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

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*promote

Promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued - promote requested by eric3579.

On one hand it does perhaps lack imagination, but on the other it makes perfect sense that aliens we first find would be much like us since they'd be attracted by our radio waves, and to become a space traveling civilisation they'd likely have similar motivations and their brains/reasoning capabilities would have evolved in a similar way. Afterall the human brain seems to be hardwired to find other humans - we see faces in the clouds and random floor patterns etc.

That new movie Arrival (2016) (not the Charlie Sheen 90s one) did a great job of unique aliens.

I guess another reason why fiction makes aliens like us is so that it allows a story to be told without the story getting bogged down on the details (unless that is the focus of the story).

The problem I had with those aliens in Arrival was their main purpose was to help humanity out so humanity could be used to help them at a future date.

Now if that isn't utterly base humanity I don't know what is.

Exactly. I see a phrase all the time:

'If there are aliens in our galaxy, why haven't we detected evidence of them?'

Perhaps because they are so different from what we even recognize as life that we don't even know what we are looking for. Perhaps the use of radio waves to communicate is something they haven't done in so long, that using it to send a message in space is unfathomable. Or perhaps they never even used that technology in the first place. It's possible that their own physiology would make such technology pointless.

The point is, we're looking for them in very human ways and expecting something very human to come back. Perhaps a civilization at a stage similar to ours out there is asking the same question and using a technology to search that we ourselves have no understanding of. They could be our galactic neighbors and our differing biologies and technology could be so different, that wouldn't even recognize each other as life.

On the flip side of that coin, I once had a UFO experience that was anything but 'lights in the night sky' and the object did things our planes couldn't hope to do. So who knows, maybe they are already here.

When aliens could be anything you have to look for everything. It's not that SETI etc don't understand that life out there may be completely beyond anything we could imagine or detect...it's just that you'd be wasting your time gazing in to space not knowing what you are looking for or trying to detect the undetectable.

I mean rly. "Beyond Imagination" ... "We need more imagination"... dunno.

What an extraordinary phrase. Call me a party pooper on this one but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I for one have no faith in the quantum maths mumbo jumbo that says extra dimensions are possible.

Devil's advocate:

First up, If we're looking for "something we can't imagine", by definition we are unable to search for it.

Second, there's every possibility that aliens ARE very similar to us. There's a principle known as the Mediocrity Principle that states that if you pick a thing at random from a set, it's more likely to common than unusual. In this case, we are picking from the (hypothetical) set of life-sustaining planets, and using the only example we're aware of: Earth.

It's not unreasonable to assume that Earth is typical of life-sustaining planets. There doesn't appear to be anything particularly special about it.... it's a rocky planet in the "Goldilocks zone" where water is liquid. We've found plenty of those.

So there's actually a good possibility that life on other planets could face the same evolutionary pressures and arrive at the same solutions.

Aliens might not be that different at all.

All you have to do is smoke DMT to see a hypercube, 4 dimensional visuals where any where you look, every side, is perfectly 3D. That's an oversimplification of that experience but if the brain is able to "see" it through experience, there's probably something to it, scientifically speaking and beyond just the brain, lol