QUOTE (DEBUNKER @ Mar 1 2008, 10:12 AM)

that is a very good point your making hazz! For the aliens to be here masking as some of our UFOs, first they had to detect us. And as the only way they can have detected us at those distances,lightyears away,is radio,we have a limit to were they might be from. The radio waves we have been sending out has now traveled about 80 lightyears from Earth.
Sure,they could have seen from telescopes that there is life on Earth,but for them to have seen "inteligent" life here,they have had to wait for our radio waves.
good point.
We havent made many deliberate broadcasts to extraterrestrials, but in 1974, as part of a ceremony at the economy-sized Arecibo radio telescope, the observatory staff arranged to beam a three-minute message to a few hundred thousand stars in the constellation of Hercules.
The message consisted of a simple picture showing the structure of our solar system and the structure of ourselves DNA and its chemical building blocks. Innocuous enough.
What was not so innocuous was the reaction. Englands Astronomer Royal was aghast at the thought of our freelance pinging of unknown galactic inhabitants. Despite the fact that the message was short and directed to a globular cluster 21,000 light-years distant, he felt that we might be endangering ourselves by
"shouting in the jungle." WHAT IF THERE ARE PREDATORS OUT THERE!?
Given the brevity and remote target of this broadcast, such concerns were surely overwrought. But the point is worth considering: Is it a good idea for anyone deliberately to beam high-powered signals into space?
Granted we wont live to see or witness the effect of the outcome, but some one will be here.
Humans, who are a long way from being able to make sporting trips to other star systems, dont rely on predation much. We farm our food, and soon well manufacture it. Killing as the Predators do, is no longer considered socially acceptable in most circles. Real Predators, who must be many thousands of years ahead of us, have presumably moved beyond this.
Presumably.
Its relatively easy to detect biology in space. How easy would it be for them to learn of our existence? If theyve already built planet-finding telescopes, comparable to, or slightly better than, the one that NASA will be hefting into orbit in the next dozen years, then they could detect the Earth.
With substantially larger telescopes, they could find our planet from hundreds or even thousands of light-years distance. Not only that, but they could also spectroscopically sample the light reflected from our atmosphere, and learn that it has large quantities of oxygen and methane, tell-tale markers of biology.
If we found another planet with the right conditions and life on it we would probably do anything to get our butts overe there.
We might get the answer sooner than expected, after all, they could be closer than the constalation Hercules.