ET Contact: National Geographic Channel 10PM tonight

Wednesday, February 2, 2005, at 10P

Naked Science
Alien Contact [TV-G]
Many scientists believe that we are on the verge of contacting alien life-forms. Join the search for extraterrestrials, and hear from those convinced that life exists beyond our planet.

Also airs:
Thursday, February 3, 1:00A
Wednesday, February 9, 5:00P

Awesome! Thanks for the heads-up, ferretman

wow, cool
we just got that channel too, thanks for the heads up!

Too bad I'm going to miss it. Gotta work and whatnot, lol...

Originally posted by ferretman
Many scientists believe that we are on the verge of contacting alien life-forms.

I'd love to see what these scientists have to say. Unfortunately I won't be able to watch it.
I hope people that watch it will post comments on it .

Likewise, I don't have cable television. So, please, everyone out there who does, post about it. I'd love to hear their treatment of the issue!

would this be on european NG by any chance?

I think I may have this channel. Will post what I think about it and how they went about it.

I saw this show last night and thought it was pretty interesting. There were 3 or 4 people, I forget who (10pm is really late for me, especially on a weeknight ) but one was from SETI. Mostly all were talking about how the universe is *so* huge that it's next to impossible that we're alone. That was pretty much the main theme of the show. No debunking or conspiracy stuff really. Also, the ever-lastin' question of why we've not been contacted. Some said maybe ET isn't that smart and doesn't know how to travel, others said we're too 'young' to be bothered with. They had a clip of Stephen Hawking saying we don't want to invite ET and it will only be trouble! I was surprised at that.

They talked about what types of life there might be on other planets, intelligent or non-intelligent. Went into the kinds of Earth life: creatures living without light, rock eating bacteria, creatures frozen in ice. Things that we're looking for on Mars and Titan...evidence of any kinds of life.

What types of propulsion would ET use? How it's very expensive to even maintain the speed of light, and some incredible amount of money was given for a huge amount of fuel needed to propel a ship so far.

Also went into types of communication, how SETI's listening out for radio waves, how they're getting more satellites online and the SETI person said they believe they're going to find something by 2025. Another kind of communication looked at was something about watching out for a very strong kind of light which might be a way of sending signals. Sort of like flashing SOS messages with a flashlight. There was one kind of communication we got that was out of the ordinary, I think it was in the 70's. It was heard once for something like 70 seconds, then never heard again.

Lastly, some dude talking about what he thinks aliens would look like and that they probably wouldn't be humanoid at all. I personally thought he wanted a job with Lucasfilm or something for all the strange creature models he made

That's about all I can remember of the show...if I think of anything else I'll post again, or maybe someone else who's seen it can post.

Thank you, saria_vo, for the review.

This thread escaped my attention until this morning, and in lieu of actually watching the show, I'll take the debrief. Thx...

Yeah thanks for the review, the Stephen Hawkins bit sounded interesting and I’ll never buy into the "its to expensive to travel the speed of light" stuff because quite simply how would they know what it would cost ET? And even on earth i still don’t buy it.