Why Alien Life Would Be Our Doom - The Great Filter

a reply to: nexotop

The movie 'ET' had a benevolent alien with bad guy government agents, and it was a pretty big hit.

originally posted by: data5091
I am in the camp of many scientists who think life is all over out there, and as I have mentioned before it has been suggested our military/government is aware of at least 6 civilizations, if not more in our own Milky Way Galaxy. With a now estimated 2 TRILLION galaxies in the known universe the odds are pretty good there is life all over the universe, and some of it has been visiting us for some time and will continue to do so.

There is a very vast difference between "life" and being a robust space faring sentient race. Nature or evolution has not been shown to select for intelligence over size and teeth.

The 'odds' are we are, right now, the only sentient species in the Galaxy, and we are unlikely to ever be 'space faring'.

a reply to: Blue_Jay33




I love kurzgesagt always makes you think.

Sometimes I wonder if maybe we are just so far away from any other life that it only appears that we are alone.
OR that the randomness of an infinite universe is what it takes to randomly create one planet with life.Like taking all the mater that exists and mixing it all together over and over until life emerges. Each big bang a new mixing.

a reply to: HummaKavula

they got a very long wait ahead!

Asimov wrote a story about this. I forgot the name of the story, but the gist was this ; There indeed were multiple sentient species in the Universe. They had spanning empires, space exploration, trade and even went to war with one another. They over-saw peace deals between themselves, declared planets as preservations, developed medicine and art mutually....

But...

By the time Man had become sentient and spacefaring, they were gone.... No civilization lasts forever, even when they work together. Basically Mankind had "just missed them" and was late to the show. Yes there was intelligent life out there once, but we outlived them in our stone-age, and were now utterly alone in the cosmos....

If I remember right, this revelation did not bode well with our psyche. It caused a decline in the overall moral of the species, spacefaring was forgotten (what's the point?), science and inventions slowly halted, and in the end we all died from a large war out of boredom, essentially.

a reply to: butcherguy

You are right, of course! Guess ET gets lost for me in the bombardment of attacking off Earth depictions...
Thanks for the reminder-

Ether there is other life or not .
Thing is ether way it will be a very hard thing for humans to deal with .
O sure we all want E to show up and as a individual it would be fine but there are 7.5 billion of us and most will ot react in a positive way .
No matter how peaceful the aliens may be many people and Governments will feal they are a threat .
And THEY are say the peaceful aliens show humans how to make unlimited food not needing a device bigger then could fit in your closet . This alone would destroy our way of life in a manor which we may never recover from .

But knowing you guys ill do a better one .Lets say the aliens come here set up factory's and start producing vecihals that have unlimited range and dont every need out side fuel added in the life span of it .

Now you jsut destroyed the one thing that runs the world oil .
there is a 1000 different thing they could be so far ahead of us in when we got teh info it would be such a change we could not adapt fast enough .

Juts finding one cell well people could handle that but even still teh shock would cause all kinds of shifts

Well, the way spacetime works, I supposed it's possible that all of the "alien" life in the universe could just be different iterations of ourselves -- or whatever crazy critters or machines that preceded us or follow us -- at various points in Earth's development in both the future and the past.

Well, if the nuclear fallout on Mars is valid then it makes one think.

Either we were space-faring at one time, or an alien race nuked it.

If it was an alien race, then the silence might be because any technological civilization gets annihilated by a preemptive strike.

That's a depressing, uber-Darwinian scenario... and maybe part of the reason such info might be hushed.

We likely shouldn't make a racket until we know what's out there... thinking about a smart, xenophobic, paranoid 13 billion year old civilization makes me pee a bit.

originally posted by: Maverick7

originally posted by: data5091
I am in the camp of many scientists who think life is all over out there, and as I have mentioned before it has been suggested our military/government is aware of at least 6 civilizations, if not more in our own Milky Way Galaxy. With a now estimated 2 TRILLION galaxies in the known universe the odds are pretty good there is life all over the universe, and some of it has been visiting us for some time and will continue to do so.

There is a very vast difference between "life" and being a robust space faring sentient race. Nature or evolution has not been shown to select for intelligence over size and teeth.

The 'odds' are we are, right now, the only sentient species in the Galaxy, and we are unlikely to ever be 'space faring'.

I disagree on those points. Looking at the estimated age of the galaxy we reside, the age of our solar system, the known rates of evolution and evolutionary periodicity, combined with recently well documented evidence of hydrocarbon and other organic molecules arising from UV photolysis, along with personal experiences and anecodotea of others, along with various forms of evidence over the last several thousand years...


We are certainly not the only intelligent species in the Milky Way.

Alien life is everwhere. Dont let them fool you. This is about information control, not science. Name one thing in nature that has only happened once.

I hope we are one of the first intelligent species to reach the stars together we can rule the galaxy we have to accept our destiny.
Mahahahaha but better us than incect people.

originally posted by: testingtesting
I hope we are one of the first intelligent species to reach the stars together we can rule the galaxy we have to accept our destiny. Mahahahaha but better us than incect people.

Well, it won't be "us," anyway. It will be our intelligent machine offspring. We can't travel light years to get anywhere because we're squishy little decaying meatbags, but our robots can just set a timer, go to sleep, and wake up when they get to the other stars.

a reply to: Blue Shift

Maybe one day download our minds to those space robots. But to start they can start making live feeds in real time VR so millions can tune in and see what all the probes and rovers see.

originally posted by: HummaKavula
What if we ARE the advanced civilization in the universe? What if other life is out there waiting on us to come visit them?

That my friend would be a damn depressing thought.

originally posted by: testingtesting
Maybe one day download our minds to those space robots. But to start they can start making live feeds in real time VR so millions can tune in and see what all the probes and rovers see.

Virtual travel is probably one of those "filters." It's not hard to imagine our fake VR getting so good that people would just prefer to fake-travel to some other cool planet with dazzling sunsets and busty alien babes, rather than actually taking the time and money and risk to actually go there. Why bother? And that would be the end of all this talk about manned space travel to distant planets.

a reply to: nexotop

not sure why folks prefer the evil invaders-

We are conditioned to it, by our media.

originally posted by: HummaKavula

originally posted by: intrptr
a reply to: HummaKavula

The Plutonians got one such visit from us. It was only a fly by but imagine if you were there looking up at the right time / place and saw New Horizons streak by. What would you think?

I would think that was pretty cool! I have always believed that we are not alone in this universe. Again, I can't link any proof, just a feeling. I have looked for and hoped for a sighting of some sort since I was a little kid. I have not been visited, nor have I ever seen anything I could consider a UFO. Wish it would happen some day though.

It just might. Happened to me and friends, once in a lifetime, a lonnng time ago.

The key to catching such a random occurrence is spending a lot of nights on remote hilltops barking at the moon...

a reply to: Nickn3

Indeed it would!

a reply to: Blue_Jay33

Whatevz.

I personally would make a great pet for alien invaders.

Can't say the same for you lot.