A great post and fascinating read, heres two points I've conjured up regarding it:

- The main problem with this argument is the ideology of ET life is similar to human life. We have barely scratched the surface of life on this planet let alone the galaxy. To presume ET has correlating interests, culture and personality to humans is contraversial.

- For me there is no such thing as perfection, thus like all life especially sentinent beings everything makes some form of mistakes. Technological superiority doesnt go hand in hand with perfection.

Perhaps it is of ET wishes to reveal their identity through abductees, thus preparing human life for the eventual integration with them.

[edit on 26-5-2006 by kolo_heights]

An individual alien could in fact be a bumbling fool. Particularly if the 'hive' or 'collective' mentality is a factor in their cognitive functions.

Far to often you see a tendency to anthropomorphize alien cultures. That tendency is probably strengthened by the general description of aliens as basically sharing our structure (two legs on bottom, arms with hands, etc.). That's odd, considering the diversity of forms on this planet, aside from humans of course. I don't think anyone has ever reported contact with a creature sporting multiple tentacles.

I think any attempt to attribute any behaviors, tendencies, traits, etc. on alien life is simply jumping the gun.

From what I can see, your rather cynical post was a back door attempt to insult the common poster and/or the topics they write about. I will not deny that the average IQ attached to the fingertips of said posters is less than stellar but I do believe that you are handicapping yourself via the opinion conveyed.

A contemptive attitude makes an otherwise enjoyable visit to the forum restrictive in that some good solid subjects (admittedly few but present none the less) are passed over based on peripheral attitude alone. Furthermore, there are more than a few very intelligent and interesting posters introducing subject matter seeded in reality. Many of which are quite spectacular and thought provoking.

While I will admit that there are far too many 'reptilians rule the earth' style subjects being discussed with pavlovian voracity, if you pass on too many...

....you may miss the one you've been waiting for my friend.






[edit on 26-5-2006 by jbondo]

1. While life-forms and their thinking equipment may differ, intelligence, I humbly submit, is always the same everywhere. We can infer this by observation, because human beings are not the only creatures on earth with intelligence; we are only the most intelligent. Do you find it hard to figure out why dogs and cats do the things they do? Or even beehives and ant colonies? Of course not. Why? Because intelligence must submit to the physical restrictions imposed on it by the laws of nature, which oblige it to be a particular, recognizable thing and act in a particular, recognizable way.

2. I agree wholeheartedly that this forum needs more tentacles, but life-forms on Earth are not really so different from one another, you know. Any zoomorph bigger than a bacterium is symmetrical about a central axis, has a mouth at one end (the same end that contains the brain or main ganglion and most of the sensory apparatus), vents for waste at the other, and limbs arranged in pairs or multiples of pairs in between. Cut them open and you'll find many more such similarities. This is obviously because they evolved from a common ancestor; beings from other planets certainly need not conform to this general arrangement. However, the arrangement has been so massively successful on Earth that it would probably evolve on other planets (earthlike ones, at least). Symmetry, for example, confers strong evolutionary advantages, so the symmetrical would devour the asymmetrical very early on.

Having said all that, I would qualify it by quoting J.B.S. Haldane's famous maxim: the universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.

3. I wouldn't have thought it needed to be pointed out, but evidently it is: Iain M. Banks' Culture is a literary invention, created for literary purposes. It is naive to assume that science-fiction writers always believe that their fictions are guesses at the nature of how things really are Out There. If Banks does have a point to make, it's a political one: namely, that given a sufficiently advanced technology, the Socialist Utopia can actually be made real. To which my own reply would be a corollary to Clarke's Third Law (any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic). The corollary being: yep, it would take a society of magicians to make Socialism work.

And now, dear friends, it is my reluctant duty...

Originally posted by jbondo
From what I can see, your rather cynical post was a back door attempt to insult the common poster and/or the topics they write about.

No, it's an attempt to raise the imaginative tone a little bit, to make things nicer for people who aren't necessarily true believers: to promote the creation a few gourmet treats for those of us who are weary of eating hamburger.

A contemptive attitude makes an otherwise enjoyable visit to the forum restrictive.

I prefer to think of it as a mental pollutant filter, the sort of thing that prevents the mind from filling up with reconstituted potato paste. But you're free to call it as you see it.

pavlovian voracity

Is this a conditioned impulse to devour large quantities of a sugary meringue dessert topped with fruits, or am I missing something really important?

[edit on 27-5-2006 by Astyanax]