40 replies to this topic

[Hasina]

Rlyeh, on 14 January 2013 - 12:37 PM, said:

Apparently the government built robot penguins to guard the ice wall.
http://www.theflatea...p?topic=20630.0

No wonder we're no longer sending humans into space! We're testing our robots in space so they can defend the Wall! They will make the perfect Night's Watch! Let's see robots abandon their posts!

[seeder]

CRYSiiSx2, on 14 January 2013 - 09:49 AM, said:

Would they send starships?  No.  They would send disease.  NASA wants to pull an asteroid into the Moon's orbit.  What if someone wanted our planet?  They would send disease and we would have no clue they knew about us.  Pull a small asteroid filled with their disease into our orbit.  Why does everyone think UFO's are real?  Would any intelligent species really send anything besides remote robots even close to us?

hhhmm, OK...

I think a useful way to think about this matter,(one of them anyway) is to imagine what 'MAN WOULD DO' if HE discovered life and wished to get in touch, you know - man is after all, reasonably intelligent.

So lets imagine?

Lets say for the sake of argument and distance, that probes find evidence of life on a planet in our own solar system. You can pick the planet but I'm just gonna call it 'the planet'. It is after all an exercise in imagination.

So its near enough that we can observe, its giving off some form of signals that we can hear/intercept, and we get to realize there is 'intelligent life' there. Our initial probes also record some sort of infrastructure, and we see parts of the planet lit up at times of that planets darkness..

So will we first think to send a capsule full of diseases?

I very very much doubt it. Why? Destroy the first sign of life we find? BS! The science world will be in a frenzy, NASA will be giving everyone wedgies of excitement, and all the people on earth would be lapping up the discovery, some fearful, but others full of joy, amazement, curiosity, (or many other things instead). Governments will either unite or...not - as the case maybe...

So the discovery of a lifetime, of all lifetimes for man in fact..

so what will we do?

WE cant communicate coz we don't understand their signals, likewise we beam our signal to them but get no response.

What do we do? again?

We just discovered intelligent and industrious life, so will we focus on a ship to go there and send a few select astronauts to meet and greet? Or a ship armed to the teeth to go and destroy and plant our flags?

NO NO NO!  how do we know we wont scare the poop out of our new found neighbors who (may) shoot us down in the sky while we try landing? Its 'their' airspace after all!  And besides, say the climate and gravity there is far too different for man to survive anyway, even with current spacesuit shielding abilities. So lets rule out physical contact shall we, for starters?

So we have new neighbors.. but how to get in touch? We dont know if they are peaceful or a warring world, or is peace and war only a human concept after all? We just wouldn't know anything

So NASA will be working on all sorts of probes to recce with...and maybe in a very covert manner too, because you cant just go in and land and say 'hello' can you? You 'need' to understand what you're dealing with. And that may take 'many years' of sorties with probes to begin gathering the intelligence. Some labs somewhere will be trying to make any sense whatsoever of the signals we recorded and that alone could take a lifetime!

And after the intelligence gathering is as complete as we can make it? What then?

Send a lander probe with something like a hugely updated 'Voyager Golden Record', or 'The Pioneer plaques' to show them who we are?

What if they never got back in touch? What then?

I wont go on, you get the picture, Im just saying 'what will we do' if we find intelligent life?  Because maybe the same difficulties for us would be (maybe) the same for any aliens. So OBSERVATION - observation - observation!

And then...we cant possibly assume anything about what aliens 'might do' if they come here can we? Sci-Fi will have us believe we should be fearful of alien life.. Maybe we should, but man tends to fear the unknown anyway, even Stephen Hawkin goes along with that theory to a degree, but then again he must sell books..

Maybe Im optimistic but I like to think alien life will be as curious about us as we them, but in the very sense of the word 'alien'...could they ever land here? Would our climate suit them or destroy them? Could they take the heat and radiation levels from our sun? Or even the brightness of the sun? The water, the air? The gravity?

Could we ever land there? what if their sun, atmosphere, gravity made it impossible for us too?

So lots to think about really if 'we' were the ones initiating contact, this is why I doubt any supposed aliens would land and just walk into our sunlit polluted world and say 'take us to your leader'

[Chrlzs]

Forgive me for introducing a little biology here, but ..a disease?  Unless they knew our DNA/ physiology/biology very accurately, targeting us with a disease (or even a poison), would be a gamble at best - very few diseases go cross-species here, even given our heavily related/evolved life-forms.

Or are we assuming they have been monitoring our telecommunications, worked out full translations and got all the information they need that way...?

It seems increasingly likely that the only vaguely unique thing about Earth is the life that has sprung up on it, so why the heck would they waste energy coming all this way to just kill us and steal stuff? I could probably accept they want to harvest/study/engage with us (or rather, the most useful (to them) life-forms here .. which probably isn't us..)

[CRYSiiSx2]

seeder, on 14 January 2013 - 01:18 PM, said:

hhhmm, OK...

I'm not gonna read your book.  So shorten it.

Edited by CRYSiiSx2, 14 January 2013 - 04:03 PM.

[Colonel Rhuairidh]

CRYSiiSx2, on 14 January 2013 - 04:03 PM, said:

I'm not gonna read your book.  So shorten it.

Well, it's not quite tl,dr, but if someone goes to the trouble of writing a reply, one might at least have the courtesy to read it.

[seeder]

CRYSiiSx2, on 14 January 2013 - 04:03 PM, said:

I'm not gonna read your book.  So shorten it.

No sorry mate I wont do it.. besides what do you expect can be said on such a 'vast' subject... in only a few lines? There's someone on another thread who gets presented with stuff he may have 'to read' in order to gain something useful, but he doesnt read either.

For that he's despised by many members...

[Abramelin]

CRYSiiSx2, on 14 January 2013 - 04:03 PM, said:

I'm not gonna read your book.  So shorten it.

I read it in a minute, AND understood it too, but that's of course because I'm Dutch.

[seeder]

Abramelin, on 14 January 2013 - 04:46 PM, said:

I read it in a minute, AND understood it too, but that's of course because I'm Dutch.

  you kill me sometimes!!

[Asadora]

CRYSiiSx2, on 14 January 2013 - 04:03 PM, said:

I'm not gonna read your book.  So shorten it.

You just gave me something sad to read. Are you thinking of doing a sequel?

[Chrlzs]

CRYSiiSx2, on 14 January 2013 - 04:03 PM, said:

I'm not gonna read your book.  So shorten it.

Hmm..  My post above wasn't all that long...  It was quite short and pretty easy to follow, I thought.  No comment on that either?

Edited by Chrlzs, 17 January 2013 - 10:56 AM.

[psyche101]

CRYSiiSx2, on 14 January 2013 - 04:03 PM, said:

I'm not gonna read your book.  So shorten it.

Proverbial White Flag huh.