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Most people probably think of "aliens" as: 1) The "grey" ones that are part of popular culture with large heads and big black eyes and tiny mouths, etc. 2) Movie aliens The above two things are not really aliens at all, they are conceptions based on alternative reality earths. People can't remove their "filters", or preconceived notions of what intelligent life would be. They don't start with a true "clean slate," and instead start with set ideas of what alien life *has* to have... internal organs like earth life, sensory organs like earth life, eyes, brain, mouth, ears, etc... Truly alien life forms might not have the same organs that life on earth has, and they might not even detect the same senses that we do... visible light, sound waves, etc. They probably wouldn't even have RNA/DNA and could be based on some completely unthought of type of base self replicating molecule. I'd like to see more science fiction that more openly explores the ideas and concepts of what true aliens could be.
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Feb 23, 2021 03:57
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| # ? Apr 25, 2024 00:25 |
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If intelligent life is the norm, and we are not special, why haven't we been contacted? personally i dont believe in alien life, but for no other reason than it seems almost impossible for life to evolve to the point of sentience
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Feb 23, 2021 03:58
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If they don’t have cheeks to clap what’s the point
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Feb 23, 2021 03:59
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Bula Vinaka posted:Most people probably think of "aliens" as: But they are subject to the same evolutionary pressures as we are, not being able to detect "visible" light would be a huge disadvantage outside of some pretty small niches...
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Feb 23, 2021 04:02
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HugeGrossBurrito posted:If they don’t have cheeks to clap what’s the point
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Feb 23, 2021 04:02
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HugeGrossBurrito posted:If they don’t have cheeks to clap what’s the point Maybe they're asking the same thing about us and wondering what's the point if we can't even evert our center nostril.
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Feb 23, 2021 04:16
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yaffle posted:But they are subject to the same evolutionary pressures as we are, not being able to detect "visible" light would be a huge disadvantage outside of some pretty small niches... 'visible light' is a side effect of the color output of our sun. some potential life-nurturing stars can emit outside of those bands - a different set of evolutionary pressures and potentially resulting in 'eyes' (or whatever passes as light sensing organs) sensitive to frequency ranges outside of our notion of visible light.
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Feb 23, 2021 05:53
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Delta-Wye posted:'visible light' is a side effect of the color output of our sun. some potential life-nurturing stars can emit outside of those bands - a different set of evolutionary pressures and potentially resulting in 'eyes' (or whatever passes as light sensing organs) sensitive to frequency ranges outside of our notion of visible light. Thus the quote marks. Even so the range of light that even the weirdest of suns puts out is going to have some cross-over with what we consider visible. (Is that true? Are there stars which emit only in infra-red/ ultra violet? IDK).
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Feb 23, 2021 06:13
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HugeGrossBurrito posted:If they don’t have cheeks to clap what’s the point
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Feb 23, 2021 06:17
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MH8aXH9XMvA A reminder that Tom DeLonge was right all along.
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Feb 23, 2021 06:22
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i like the alien in Solaris where it's actually just a giant ocean that sends people psychic manifestations of their deceased loved ones to gently caress with them
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Feb 23, 2021 06:28
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I think there's aliens and we'll prolly never meet one another because space is loving huge
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Feb 23, 2021 06:37
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Do Not Fear Jazz posted:If intelligent life is the norm, and we are not special, why haven't we been contacted? The thing about low probabilities is that given enough iterations they become nearly certain. There’s something like a quintillion stars in the observable universe, and it’s starting to look like planets are the norm rather than the exception. Life, in a very basic sense, is probably not vanishingly rare. I’ll grant that “metabolic process” and “self awareness” are miles apart, but there’s no reason to believe that evolution wouldn’t be a thing elsewhere, so it’s just a question of whether sentience is an advantageous trait. I’m not convinced that it is; a half billion years of natural selection produced me and all I do is panic about my inevitable demise Honky Dong Country posted:I think there's aliens and we'll prolly never meet one another because space is loving huge Yeah, if it turns out that FTL travel actually is literally impossible, then that puts a pretty big damper on expansion capability. Or there actually is a Great Filter. Dross fucked around with this message at 06:42 on Feb 23, 2021 |
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Feb 23, 2021 06:40
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Sally posted:i like the alien in Solaris where it's actually just a giant ocean that sends people psychic manifestations of their deceased loved ones to gently caress with them I was thinking that actually. Like the manifestations are meaningful to the people who meet them, but the alien entity "planet" itself, although is capable of sensing human beings' subconscious, has no real idea what any of it means on the level of a human mind. Perhaps the manifestations were simply its way of trying to say hello.
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Feb 23, 2021 06:43
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Honky Dong Country posted:I think there's aliens and we'll prolly never meet one another because space is loving huge and more specifically, ftl is almost certainly impossible. i am pretty reasonably convinced that microbial life exists elsewhere. there’s probably even multicellular life. taking that to the evolution of a race that has the wherewithal to consider themselves as people and even further to be able and wanting to explore outer space is less likely, imo.
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Feb 23, 2021 06:43
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Dross posted:Yeah, if it turns out that FTL travel actually is literally impossible, then that puts a pretty big damper on expansion capability. Or there actually is a Great Filter. "Spooky action at a distance" or quantum entanglement is real however, and is instantaneous from the perspective of anything living in the universe. If you could somehow gain control of just enough particles in a distant part of the universe, maybe you could get them to form a self replicating molecule, then get those molecules to become more complex. Maybe that's what RNA/DNA is?
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Feb 23, 2021 06:46
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Do Not Fear Jazz posted:If intelligent life is the norm, and we are not special, why haven't we been contacted? Space is big
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Feb 23, 2021 06:50
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We barely know what people were doing on our planet speaking and writing our languages a few thousand years ago. How the hell would we know if anyone was trying to contact us
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Feb 23, 2021 06:52
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They noticed complex life on earth a billion years ago and spent ten thousand years trying to contact us and then their entire solar system was consumed by a supernova, and then that happened hundreds more times, and it still didn't overlap with the existence of a language speaking life form on earth at all, nevermind one with anything capable of noticing anything weird like a radio telescope
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Feb 23, 2021 06:53
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Bloody posted:They noticed complex life on earth a billion years ago and spent ten thousand years trying to contact us and then their entire solar system was consumed by a supernova, and then that happened hundreds more times, and it still didn't overlap with the existence of a language speaking life form on earth at all, nevermind one with anything capable of noticing anything weird like a radio telescope i mean ok but “complex life” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. we didn’t even get bitsy animals until like 600mya. hypothetical aliens that are hypothetically so inclined might have their own bio signature metrics for which they search though
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Feb 23, 2021 06:59
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I wonder if there could be something like this, but instead of sound waves, it's some kind of quantum resonance, and instead of salt crystals, it's hydrogen atoms or maybe even some smaller quantum particle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvJAgrUBF4w I wonder if would at least be possible to communicate with other intelligences in our universe using quantum entanglement.
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Feb 23, 2021 07:02
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you probably can’t use the phenomenon to send any information on its own, and especially not ftl. but more to the point since everyone likes silly theories and cries out “thought experiment” even if you could somehow make this star trek subspace comms tech you’d have to arrange this setup with one of these alien races via some classical sublight methods, which unfortunately brings us back to the problem of being segregated by time
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Feb 23, 2021 07:15
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maybe we havent looked in every direction yet, like theres up, down, left, right, i think theres some other ones too
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Feb 23, 2021 07:19
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Do Not Fear Jazz posted:If intelligent life is the norm, and we are not special, why haven't we been contacted? it’s because space is loving huge OP sagan said some drake equation poo poo with reasonable parameters would put the average distribution of intelligent life at one species every 200 light years and even if there was a civilisation capable of somehow travellling or communicating over that distance the chances of them being at a comparable period of development (within say, 5000 years) are slim as poo poo too unless we can crack some grand unified theory which removes the constraints of spacetime, we won’t be meeting any alien space babes
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Feb 23, 2021 07:53
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I've always suspected that any alien species that attempts to go to space in the first place is already hosed intrinsically. If a species doesn't outstrip its resources it has no incentive to explore or colonize. But FTL is impossible and offworld colonization is prohibitively costly, so they accomplish nothing, burn through their nonrenewables, and sink into a permanent dark age or wipe themselves out. In short, all sentient life invents Bitcoin, and then it dies as a result.
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Feb 23, 2021 10:53
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Bula Vinaka posted:I wonder if would at least be possible to communicate with other intelligences in our universe using quantum entanglement. Maybe I should have Google'd that. The answer is it won't work, because if you force an entangled particle into a particular state, you break the entanglement. You can only receive. You can't send.  https://www.forbes.com/sites/chadorzel/2016/05/04/the-real-reasons-quantum-entanglement-doesnt-allow-faster-than-light-communication/
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Feb 23, 2021 15:59
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Sure, alien life has to exist, and even intelligent alien life. But for some of it to make its way through the vast distances of space to spread to our little corner of the galaxy it would realistically need to be prodigious. Like, really good at reproducing and spreading it's genetics. Aliens are hung is what I'm saying
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Feb 23, 2021 16:37
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The Cosmic microwave background is a womb, there are no aliens, only babby.
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Feb 23, 2021 16:49
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People convinced aliens don't exist because they haven't contacted us is like being convinced humans don't exist because dogs can't answer cellphones.
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Feb 23, 2021 17:05
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mediaphage posted:and more specifically, ftl is almost certainly impossible. Space is huge though. Andromeda is 2.50 Mly away. If there are gray aliens with big eyes colonizing it for 2 million years already, we won't see it for some time. They could have even blown it up by now somehow for all we know. And if there aren't/weren't even some tribal dudes there, there are shitzillion more galaxies out there, and even further away, and all we can see is their past, so if there was like 1% chance that each galaxy has at least one planet with some microbes, some of those can evolve to spacefaring aliens, but we will never know about them
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Feb 23, 2021 17:07
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Asterite34 posted:People convinced aliens don't exist because they haven't contacted us is like being convinced humans don't exist because dogs can't answer cellphones. lol
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Feb 23, 2021 17:11
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Hopefully first contact with aliens goes like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMjTaYih-ak
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Feb 23, 2021 17:15
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commando in tophat posted:Space is huge though. Andromeda is 2.50 Mly away. If there are gray aliens with big eyes colonizing it for 2 million years already, we won't see it for some time. They could have even blown it up by now somehow for all we know. And if there aren't/weren't even some tribal dudes there, there are shitzillion more galaxies out there, and even further away, and all we can see is their past, so if there was like 1% chance that each galaxy has at least one planet with some microbes, some of those can evolve to spacefaring aliens, but we will never know about them ok? also just because you have bacteria doesn’t remotely mean you’re going to get multicellular life out of it, let alone sentient or even spacefaring groups, which is my point. yes. space is big. but just because life happened here doesn’t actually mean it’s happened elsewhere. i am hopeful, though.
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Feb 23, 2021 17:24
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mediaphage posted:ok? I think the sheer vastness of space and all the places it could happen suggest that it probably has happened multiple times.
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Feb 23, 2021 17:36
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Aliens don't hsve butts and that is why they come here all the time. The whole "eating rear end" thing originated in an alien misunderstanding, but it's not exactly a coincidence it started when anal probes started going out of fashion.
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Feb 23, 2021 17:52
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Honky Dong Country posted:I think the sheer vastness of space and all the places it could happen suggest that it probably has happened multiple times. i would 100% believe this if we ever find signs of life unrelated to our own phylogenies (i.e., life on mars would be awesome; life on mars that didn’t originate on earth or vice versa would be paradigm shifting).
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Feb 23, 2021 18:12
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what if there is a race of aliens out in space also shitposting on a forum asking the same question
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Feb 23, 2021 18:19
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Asterite34 posted:People convinced aliens don't exist because they haven't contacted us is like being convinced humans don't exist because dogs can't answer cellphones. 
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Feb 23, 2021 18:20
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mediaphage posted:and more specifically, ftl is almost certainly impossible. this is about my thoughts
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Feb 23, 2021 18:21
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Ahh see but that's a landline
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Feb 23, 2021 18:22
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