How do i introduce this topic without looking like a weirdo?

ok.. Aliens.. discuss.

No really, these things actually fascinate me.. aliens do we think they exist?

Well I am posting this because of an interesting, fairly in depth discussion about it at work today, at 9am.. which was enlightening!

I personally find it very difficult to believe advance life doesn't exist, but in saying that I don't believe aliens have ever visited here, nor unless they had exceptional abilities, and a very good reason would they ever come and disturb a population of warmongering primitive natives.

 

Don't let me be the second poster on the thread

I watched a program last night that reconed we're the aliens, that microbes from a comet seeded the Earth

 

I'm with you that we can't just be the only advanced life in the universe!
But I have met quite a few alien folk though in my life!

 

This must of been on eastenders then zigs

 

Fits in nicely with the gardening theme... Gardeners who were gardened... love that idea

 

Believe me, I look in the mirror and wonder...

 

It's a big old universe out there (scientifically speaking )so the chance of other life existing is quite high I would think. There's also a reasonable chance that some of it is at least as intelligent as homo sapiens. However the chance of it having found some form of transport enabling it to travel vast distances in a reasonable length of time must be much, much smaller. (The only worm holes I believe in are those in the garden and they don't allow for interstellar travel. Not unless my vision of an intelligent super race needs significant readjustment.)

So I don't expect to meet any little green men any time soon

 

HsuH I agree, wormholes do actually exist believe it or not, but only at the sub-atomic level, which is no use to us, unless we somehow shrink our starship down the size of a neutron which seems a little unlikely

There's a few theories being bandied around, about extra dimensions, wormholes, time travel. Many physicists are taking this stuff seriously... theoretically wormholes are possible if you can grab a sub-atomic wormhole and inflate it to the size of a human, but also keep it open.. unfortunately such a task would warrant the energy from a galaxy, which we havent quite got to yet.. ! Other dimensions are a possibility, in fact some theoretical physicists seems adamant that there are other dimensions.. also it's been proven in the lab, that time does indeed slow down on the event horizon of a black hole.. so we could technically go back into the future if we could harness a black hole without destroying ourselves and Earth!

 

What is intelligence? Is human consciousness and self-will the only form there is? Can we conceive of sentient entities whose consciousness and intelligence are not patterned on our own? If not, aliens could already be here and we wouldn't have a clue.

 

Stephen, there certainly has to me to be an entity more intelligent than you and me ... and you know I say that with love and truth ... xx

 

I reckon there has to be alien life. For a start, I actually married an alien. I love my alien wife, but she has very little recollection of events from the 1980s when she should have been growing up in Redcar according to her cover story. Her climate preferences are almost unbearable to me, far too hot. Way hotter than she should be used to according to her cover story that she grew up, like me, on the north east coast, and if I try to discuss physics or space with her she immediately blanks me, because of course she was trained not to discuss certain topics with the indigenous bipeds in case of accidentally blowing her cover. When I've asked her in the past to point out certain known named stars in the sky, she has been unable to do so, which can only be because she grew up somewhere where her sky was radically different, probably several million light years away.

Even apart from that, consider two things:
1) We now know that most stars have planets of some form around them
2) We also now know that contrary to popular belief from a few years ago, life does not depend on free oxygen, it can thrive in environments previously thought to be extremely toxic, can thrive in temperature ranges far more extreme than previously thought, and in general, is far less fussy than we believed a few years ago.

Based on those two points, and the laws of probability, I reckon it would be a very bold claim to say earth is unique in that it has life.

As for the comments about how other intelligent species might travel vast distances and what they might think of us if they came here, these are all irrelevant thoughts because they are based on the human point of reference. Why would aliens come to earth when we're primitive war mongers? I wonder if mosquitoes ever wonder why humans choose to holiday in places where they (the mozzies) are abundant and eat people alive at night.

And on the bit about how they would travel about about quickly enough to cover interstellar distances in a single lifetime, assuming that there are some aliens that want to do that, we can't base our assumptions about their capabilities on our own. We're only just now starting to unlock some of the secrets of the universe. All the quantum stuff for example. In the (just over) 20 years since I went to college to study electronics, I've seen reports that tell me a significant chunk of what I was taught was plain wrong. Fundamental stuff. An electron was a particle back then. Now it is a wave, a particle, both at the same time, neither, and exists in more than one place and more than one time. We've made loads of progress in just the last 20 years alone. Remember that for a significant chunk of our history, scientific progress virtually stopped because you'd be burned as a heretic for studying science. We were held back for hundreds of years because of a chance event. What if the powers that decided to manipulate the teachings of the church had not banned people from studying the sciences? What sort of capabilities would we now have? What if on some other world somewhere, with by pure chance a similar sort of level of evolution, they hadn't spent a few hundred years threatening to burn heretics? What sort of understanding could they have developed, and what sort of capabilities would arise from that?

 

Yes it's true,there are aliens seen it on Tv called Star Trek

 

Shiney, that sounds like a blatant cover up to me!

This stuff really fascinates me, theoretical physics is the philosophy of science, and even if were wrong about things, it still makes for very interesting conversations.

The theories going into physics now are so mind boggling that had you even said 1% of what is now thought possible by physicists and scientists just 15 years ago you would have been completely ridiculed. Of course the actual stuff doesn't mean much to us, but the technology that could advance out of such knowledge could be exciting and daunting!

You have;
extended life
quantum computing
infinite energy
new communications technology (in the pipeline)

It's all pretty awesome stuff!