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Maybe they should look for signs of extraterrestrial death. You know, cemeteries, mausoleums, weapons of mass destruction...

I still think about this a lot, lol. And I totally agree with his reference to extraterrestrials living on a different wavelength/dimension. And I always come back to what humanity has accomplished in such a short time period relative to the Universe itself.

There's no doubt that extra-dimensions exist that we have no clue about, so there could be existence beyond our capability to imagine in those dimensions. But, even more so - the Universe as we know it is chaotic in a way that it wouldn't be complicated to imagine advanced civilizations finding a way out of the "material" world somehow to find permanent safety. Which might mean transcending bodies into another form that can exist in one of these "realms". Humans are babies in the Universe - the impossible is possible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A10V_t95VfI

The human species measures elevation relative to sea level, as they are both a terrestrial and a single-planet species. So to adopt the common parlance of this species one must accept that Mount Everest is indeed the tallest mountain on Earth. To vocally argue against this point amongst the humans would either clue these clothed-primates to your extraterrestrial origins, or may otherwise cause them to view you as the most haughty of pedants, and cast aspersions on you who revels in the intentional abstrusity of abstract technicality.

In defence of E.T, The Extraterrestrial, although not a particularly good game it wasn't the worst game ever for the Atari 2600. It really did contribute to Atari's downfall though, since Atari management ordered 5 million copies of the cartridge (of which 3.5 million ended up being returned).

Snopes has a pretty good article on the subject - http://www.snopes.com/business/market/atari.asp

I think the biggest questions is why does Russia allow small extraterrestrials to compete in human competitions?

Now try the same thing without any vowels at all.
"Mrglyblrgltrd..."
That's spitting a hot rap right there...just ask any extraterrestrial.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'peter k rosenthal, spielberg' to 'peter k rosenthal, spielberg, electronic turtle, extraterrestrial' - edited by xxovercastxx

upvoted for the conversation sparked, not the video in and of itself.

Just to throw my two cents in: I think the vast majority of civilizations out there probably have intelligences similar to our own just because that is what evolution would dictate. This is of course based only on observing our own evolutionary path which is unfortunately the only model we have access too. But it does actually tell us quite a bit, based on an environment similar to ours it would appear that intelligence would plateau at a certain point because it just isn't beneficial to beings in early societal stages. Ie: you only need a certain amount of intelligence to outsmart a mammoth, this does not involve an innate understanding of complex mathematical principles.

That being said, since there are (probably) billions of planets that could support life I'm sure there are a couple outliers whose intelligent life has a more innate understanding of complex knowledge. It would "probably" be more nuanced than just beings whose intelligence completely dwarfs our own. Parts of their brain (or however you want to translate it to extraterrestrial anatomy) which handle physics or mathematics etc. may be larger giving an added dexterity to problem solving in that SPECIFIC cognitive fields. Similarly to how certain people have added capacity in one portion of their brain or another but does not make them gods in comparison to other.

The reality is that we probably already have met the superior godlike species and we created them. Computers already excel vastly over us in many areas and I'd assume it's only a matter of time before they surpass us entirely.

But hey there are almost assuredly an near infinite amount of planets out there, so maybe there is one where GOD evolved?

It's not just him, it's the whole presentation. They've created a nice but fairly ordinary dress out of novel materials with a borderline cutting edge technology, but the speech and the soundtrack are suited for a company announcing that they've discovered extraterrestrial life (and they'll be available for purchase immediately).

In 1981, Frank Tipler[3] put forth an argument that extraterrestrial intelligences do not exist, based on the absence of von Neumann probes. Given even a moderate rate of replication and the history of the galaxy, such probes should already be common throughout space and thus, we should have already encountered them. Because we have not, this shows that extraterrestrial intelligences do not exist. This is thus a resolution to the Fermi paradox—that is, the question of why we have not already encountered extraterrestrial intelligence if it is common throughout the universe.

A response[4] came from Carl Sagan and William Newman. Now known as Sagan's Response, it pointed out that in fact Tipler had underestimated the rate of replication, and that von Neumann probes should have already started to consume most of the mass in the galaxy. Any intelligent race would therefore, Sagan and Newman reasoned, not design von Neumann probes in the first place, and would try to destroy any von Neumann probes found as soon as they were detected. As Robert Freitas[5] has pointed out the assumed capacity of von Neumann probes described by both sides of the debate are unlikely in reality, and more modestly reproducing systems are unlikely to be observable in their effects on our Solar System or the Galaxy as a whole.

Another objection to the prevalence of von Neumann probes is that civilizations of the type that could potentially create such devices may have inherently short lifetimes, and self-destruct before so advanced a stage is reached, through such events as biological or nuclear warfare, nanoterrorism, resource exhaustion, ecological catastrophe, pandemics due to antibiotic resistance.

A simple workaround exists to avoid the over-replication scenario. Radio transmitters, or other means of wireless communication, could be used by probes programmed not to replicate beyond a certain density (such as five probes per cubic parsec) or arbitrary limit (such as ten million within one century), analogous to the Hayflick limit in cell reproduction. One problem with this defence against uncontrolled replication is that it would only require a single probe to malfunction and begin unrestricted reproduction for the entire approach to fail — essentially a technological cancer — unless each probe also has the ability to detect such malfunction in its neighbours and implements a seek and destroy protocol.

wikipedia my friend

Tags for this video have been changed from 'life, extraterrestrial, 57sec' to 'life, extraterrestrial, richard dawkins' - edited by kulpims

>> ^JiggaJonson:

With the votes being 1/1/28/1, you've touched on something that is clearly, as you put it, divisive. </sarcasm>
It may be divisive among the troglodytes that make up a good hunk of society, but I would hope, for most who are not ignorant of what evolution is, that this is not even a question. What @zombieater brings up about abiogenesis is something I agree with. @gwiz665 makes a good point too. It's just hard to answer a question like this when the question is not very specific.
On another note, I also don't believe extraterrestrial evolution is that far fetched; with The Voyager 1 reaching the boundaries of our solar system, I think it's certainly possible that even we are colonizing a few cells if by some chance they make their way to a habitable planet. That situation, however, requires that Darwinian evolution exists.


Wow, the result... I figured we'd have a few more for Creationism and especially Theistic Evolution, BUT all I can say is that I'm guessing education (YES, this is a big player!) played a large part into the outcome of this poll. The only two things that could be making such a large play on this poll is, one: education--this is pretty straight forward, but basically everyone that voted had a considerable higher source of education (or perhaps even better grades, thus more attention and better retention of the knowledge they learned). Two: cultural (or better said sometimes as: community education), this could be due to the literal source of where this poll is located such as in this case, "The Internet", meaning it attracts a certain type of person and ONLY persons that have access to the Internet (which already means that those people most likely have access to things you only commonly see in a First World society--especially if it seems to be a common place discussion...); second, the culture and community around the person voting. In this case we could say that the culture and community are both the Internet. The last choice is of course your personal one; we all have it in the end, but this poll was taken on the Internet and shown to have a stark difference between a "real world" poll and a tongue-and-cheek version.

Of course the original was the U.S. only and also was across all types of people. It would be interesting to go back to those polls and have them mark out the reasoning for why they made the choices they did. Was it religion? Was it religion, but evolution is on their minds they just don't think science has proved it yet...? Was it science? Was it what they were taught (belief)? Did they guess or just pick what they thought was right? Lets see a poll on that as well.
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For example if you go to this page here: wiki-answers: Do you believe in Creationism or Evolution and why?

It REALLY is a Creationism page! Sure they "try" to be nice to evolution, but apparently whoever understands evolution there knows about it in a 1970's Junior High textbook read-through half-assed way, looking back after 47 years they wrote a very brief summary of what they "thought it was (after writing some stuff down from Wikipedia too flesh it out)" and then left it for the masses.

They even put up links, plenty of creationist, creationism, or young-earth scientist links, BUT when they got to evolution they put up:...not even the Wikipedia entry. THEN they call it an answer on a page were people go looking for answers and this is a page that gets HIGH HITS from Google! They can barely even explain what the word evolution is, they know know enough to not get "clowned" by every single person.

BUT, here's the thing I bet the majority of the people that voted yes for evolution on this poll COULD in fact tear into this person and make a mockery out of that page. The page tries to be friendly to what I would call: "Atheist Suckers". They come on soft and nice, telling you how religion got you down, but guess what there is so much evidence that is just plain strange--it makes no sense.

As I said though, there is absolutely no page to back up their claims; just some names of idiotic scientists that most likely were Dentists and decided it was their job to tell you that carbon dating is fake, and so on and so forth.
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To me it is as clear as day, but maybe I'll FORCE someone to make a poll besides me on this subject. Why did you vote for evolution, creationism, intelligent design, or the aliens (don't forget comedy for the alien choice ), or maybe just quickly post below as it would much quicker get the job done and allow for every response in the book, including multi-responses. Maybe even tell what choices you were originally if you changed over time and HOW those choices changed (was it due to faith or education)!?

With the votes being 1/1/28/1, you've touched on something that is clearly, as you put it, divisive. </sarcasm>

It may be divisive among the troglodytes that make up a good hunk of society, but I would hope, for most who are not ignorant of what evolution is, that this is not even a question. What @zombieater brings up about abiogenesis is something I agree with. @gwiz665 makes a good point too. It's just hard to answer a question like this when the question is not very specific.

On another note, I also don't believe extraterrestrial evolution is that far fetched; with The Voyager 1 reaching the boundaries of our solar system, I think it's certainly possible that even we are colonizing a few cells if by some chance they make their way to a habitable planet. That situation, however, requires that Darwinian evolution exists.

I'm with Fermi.

Interestingly, the Fermi Paradox does a better job at disproving time travel than it does extraterrestrial civilization. Where you can argue that all the ETs just haven't developed space travel sufficient to the task or simply have not stumbled across us yet, the same cannot be said of time travelers. (i.e. If it was possible, we would have already met them, etc.)