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Topic:
Extraterrestrials: real, or a hoax? v.2
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DarthBoba
Registered:
Jun '00
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Date Posted:
1/19/07 12:11pm
Subject:
RE: Extraterrestrials: real, or a hoax? v.2
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People spend their entire lives studying things like sloths. There's always some level of interest, imo.
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Star_Wars_Freak_2006
Registered:
Jan '04
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Date Posted:
1/26/07 6:23pm
Subject:
RE: Extraterrestrials: real, or a hoax? v.2
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I'm not going to say whether extraterrestrials exist or not, I guess that can be left up to each person to decide for themselves, I'm just going to post an experience I had.
When I was 14, I was on a church camp trip in Panama City Beach, FL. We stayed at a building across from a two-lane street from the beach, and the guys slept out on the balcony at night because the seabreeze was comfortable. One night I was laying awake as everyone was settling down, watching the sky. It was getting cloudy, but the street lights shown on the low clouds, making them appear orangish in color. Out of the clouds came a relatively small disc-shaped object, just like what you see in the movies, and yes, it appeared to be spinning. I believe it was metal, because it too had an orange sheen from the street lights. It hovered, maybe 150 - 200 feet above the roof of the camp building, for less then 5 seconds, then suddenly shot to my right, staying the same distance above the ground and flying parallel to the two-lane road. The entire thing only lasted maybe 7 or 8 seconds. Now, I would almost think I was crazy, but another kid jumped up the same exact instant that I did, shouting, "Oh my God! Did anyone see that?"
So, in my mind, yes, this "UFO," if you will, was an extraterrestrial ship. So I definitely do not believe extraterrestrials are a hoax. Naturally, some of the "encounters" are definitely hoaxes, but something had to prompt people to start believing in extraterrestrials. That's not something someone just makes up on a whim. But, decide for yourself. 
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Brad Jordan Hunter
March 24, 1987 - June 16, 2003
I love you, bro. Take care.
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Lowbacca_1977
Title: Senate Moderator
Registered:
Jun '06
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Date Posted:
1/26/07 8:43pm
Subject:
RE: Extraterrestrials: real, or a hoax? v.2
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My two cents here....
Do I believe there is intelligent life out there somewhere? Absolutely. Given the size of the universe, I think its unreasonable to think there isn't.
Do I think that they've had contact with us? Not at all. Given the time involved in space travel, the distances we're talking about, and how it wouldn't have been possible for life to start going terribly much before ours did.... I don't think there's been enough time to reach the point where other life forms are reaching earth.
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VadersLaMent
Registered:
Apr '02
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Date Posted:
1/29/07 10:55am
Subject:
RE: Extraterrestrials: real, or a hoax? v.2
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I'm not so sure about that. There have been no Population III stars found anywhere. Population II stars though metal poor could give rise to life and technology. There are many, many, many, many, many, many Population I stars(like our Sun) that are older than our Sun. There has been plenty of time before the rise of makind for anyone anywhere to give rise to intelligence assuming that intelligence can arise.
Here's one answer to Fermi's paradox.
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Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic--Arthur C. Clarke
Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God--Michael Shermer
I am officially Awesome.
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dizfactor
Registered:
Aug '02
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Date Posted:
1/29/07 1:45pm
Subject:
RE: Extraterrestrials: real, or a hoax? v.2
- Date Edited:
1/29/07 1:46pm (1 edits total)
Edited By:
dizfactor
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I think it's unlikely that any civilization significantly more advanced than ours would still be inhabited by biological persons in the sense that we understand the term. An interstellar civilization would probably look more like a network of solar-system-sized nanotech clouds than what most people think of when they think about "aliens."
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"Play is going to be for the 21st century what steam was to the 19th century."
Julian Dibbell
"You gotta love an elite killing force that you can fool by putting on a hat."
Gryph
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VadersLaMent
Registered:
Apr '02
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Date Posted:
1/29/07 2:11pm
Subject:
RE: Extraterrestrials: real, or a hoax? v.2
- Date Edited:
1/29/07 2:12pm (1 edits total)
Edited By:
VadersLaMent
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I can agree with that. Here's the short version and here is the long version.
Other than such an example we are all over the place as to what "advanced" means. Ten times out energy usage? One hundred? How about a billion?
Even at ten times our current energy capabilities interstellar travel isn't so tough, it just takes a long time, unless some bit of wormhole knowledge comes along that makes them easier than we think.
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Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic--Arthur C. Clarke
Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God--Michael Shermer
I am officially Awesome.
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Jabbadabbado
Registered:
Mar '99
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Date Posted:
1/30/07 12:13pm
Subject:
RE: Extraterrestrials: real, or a hoax? v.2
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That's a delightful read. From our limited perspective, technology "evolves" faster than biology. So, almost definitionally the fastest pathway for human development is artificial evolution through technology, as evidenced by the ongoing development of increasingly powerful AI tools to amplify or replace human brainpower. Better AI helps create more advanced technology, which creates a demand for even more powerful AI, and so on, a feedback loop likely to continue. Hence, the eventual demand for a matrioshka brain seems plausible.
And this is of course a classic and pervasive scifi theme. Our tools eventually become so advanced that they no longer need us and compete with us for survival, or more benignly the distinction between us and our tools gradually erodes over time until the day in the far future when humans integrate seemlessly with their tools to form a distinctive future being.
If an extraterrestrial matrioshka brain has been around far longer than recorded human history, it might well be that we would not be able to detect it - it wouldn't be radiating much light or heat. The trick would be to catch a matrioshka brain in the act of "going operational" - the moment when its star, observationally speaking, winks out of existence.
It's easy to imagine that being a relatively rare event, even in a galaxy overflowing with matrioshka brains.
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Malthusian Doomsday Quack
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VadersLaMent
Registered:
Apr '02
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Date Posted:
1/30/07 1:59pm
Subject:
RE: Extraterrestrials: real, or a hoax? v.2
- Date Edited:
1/30/07 2:59pm (1 edits total)
Edited By:
VadersLaMent
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In exchanging emails with the MBrain author, Robert Bradbury, he and other links on this subject made it quite clear that so long as we are dealing with the realm of physics no known technology will be 100% efficient. Cover a star with a swarm and it will still radiate in the infrared. An infrared source that shines like a star but is not shining like a star in the other portions of the spectrum and you have a candidate for a Dysonian civilization. Searches for such have been conducted but I have no idea how widespread they were. No such sources have been found to date.
One of the purposes of the Mbrain page was to see what the limits of a civilization could be without getting into scifi science.
I had one topic in which I disagreed with Bradbury, and I see alot of it here on these boards and others. The idea that we are so much lesser than anything in the Universe is sort of silly to me. The usual analogy used is how much respect we give an ant. Note that the difference between the thinking power of an Mbrain and the entire human race is greater than the difference between a man and a zygote.
I don't know that an Mbrain would go out of its way to send a probe to us when it would be far easier to take a look from a distance and run a million simulations at the same time to predict what is going on here. There is a little tidbit on the Mbrain page about a telescope array made up of 100 billion Moon-sized telescopes with a set up diameter equal to the orbit of Jupiter. Such a thing could take a picture of your face from around 30,000 light years if I did the math right.
But I don't think any intelligence will disregard any other intelligence that is capable or potentially capable of getting off their home world. An ant will never make a spaceship.
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Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic--Arthur C. Clarke
Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God--Michael Shermer
I am officially Awesome.
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dizfactor
Registered:
Aug '02
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Date Posted:
1/30/07 2:40pm
Subject:
RE: Extraterrestrials: real, or a hoax? v.2
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If anyone's looking for a great fictional treatment of this topic, I heartily recommend Charles Stross' Accelerando, which is available for free in pdf form on his website.
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"Play is going to be for the 21st century what steam was to the 19th century."
Julian Dibbell
"You gotta love an elite killing force that you can fool by putting on a hat."
Gryph
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Darth Mischievous
Registered:
Oct '99
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Date Posted:
2/1/07 2:26am
Subject:
RE: Extraterrestrials: real, or a hoax? v.2
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[Cartman]I did NOT have an anal probe![/Cartman]
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Beowulf
Registered:
May '99
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Date Posted:
2/1/07 7:57am
Subject:
RE: Extraterrestrials: real, or a hoax? v.2
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That's great, DM, but if any extraterrestrial intelligence visited this planet, I think anal probing would be last on their to-do list. But that was a great episode too. Thanks for lightening the mood 'round these parts.
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"Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."
Benjamin Franklin
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Jabbadabbado
Registered:
Mar '99
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Date Posted:
2/1/07 2:47pm
Subject:
RE: Extraterrestrials: real, or a hoax? v.2
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An infrared source that shines like a star but is not shining like a star in the other portions of the spectrum and you have a candidate for a Dysonian civilization.
Clearly, one convincing answer to why SETI hasn't discovered anything is that for all practical purposes it hasn't "looked" anywhere yet.
But it also seems to me that confirming the existence of a Dyson sphere is probably impossible with current technology - even if we find stars that radiate bizarrly in the infrared. We aren't sophisticated enough to tell whether we've observed any astroengineering projects or an unexplained natural event. It would be a little bit comforting maybe to know there were dozens of plausible Dyson sphere candidates out there, that the possibility hasn't been entirely ruled out, but that would be the case even if no Dyson sphere candidates have been found. There is no proving that ET life doesn't exist - at least in the foreseeable future.
The only confirmation would come from catching the Dysonian civilization in the act of waving at us.
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Malthusian Doomsday Quack
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Lowbacca_1977
Title: Senate Moderator
Registered:
Jun '06
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Date Posted:
2/1/07 4:44pm
Subject:
RE: Extraterrestrials: real, or a hoax? v.2
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Well, extraterrestrials DID shut down Boston the other day. I think that needs consideration here.
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dizfactor
Registered:
Aug '02
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Date Posted:
2/3/07 4:19pm
Subject:
RE: Extraterrestrials: real, or a hoax? v.2
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Lowbacca_1977 posted:
Well, extraterrestrials DID shut down Boston the other day. I think that needs consideration here.
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"Play is going to be for the 21st century what steam was to the 19th century."
Julian Dibbell
"You gotta love an elite killing force that you can fool by putting on a hat."
Gryph
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Darth Mischievous
Registered:
Oct '99
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Date Posted:
2/3/07 7:48pm
Subject:
RE: Extraterrestrials: real, or a hoax? v.2
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^
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