Do you believe in aliens?

Do you believe In Aliens?

  • Humans are aliens in disguise

    Votes: 3 7.0%

  • The universe is too big for us to be alone.

    Votes: 35 81.4%

  • I call bullshit

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • OP is a F@g

    Votes: 5 11.6%
  • Total voters
    43
i'm putting a monster BT speaker on my handlebars, and looking forward to fight club - i'm thinking RV for the hill climb cadence!

oh, is that syncopated bass guitar? ya mon!

so i'm hearing some blackfoot influence with nrbq...
hahahah sohcahtoa.....yeah, math geek reference. impressive for a music student.

well done DC!
 
knobbyhead said:
What about the Fermi paradox?
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I was saying to D last night that 1 thing I never tire of is reading descriptions of just how big the universe is. I had just read another good explanation before I said that.

The Fermi Paradox fails to comprehend just how large the universe is. Trillions of galaxies. The concept isn’t possible for us to understand.

The Dark Forest lays out a fantastic reason as to why any civilization that wants to persist would be well served to STFU and lay low. That’s another pretty practical contradiction of TFP.
 
Norm said:
I was saying to D last night that 1 thing I never tire of is reading descriptions of just how big the universe is. I had just read another good explanation before I said that.

The Fermi Paradox fails to comprehend just how large the universe is. Trillions of galaxies. The concept isn’t possible for us to understand.

The Dark Forest lays out a fantastic reason as to why any civilization that wants to persist would be well served to STFU and lay low. That’s another pretty practical contradiction of TFP.
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As soon as I saw this thread, I thought of that theory. I love that despite it being directly from a sci-fi novel, it's actually gained a lot of traction among the scientific community. And that makes sense, when you combine its two basic tenets (every civilization seeks to survive and resources are finite.) It doesn't get much simpler than that - under those constraints, there could very reasonably be no possible scenario under which peaceful interactions between civilizations occur. So it's a pretty compelling argument to, indeed, STFU.

Overall, there's a lot of big ideas behind any discussion on this kind of topic. You could look at it from a more existential POV - we live in a more or less cozy, enclosed world where we consider other humans from different outlooks and perspectives as the greatest threat to our way of life or what we believe, but that's really just the result of bias along the lines of what Nassim Taleb's Black Swan theory posits, isn't it? You could argue that just a single encounter, however rare, with any other lifeform from someplace beyond - be it intelligent or otherwise - is a far greater existential threat than the day to day threat economic and "super power" interactions pose. Just one such encounter could wipe us all out in the time it takes to understand the term "exponential growth." Like what happens if we happen to encounter some single cell organism we've never encountered before - be it from journeys we take into space or something that reaches our planet on a chunk of rock that crashes through our atmosphere? That could lead to a scenario very similar to when Europeans, having cohabitated with animals for many years already, encountered isolated villages of natives in the new world - wholesale elimination of civilizations by diseases that were novel and new to those civilizations but not even something the "invaders" were aware of at the time. And that's just one example of something we are already aware of - what if the "life" we encounter doesn't fit any of our definitions? I think the best line from that 60 Minutes story was the one where the one guy said that we have to be prepared to confront the fact that our understanding of the very term "life" is probably pretty limited. Our "rules" don't mean anything once you get beyond our own biases.

If you're a data scientist, you can play out the question from a game theory perspective and design your own fairly straightforward simulations (like, say, this example - BTW, for anyone who is a data scientist or even just interested in the world of so-called "big data" analytics, towarddatascience is a great site. Lots of coding tips, methodology discussions, and tons of examples.)

All in all, I think the more relevant thing for people to think about than merely the question of whether or not other intelligent life exists in the universe is the fact that humanity is really kind of like a bunch of five year olds trying to walk a tightrope 50 feet above the ground here - we only recently learned to walk and we're confident in our ability to do so, and perhaps we're just intelligent enough to start asking questions about how to walk that rope, but we're in no way prepared for the consequences of what happens when we get a few feet out on that rope and realize the rules of simply walking aren't sufficient to keep us from falling. Basically, our ability to ask the question in no way means we're ready to try to answer it. Even if the Dark Forest Theory is totally wrong, which is certainly a possibility, you could argue that a program like SETI was really, really stupid because having the ability to send a message and then doing so without having a clue what kind of response it might elicit is objectively stupid.
 
1speed said:
you could argue that a program like SETI was really, really stupid because having the ability to send a message and then doing so without having a clue what kind of response it might elicit is objectively stupid.
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Why? SETI is basically all passive, i.e. looking for radio signals or optically/elementally looking for habitable planets.

As soon as we developed radio communications and started transmitting globally, the proverbial cat was out of the bag.
 
rick81721 said:
Why? SETI is basically all passive, i.e. looking for radio signals or optically/elementally looking for habitable planets.

As soon as we developed radio communications and started transmitting globally, the proverbial cat was out of the bag.
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We're sending radio signals into space, which is basically no different than shouting "Hey look! We're here!" when we have no idea how they might be received by anyone or anything listening. And, yeah, you make a good point on terrestrial radio signals, but since they are localized, they carry a slightly lower risk because they are not a directional attempt at communication. Still risky because they broadcast that we're here, but less so than saying "We're not only here, but we're trying to find you." In that way, SETI can look a lot more like an act of aggression than radio signals used for terrestrial communication. Of course, it's all academic, right? The reality is - and this is mostly the point I was trying to make - we have no idea how any of it would be perceived by a life form we don't understand in any way, or even if any such life form exists. But there is a pretty compelling argument to not do any of that ever because until first contact occurs (which is, of course, way too late) we can never know if what we encounter is (a) hostile and/or (b) so advanced on us as to make any attempts to protect or assert ourselves only assure our own end. And in that kind of risk/reward model, survival says that however low the probability of any outcome, the relative weight placed on the negative outcomes should be very high.
 
1speed said:
We're sending radio signals into space, which is basically no different than shouting "Hey look! We're here!" when we have no idea how they might be received by anyone or anything listening. And, yeah, you make a good point on terrestrial radio signals, but since they are localized, they carry a slightly lower risk because they are not a directional attempt at communication. Still risky because they broadcast that we're here, but less so than saying "We're not only here, but we're trying to find you." In that way, SETI can look a lot more like an act of aggression than radio signals used for terrestrial communication. Of course, it's all academic, right? The reality is - and this is mostly the point I was trying to make - we have no idea how any of it would be perceived by a life form we don't understand in any way, or even if any such life form exists. But there is a pretty compelling argument to not do any of that ever because until first contact occurs (which is, of course, way too late) we can never know if what we encounter is (a) hostile and/or (b) so advanced on us as to make any attempts to protect or assert ourselves only assure our own end. And in that kind of risk/reward model, survival says that however low the probability of any outcome, the relative weight placed on the negative outcomes should be very high.
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My main point was, SETI isn't doing that:

"Note that SETI experiments do not broadcast. They just try to pick up signals that might already be threading the galaxy"

https://www.seti.org/csc

I get your point, but I would argue most intelligent civilizations will go through the same technological evolution where they go from local to global communications to looking for extraterrestrial life. In my view, aliens have already found us - if they were going to go war of the worlds on us they would have done it already.
 
rick81721 said:
As soon as we developed radio communications and started transmitting globally, the proverbial cat was out of the bag.
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Not really, because the cat is globe 200 light years in radius. The universe is like 15 billion light years across, or something.

I mean sure but it is a very, very small cat and a very, very large bag. Basically inconsequential in terms of the size of the universe.
 
Norm said:
Not really, because the cat is globe 200 light years in radius. The universe is like 15 billion light years across, or something.

I mean sure but it is a very, very small cat and a very, very large bag. Basically inconsequential in terms of the size of the universe.
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Agreed that our radio transmission "cat" is a very tiny part of the universe. But that's even more applicable to 1speed's concern regarding the tinier cones of whatever targeted transmissions have been sent by whomever.

It's also possible that advanced civilizations have found us 1000s or even millions of years before we had radio technology via optical methods far superior to ours. We have already found potentially habitable planets more than 5000 light years away.
 
clarkenstein said:
well uploading music to the internets is a lot more of a pain in the ass than i thought. but i did it. i apologize in advance for anyone losing a full half hour of your life if you listen the whole way through. i put this together 7/25/04 through 8/2/04. i caught a flu while living with my parents so i locked myself in my room to avoid human contact and ended up walking out with this. i didn't allow myself more than 3 takes on anything - so if something i recorded didn't work it still stayed. there's also an annoying high pitch sound you may hear through out it. turns out when you record directly into your computer, you need to unplug your printer.

anyway, that's the story. a girl in high school told me she was abducted by aliens, so about a decade later after trying to make that story into something stupid, it morphed and morphed until i wrote a story about a few aliens who wanted to go surfing but ended up going to the midwest first by accident. they have their ship taken over by a rube, are captured, made to sit down on a horsehair couch (which i have experienced and is torture), and escape after being locked in a basement. they start walking west after and finally get to surf mavericks.

https://daveclark.bandcamp.com/album/the-earth-show
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I know this is an old thread that was resurrected but I listened to your album and it reminds me of early Phish. Not sure if they are one of your influences. Sounds good.
 
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