So, do YOU believe?

[Si_Crewe]

Hitler at 1936 Berlin Olympics was one of the first live tv broadcasts--well according to the flim Contact--can you imagine Aliens viewing that militaristic regime wondering if we are still the same?
Then follow that up with war bulletins of WW2 Korea and Vietnam and they might want to give us a wide berth.

Course, any beings able to pick up those signals (are there actually any other solar systems close enough to have picked-up any of our broadcasts?) would probably be smart enough, and have the capability, to send some kind of probes toward us and pick up more recent broadcasts rather than just waiting years for new ones to arrive and see if we've improved.

From what I've read, it seems like it's more likely that one civilisation will identify another via monitoring changes in the atmosphere of a planet rather than waiting for radio signals to arrive.
That being the case, any beings who'd been keeping an eye on Earth for a couple of hundred years would probably already have decided to investigate regardless of whether they picked up broadcasts of Hollyoaks or TOWIE.

Least, I hope so.

[Vam]

What fascinates me is how most people assume alien life will be more advanced than us. Why is that???

If you look at the advances we have made in your lifetime it is pretty impressive. No reason to think anyone else would have the ability to time travel , or have weapons that would melt us in a millisecond etc. Maybe there is other life out there and maybe the reason we have never encountered it is because they don't even have the technology we do

Interesting point there...

As a kid I was interested in dinosaurs and read about how they'd been around for millions of years and we've only been around for a fraction of that time.
I always used to wonder if, perhaps, dinosaurs evolved, like we are, and got to the point where they were smart enough to build space-ships and clear off to find a different home when Earth became inhospitable toward reptilian life.

course, as an adult I realise there's a squillion things wrong with that idea.

Fundamentally, from what we know of the universe and how stars and planets are formed and how ecosystems evolve, it seems like it's very unlikely that there's been time for life on any planet to have evolved a lot further than we are and it's likely that we're part of the "first wave" of intelligent life in the galaxy, in not the entire universe.
Kinda disappointing really. If we were around when the universe was, say, 30 billion years old then I guess there'd be far more room for speculation.

Course, it might just be that we've got our sums wrong and the universe is older than we realise or that the physics, biology and chemistry which suggest we're at the vanguard of evolution might not be a universal constant and there might be different things happening in different parts of the universe.
There's an awful lot which we don't know and I'd like to think that, perhaps, some of the stuff we don't know about can provide room for speculation.

Having said that, if the universe is infinite then it's unlikely that we're the only life in it and, even if we're "first generation intelligent life", we did have a honking-great period where we didn't achieve much so, given how quickly technology is changing, it's entirely possible that there's beings out there who're at a roughly similar point of evolution but who're at least a couple of hundred years more technically-advanced than we are.

There's a popular sci-fi concept which posits that it's not entirely wise for us to be shouting to get the attention of alien beings because any being capable of visiting will be vastly more technologically advanced so we'd likely be at their mercy and I think that's a fair point, albeit a rather pessimistic one.

I'd nail my colours to that BIB, in particular
And, given the seriously ramped-up technology involved in the Breakthrough initiative, might it not be possible for your theory to be proven - even if that doesn't happen until some point in the very distant future?

[Trapper John]

To prove a point read this and then look at the image in the link...

Extent of human radio broadcasts

Humans have been broadcasting radio waves into deep space for about a hundred years now, since the days of Marconi. That, of course, means there is an ever-expanding bubble announcing Humanity's presence to anyone listening in the Milky Way. This bubble is astronomically large (literally), and currently spans approximately 200 light years. But how big is this, really, compared to the size of the Galaxy in which we live (which is, itself, just one of countless billions of galaxies in the observable universe)? To answer that question, Adam Grossman put together this diagram. It's not the black square; it's the little blue dot at the center of that zoomed-in square.

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-la ... oogle.com/

Please have a look at this Senor Rollup, we have been broadcasting for 100 years and this shows you the extent our transmissions have travelled in space.
It is pitiful.
It could be that those far more advanced than we transmitted in the same fashion (radio) but unfortunately we were hanging upside down from a branch in the Great Rift Valley when their signals hit earth and they have now moved on to more exotic communications.
We can but hope that we do pick up radio signals but those who transmitted might be extinct or moved to another galaxy as their technology will be so far ahead of ours given the vast time and distance such a signal would have travelled to hit earth.
It is a fascinating subject with so many unknowns and zero probabilities.
If we do get a signal will they even tell us? Will they want to?

Like I said, it could just as easily be the other way round

Forget about the 'Universe' or other galaxies - inter galactic travel is an impossibility just based on the vast distances involved.

Just take our Galaxy, the Milky Way - it's an average sized spiral galaxy and contains approximately 400 billion stars. Some of those will have planets orbiting them and some of those will not doubt be inhabited by some form of life.

Of those, some might have intelligent life but the chances are if they had the ability to create a civilisation, they would be at differing stages of development, ranging from anywhere between 'extremely primitive' to 'extinct'.

So the chances of a civilisation being at the right stage of development where it could contact us physically or remotely are very, very slim to non-existent.

To put it another way, If a hugely advanced civilisation to our own existed on the opposite arm of our spiral galaxy to us and they had somehow developed faster than light (FTL) travel - to make it simple say 10x faster than light - it would take them 12,000 years if they decided to visit us.

So simply put, to arrive today on our earth, they would have needed to have set off while our ancestors in the Northern hemisphere were deep into the last ice age, hunting woolly mammoths and fighting off sabre toothed tigers.

[Si_Crewe]

I'd nail my colours to that BIB, in particular
And, given the seriously ramped-up technology involved in the Breakthrough initiative, might it not be possible for your theory to be proven - even if that doesn't happen until some point in the very distant future?

Buggered if I know.

Using Earth as a baseline, it seems like the "best case" would be that the dinosaurs had continued to evolve like we have and, in that case, another Earth-like planet could have life on it which which is billions of years more advanced.

Trouble with evolution is that it doesn't have any definite goals.
"Worst case" is that, for all we know, even if there is life on a bunch of different planets, it might be that evolution usually dictates that it's non-sentient plankton which is best-suited for survival and it's only a freak chance that evolution favoured mammals with big brains on this planet.

Honestly, I think you'd have to be a bit arrogant to start making ANY kind of definitive statements about what might or might not be happening in parts of the universe that we barely know exist.

[Steve Hawkeye]

Hitler at 1936 Berlin Olympics was one of the first live tv broadcasts--well according to the flim Contact--can you imagine Aliens viewing that militaristic regime wondering if we are still the same?
Then follow that up with war bulletins of WW2 Korea and Vietnam and they might want to give us a wide berth.

Course, any beings able to pick up those signals (are there actually any other solar systems close enough to have picked-up any of our broadcasts?) would probably be smart enough, and have the capability, to send some kind of probes toward us and pick up more recent broadcasts rather than just waiting years for new ones to arrive and see if we've improved.

From what I've read, it seems like it's more likely that one civilisation will identify another via monitoring changes in the atmosphere of a planet rather than waiting for radio signals to arrive.
That being the case, any beings who'd been keeping an eye on Earth for a couple of hundred years would probably already have decided to investigate regardless of whether they picked up broadcasts of Hollyoaks or TOWIE.

Least, I hope so.

Telescopes use visual, infrared and radio to examine atmospheres and they all travel at the speed of light, radio can't travel faster than the visible or invisible spectrum.
Just sayin'

[Steve Hawkeye]

To prove a point read this and then look at the image in the link...

Extent of human radio broadcasts

Humans have been broadcasting radio waves into deep space for about a hundred years now, since the days of Marconi. That, of course, means there is an ever-expanding bubble announcing Humanity's presence to anyone listening in the Milky Way. This bubble is astronomically large (literally), and currently spans approximately 200 light years. But how big is this, really, compared to the size of the Galaxy in which we live (which is, itself, just one of countless billions of galaxies in the observable universe)? To answer that question, Adam Grossman put together this diagram. It's not the black square; it's the little blue dot at the center of that zoomed-in square.

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-la ... oogle.com/

Please have a look at this Senor Rollup, we have been broadcasting for 100 years and this shows you the extent our transmissions have travelled in space.
It is pitiful.
It could be that those far more advanced than we transmitted in the same fashion (radio) but unfortunately we were hanging upside down from a branch in the Great Rift Valley when their signals hit earth and they have now moved on to more exotic communications.
We can but hope that we do pick up radio signals but those who transmitted might be extinct or moved to another galaxy as their technology will be so far ahead of ours given the vast time and distance such a signal would have travelled to hit earth.
It is a fascinating subject with so many unknowns and zero probabilities.
If we do get a signal will they even tell us? Will they want to?

Like I said, it could just as easily be the other way round

Forget about the 'Universe' or other galaxies - inter galactic travel is an impossibility just based on the vast distances involved.

Just take our Galaxy, the Milky Way - it's an average sized spiral galaxy and contains approximately 400 billion stars. Some of those will have planets orbiting them and some of those will not doubt be inhabited by some form of life.

Of those, some might have intelligent life but the chances are if they had the ability to create a civilisation, they would be at differing stages of development, ranging from anywhere between 'extremely primitive' to 'extinct'.

So the chances of a civilisation being at the right stage of development where it could contact us physically or remotely are very, very slim to non-existent.

To put it another way, If a hugely advanced civilisation to our own existed on the opposite arm of our spiral galaxy to us and they had somehow developed faster than light (FTL) travel - to make it simple say 10x faster than light - it would take them 12,000 years if they decided to visit us.

So simply put, to arrive today on our earth, they would have needed to have set off while our ancestors in the Northern hemisphere were deep into the last ice age, hunting woolly mammoths and fighting off sabre toothed tigers.

All your assumptions are based around current knowledge.
Where will that knowledge be in 10,000 years?
Think how far we have come in the last 100 years as a guide.
Now tell us where we will be?

[Si_Crewe]

Telescopes use visual, infrared and radio to examine atmospheres and they all travel at the speed of light, radio can't travel faster than the visible or invisible spectrum.
Just sayin'

Erm, yeah. That was my point.

It's far more likely that any advanced civilisation would be using their fancy-pants advanced telescopes to monitor changes in our atmosphere (with changes in CO2 hinting at life and all the other crap we're pumping into the atmosphere suggesting industrialisation) and already have decided to come see what we're all about, or decide to avoid us like the plague, rather than hoping to pick up any signals we've broadcast regardless of what was in them - assuming they were even still coherent after travelling such vast distances.

[Steve Hawkeye]

Telescopes use visual, infrared and radio to examine atmospheres and they all travel at the speed of light, radio can't travel faster than the visible or invisible spectrum.
Just sayin'

Erm, yeah. That was my point.

It's far more likely that any advanced civilisation would be using their fancy-pants advanced telescopes to monitor changes in our atmosphere (with changes in CO2 hinting at life and all the other crap we're pumping into the atmosphere suggesting industrialisation) and already have decided to come see what we're all about, or decide to avoid us like the plague, rather than hoping to pick up any signals we've broadcast regardless of what was in them - assuming they were even still coherent after travelling such vast distances.

Volcanoes and plants produce CO2.

[Trapper John]

To prove a point read this and then look at the image in the link...

Extent of human radio broadcasts

Humans have been broadcasting radio waves into deep space for about a hundred years now, since the days of Marconi. That, of course, means there is an ever-expanding bubble announcing Humanity's presence to anyone listening in the Milky Way. This bubble is astronomically large (literally), and currently spans approximately 200 light years. But how big is this, really, compared to the size of the Galaxy in which we live (which is, itself, just one of countless billions of galaxies in the observable universe)? To answer that question, Adam Grossman put together this diagram. It's not the black square; it's the little blue dot at the center of that zoomed-in square.

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-la ... oogle.com/

Please have a look at this Senor Rollup, we have been broadcasting for 100 years and this shows you the extent our transmissions have travelled in space.
It is pitiful.
It could be that those far more advanced than we transmitted in the same fashion (radio) but unfortunately we were hanging upside down from a branch in the Great Rift Valley when their signals hit earth and they have now moved on to more exotic communications.
We can but hope that we do pick up radio signals but those who transmitted might be extinct or moved to another galaxy as their technology will be so far ahead of ours given the vast time and distance such a signal would have travelled to hit earth.
It is a fascinating subject with so many unknowns and zero probabilities.
If we do get a signal will they even tell us? Will they want to?

Like I said, it could just as easily be the other way round

Forget about the 'Universe' or other galaxies - inter galactic travel is an impossibility just based on the vast distances involved.

Just take our Galaxy, the Milky Way - it's an average sized spiral galaxy and contains approximately 400 billion stars. Some of those will have planets orbiting them and some of those will not doubt be inhabited by some form of life.

Of those, some might have intelligent life but the chances are if they had the ability to create a civilisation, they would be at differing stages of development, ranging from anywhere between 'extremely primitive' to 'extinct'.

So the chances of a civilisation being at the right stage of development where it could contact us physically or remotely are very, very slim to non-existent.

To put it another way, If a hugely advanced civilisation to our own existed on the opposite arm of our spiral galaxy to us and they had somehow developed faster than light (FTL) travel - to make it simple say 10x faster than light - it would take them 12,000 years if they decided to visit us.

So simply put, to arrive today on our earth, they would have needed to have set off while our ancestors in the Northern hemisphere were deep into the last ice age, hunting woolly mammoths and fighting off sabre toothed tigers.

All your assumptions are based around current knowledge.
Where will that knowledge be in 10,000 years?
Think how far we have come in the last 100 years as a guide.
Now tell us where we will be?

I'm guessing it will be buried under 9,000 years of dust and sand.

[Trapper John]

There is this assumption that intelligent civilisation rises just the once - this is the assumption we have about ourselves and our earth.

When the meteor destroyed pretty much everything land based on earth 65 million years ago, it is assumed that the mammals which became us, took that amount of time to become us.

In reality, there could have been a dozen civilisations as advanced or further advanced than us which came into being in that time without any traces of them ever being found.

1 million years is a long time but in our heads it's not when we talk about these things - we seem to forget that just a mere 10,000 years ago we were scattered groups of hunter gatherers, wearing rough skin clothes and using flint as our ultimate weapon.

[Guest]

Like I said, it could just as easily be the other way round

Forget about the 'Universe' or other galaxies - inter galactic travel is an impossibility just based on the vast distances involved.

Just take our Galaxy, the Milky Way - it's an average sized spiral galaxy and contains approximately 400 billion stars. Some of those will have planets orbiting them and some of those will not doubt be inhabited by some form of life.

Of those, some might have intelligent life but the chances are if they had the ability to create a civilisation, they would be at differing stages of development, ranging from anywhere between 'extremely primitive' to 'extinct'.

So the chances of a civilisation being at the right stage of development where it could contact us physically or remotely are very, very slim to non-existent.

To put it another way, If a hugely advanced civilisation to our own existed on the opposite arm of our spiral galaxy to us and they had somehow developed faster than light (FTL) travel - to make it simple say 10x faster than light - it would take them 12,000 years if they decided to visit us.

So simply put, to arrive today on our earth, they would have needed to have set off while our ancestors in the Northern hemisphere were deep into the last ice age, hunting woolly mammoths and fighting off sabre toothed tigers.

All your assumptions are based around current knowledge.
Where will that knowledge be in 10,000 years?
Think how far we have come in the last 100 years as a guide.
Now tell us where we will be?

I'm guessing it will be buried under 9,000 years of dust and sand.

A future Time Team will be digging at Cerne and saying "in trench number one we think we have some real archaeology, fred thinks he's found sign of an ancient large hadron collider and just for any viewers who don't know what that was used for fred will now explain"

Fred's hologram will be giving 3d explanations with instant 3d images and archive footage to billions of viewers throughout the galaxy in real time.

And all the viewers will be saying "those guys couldn't even go faster than light and they hadn't even been to mars, how quaint is that?"

[rollup]

There are millions of aliens amongst us already.
Sit down and relax with a nice cup of tea and find an incoming sunbeam to contemplate.
Look carefully at the dust particles in the sunbeam and you'll see the odd usually silver coloured space craft coming and going.
On close examination they look they they probably have thousands of passengers/inhabitants aboard.
Gets quite busy some days with hundreds of them coming and going each hour.
Where exactly they land and live I'm not sure.
Investigations are on going ......

[Guest]

There are millions of aliens amongst us already.
Sit down and relax with a nice cup of tea and find an incoming sunbeam to contemplate.
Look carefully at the dust particles in the sunbeam and you'll see the odd usually silver coloured space craft coming and going.
On close examination they look they they probably have thousands of passengers/inhabitants aboard.
Gets quite busy some days with hundreds of them coming and going each hour.
Where exactly they land and live I'm not sure.
Investigations are on going ......

What have you got to smoke to see all this?

[Gabby]

I believe something when I see it..... otherwise it's all just fantasy!

[Random]

When the aliens come down and offer you salvation and better things will you take it?

What of the scientists who never get a mention? Surely there is more than Stephen Hawkings, but you wouldn't think so would you?