This music remind anyone else of Pink Floyd's "Interstellar Overdrive"?

Well, traveling at 100,000 mph, it would take a mere 93 million years to reach it. The solar probe on close approach to the sun can reach about 200km/s, so only about 864,000 years that way. I doubt we'll be able to travel faster than that in interstellar space in the next few hundred years.

Yea, we're not going to these planets any time soon. Let's hope for our inter-dimensional friends to hook us up with some loopholes to travel faster, eh?

They're fallen angels impersonating aliens..many UFO researchers have concluded (even secular ones) that UFOs are not interstellar but interdiminsional.









>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:^On what day did the Lord create butt-raping reptilian alien demons, and couldn't he have rested on that day too?

Man owns everything nature produces, according to the Bible and free market philosophy.

I don't really see why anyone would pause to consider the moral and ethical consequences of doing these sorts of things, as long as there's money to be made.

I suspect that in our own solar system, our progress is going to be slow enough that we'll have a pretty damn good idea of whether there's life someplace before we strip mine and terraform it. I also think that at first the cost/benefit analysis will make it so we'll prioritize scientific research of alien life above mining and colonizing.

Once we start talking about an interstellar migration, I think all bets are off though. The cost of establishing the first few interstellar colonies is going to be so high, we're probably not going to blink twice about eradicating even sentient life to secure them.

Maybe once we've exterminated a few planetary ecosystems (including our own, naturally), some sort of environmentalist movement will rise up to try to protest the expansion of the colonial empire, but they'll just be ignored as dirty fucking hippies who hate humanity.

Of course, there's always the chance that we'll outgrow capitalism before we start flying to the stars. It'd be nice if we at least learned how to treat every member of our own species as if they're people before we started encountering people who definitely aren't human beings.

A guy can dream, I guess.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Given life on any planet I would not say that intelligence is inevitable. For us, intelligence and self-awareness was just a particular adaptation - that didn't have to happen, we could have gotten an extra row of teeth instead.

Still though, given the vast amount of potential life-bearing planets out there, it must happen sometimes - and that's enough. That's why i think something like the Prime Directive is keeping us isolated. I also doubt that radio waves are used for interstellar chatting. Subspace communication FTW!

>> ^Xaielao:

>> ^deathcow:
of course life is everywhere

I'm inclined to agree. Considering the shear wealth of life on this planet alone with it's ability to survive what we thought just fifty years ago was impossible conditions. It sure seems to me that life isn't just a possibility, but the norm. It's certainly been shown in the lab that life strives to exist, that it just isn't a random event. And we as well now know that life began on this planet very early in it's own life. Indeed I think that even intelligent life (though I think that is a bad term in and of itself) is inevitable given time.

>> ^NetRunner:

More seriously, I've always felt like Drake's equation is missing something. What if there is some way of communicating across interstellar distances that's better than radio? What if the amount of time that civilizations take to make radio obsolete is ridiculously short, like only 100-200 years?
Maybe the sky is humming with all sorts of signals...that we haven't yet developed the technology to hear.


Well we're playing with radio waves which is part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Now, I don't know what makes radio waves so special when it comes to transferring data. I mean aside from the fact that they're harmless to us (large wavelength, low frequency, low energy) there's nothing inherent about tuning into those frequencies. Imagine too, that radio waves travel at light speed. That's the fastest we know ANYTHING to travel. If were to pick up a transmission that was sent a thousand years ago, that solar system could be as good as gone by now.

well maybe not a 1000 years...unless it was their last cry for help.

More seriously, I've always felt like Drake's equation is missing something. What if there is some way of communicating across interstellar distances that's better than radio? What if the amount of time that civilizations take to make radio obsolete is ridiculously short, like only 100-200 years?

Maybe the sky is humming with all sorts of signals...that we haven't yet developed the technology to hear.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

I don't think you can make the assumption that nurturing parents are a prereq for civilization. You're being mammalist. >> ^direpickle:

>> ^dag:
It's because we're mammals. All the love and affection we feel is a product of our need to pair-up, spawn and nurture our offspring. When we do meet ET - we may find that they laugh at our idea of love - if we haven't by then figured out its true nature.
For aliens, I can imagine love would be getting close to mathematical perfection - a near perfect sphere, a beautifully balanced equation, a well-thought-out proof.

>> ^quantumushroom:
All true. Humans are irrational. If aliens could invade disguised as baby seals, kittens and teddy bears they'd take over in a week without firing a single death ray.


>> ^Drachen_Jager:
This thread just shows how terrible most people's thought processes are.
Seals are abundant, in absolutely no danger from a species point of view. The hunting of seals is not having a significant impact on the environment. They are cute. People defend them to the death.
Many types of sharks are endangered, play a vital role in the ecosystem. Many marine biologists feel that the overfishing of sharks is a large part of the reason why coral reefs are dying out. Nobody cares that they're being destroyed at a prodigious rate.



Civilization and what we think of as intelligence themselves are products of the ability and need to care for our tribe/family/offspring/whatever. Any ET will have gone through that stage in their own evolution, even if they've outgrown it by the time we run into them. You're not going to develop language, much less interstellar travel, with an animal that abandons its young and lives solitarily.

>> ^dag:

It's because we're mammals. All the love and affection we feel is a product of our need to pair-up, spawn and nurture our offspring. When we do meet ET - we may find that they laugh at our idea of love - if we haven't by then figured out its true nature.
For aliens, I can imagine love would be getting close to mathematical perfection - a near perfect sphere, a beautifully balanced equation, a well-thought-out proof.

>> ^quantumushroom:
All true. Humans are irrational. If aliens could invade disguised as baby seals, kittens and teddy bears they'd take over in a week without firing a single death ray.


>> ^Drachen_Jager:
This thread just shows how terrible most people's thought processes are.
Seals are abundant, in absolutely no danger from a species point of view. The hunting of seals is not having a significant impact on the environment. They are cute. People defend them to the death.
Many types of sharks are endangered, play a vital role in the ecosystem. Many marine biologists feel that the overfishing of sharks is a large part of the reason why coral reefs are dying out. Nobody cares that they're being destroyed at a prodigious rate.




Civilization and what we think of as intelligence themselves are products of the ability and need to care for our tribe/family/offspring/whatever. Any ET will have gone through that stage in their own evolution, even if they've outgrown it by the time we run into them. You're not going to develop language, much less interstellar travel, with an animal that abandons its young and lives solitarily.

I think the Prime Directive is one of the best, most hard-sci-fi aspects of Star Trek.

I would hope that any interstellar civilization we create or join would have the same policy.

I agree with most here. His premise is shaky, if not faulty completely. DNA is often described as computer code for living beings. DNA is simply a solution to a problem... the problem is: replication of the species. Specifically, replication of more DNA.

DNA is not a measure of intelligence or a total measure of potential. After all, I'm fairly certain alien life wouldn't have DNA at all. But even if they used DNA as a means of reproduction and ordering of life, they still have the same basic problem to solve. They would have evolved on a planet.. primarily evolving to survive long enough to create copies of itself... I daresay this wouldn't give any sort of instinctive insights to cosmic mysteries, no matter how advanced they were.

Educational techniques, and the mean average intelligence would be much higher than us (assuming they have interstellar travel and we do not) but I don't believe it would be terribly anthropocentric to believe that with equal time to advance our own educational techniques and mean average intelligence we could be on par of any advanced intelligence.

To believe otherwise would be to go against the pursuit of science, art, and literature as hopeless tasks whose limits will someday be reached... meaning there will come a point someday in the future where we cannot learn more, we cannot create more, and there is nothing left in the realm of the knowable.

Perhaps this is an incredibly naive statement of faith... but I have a firm belief that there will never be a time when the human race cannot solve another problem. I honestly believe our potential is limitless.

I must not have expressed myself clearly. But what I meant was that I believe that there is far greater difference between the geniuses of our society and the average Joe. I have always believed in the bell curve distribution of human intelligence.

I know what Neil meant though but I guess we agree that we don't know anything essentially at this time. I still think there is little intelligent life out there. If it does exist we will probably not have contact for several hundred thousand years due to the vast interstellar distances involved and lack of any real scientific theory for faster then light travel.

>> ^dannym3141:
Yeah, but are you really gonna place a bet against the odds that between now and 14 billion years ago, any hydrogen atom in your body was NEVER part of a star? Like it just floated around for 14 billion years avoiding all contact with all other material, landed on earth perhaps in a science lesson, went into a test tube thanks to a series of freak localised winds, they did the burning hydrogen trick showing that it made water as a result, which then worked its way around the sewer system which you one day drunk and it's still in you now?
Or were you just trying to show how clever you were(n't)?Yes in that way it is true. It is very likely that most hydrogen atoms were part of a star at one time or another. I misinterpreted that statement as all atoms were made in a star.
However there must still be a lot of primordial hydrogen in the interstellar medium which will be incorporated into molecular clouds out of which stars form.

>> ^Enzoblue:
Don't wanna be 'that guy', but this was really poorly done in my opinion. Way too few interstellar references, the orbit lines made it all too unreal, and the sense of scale I got was way out of whack. Where's the Orion nebula? Where's Andromeda in relation to us? No, we just zoom out and back in and learn nothing. Check me off as disappointed.


Agreed. Plus: It gives the wrong impression the universe is spherical.

Don't wanna be 'that guy', but this was really poorly done in my opinion. Way too few interstellar references, the orbit lines made it all too unreal, and the sense of scale I got was way out of whack. Where's the Orion nebula? Where's Andromeda in relation to us? No, we just zoom out and back in and learn nothing. Check me off as disappointed.