope for benevolent... malevolent aliens would be particularly nasty considering how underdeveloped technologically we are.


If its malevolent lets hope the REAL military are much more willing to use the technology available in 2008 to defend ourselves instead of the 1985 technology phalanx HQ has provided my soldiers :-p (yes thats a stab at you for the comments in the minigun thread)

[BTAxis]

its a 50/50 chance they will be benevolent or malevolent

We can safely state that his is a load of crap. Just because there are two possibilities doesn't mean they each have a perfectly 50% chance of occurring. Didn't they teach you basic probabilistics in school?

[BAM]

Who knows; if alien contacts have been made and covered up so proficiently, how or why would civilians know who the world leaders or alien-contact agents really are?

[Falion]

Wow, I didn't expect my personal unexplained account, to have so much feedback and speculation. From one who needs no convincing, that there are more things in this universe than we can even fathom or explain...

I seriously doubt, our world leaders are aliens or are being controlled by any such...

That doesn't mean, that this small section of the galaxy, in an almost infinite amount of galaxies, in an immense universe is not, or has not in the past been observed or studied. In fact, I would state that for us not to be, would probably be far less likely. Most of us ( including myself ) just don't like the idea, that somewhere...some species may be further along in development than we are. Indeed, this is totally against many of the worlds major religions...my own included...as we are supposedly "unique and singular" from that perspective.

If you look at this strictly from that standpoint...if and its an extremely HUGE "if", the world leaders had any idea, any type of "off world life" was / is indeed true ( especially anything more advanced than ourselves). To let the public know such, would destroy and throw into chaos almost every world religious viewpoint...something that I would suspect they would be in great fear of letting happen.

I do think it arrogant indeed, for us as as a race of "thinking" beings, that a large majority of us, think that we are the "end all be all" of any sentient lifeforms. The universe is just to VAST to continue to actually believe such, as even if the universe was created indeed by a "God", if such a god is really omnipotent...to waste it's time on just "us" is kind of inane, perhaps even ludicrous...but that's just an opinion of course.

The only thing that keeps visitation of us, as being even somewhat fanciful is that same "vastness" of space, that makes other life out there somewhere a distinct possibility. Of course, I seriously doubt we have discovered "all" of the laws of physics that this universe has for us to discover...perhaps some type of FTL travel does exist...we just don't know where, or how to find it yet. It wasn't all that long ago...we were still riding around on horses...in the grand scheme of things...who knows what we'll discover 200-300 years down the road...provided we are all still here

[Darkpriest667]

We can safely state that his is a load of crap. Just because there are two possibilities doesn't mean they each have a perfectly 50% chance of occurring. Didn't they teach you basic probabilistics in school?

what variables and examples would you use to deduce the probability of an extra terrestrial to be benevolent or malevolent.

when you can give me the numbers to plug into the equation ill gladly give you the more accurate probability..
 

with no data and two options i can only hypothesize that it is 50/50

[BTAxis]

Your hypothesis is based on a complete lack of figures, same as mine. However, the chance likelihood that the chance is exactly 50/50 is extremely low (1%, if we round to whole per cents), so I can say with 99% certainty that I'm right and you're wrong.

[BTAxis]

Actually that's not entirely true either. The likelihood isn't equally distributed over the entire 100/0-0/100 space. One could argue that an alien species that tries to make contact is more likely to be benign than hostile, as hostile aliens wouldn't bother making contact.

[Darkpriest667]

no usually they just nuke or use a bio weapon against the population and move in.. you're absolutely right about that

And i also tend to agree based on my opinion that a highly advanced species would be more interested in making contact than conquering another world.

Speaking of ugly mean aliens... any chance a chrysallid type species is in the works.. I always hated those damn things... i lost teams and teams against them :-p

[DanielOR]

BAM: I suspect there is indeed some sort of gov. agency that would at least look at "alien" authored e-mail.  I would, however, wager you a drink that the first person to look at such a mail is a shrink, with vast majority of "contact" e-mail coming from either sick or badly confused people.

Far as other life...  The view I heard, and I cannot substantient with any figures at all at this time is the following: density of life-sustaining planets in the universe can be computed.  The liklyhood that there is life (let alone inteliigent life) on a planet at any time can also be computed.  That there is other life someWHEN and someWHERE is alsmot a certainty.  For contact, however, we need: life, intelligent life, very highly tech-evolved inteligent life, close enough to spot us, and near to us in time - on universal scale the solar system's existence is not that long of a time.  The liklyhood of all of those odds occuring at the same time...tiny beyond comprehension.

Far as anyone out there - I would honestly prefer we never meet them.  G-D knows we have a hard enough time getting along here.  The odd chance that compared to green or grey aliens we will all see ourselves as borthers and human first - now, THAT is a small probability!

[BAM]

DanielOR:
Yes, the chances are highly unlikely, I agree. But the email thing I forgot to explain:
Possibly the probes that "broadcast our location"  tell aliens the secret email addresses. Sounds like a 1/9999999999999999999 (no figures) chance, and I'm probably making a fool of myself, but it is possible. This way no civilians could interfere by sending bogus messages to these agencies, yet aliens could.

[BTAxis]

The whole email scenario is laughable. An alien receiving a message with an email address in it wouldn't recognize it for what it was. If you were an explorer to an alien world and you were getting some electronic message that consisted of a lot of 1s and 0s (if it was even that, they might well be using some other coding scheme), would you know what it meant? No. Aliens can't magically read our language, they don't have equipment that can interface with ours and they certainly don't have an ISP for our internet. And you can't obtain ANY of that without some direct help from humans.

[BAM]

...Which brings us back to the hidden contacts theory. Wether they invented the microprocessor or we did, they would know how it works and owuld probably be able to read ASCII binary text.

[DanielOR]

Hate to break the fantasy, but...the processor was put together by a large group of geeks.  Was then and is still.  The thing is too damn in-ellegant and requires manual labor in designing the chip layout.  Just knowing how they are made somehow does not seem to fit with the ability to travel between the stars...

[BAM]

Well, no point in continuing the argument... yes, very unlikely but still plausible that aliens have contacted Earth.

[DanielOR]

An interesting, if somewhat tangential, question is: what should they do if they find us.  Given human race' perpensity for violence and frequent bouts of monumental intolerance...  The safe thing would be to at least keep us restrained to the system, lest we export our violent ways.