Aliens. What are they like?

I can eat fifty eggs.

JohnJonesCardiff wrote:

Thanks for not understanding that sentence, and not looking at the others. I must say, things have improved.

I'm sorry if I misunderstood. Your writing style certainly doesn't make things easy.

Quote:

What makes you think life is somehow different if its off the earth?

I don't know , and neither do you. So making a simple assertion based upon reading AMAZING STORIES is silly.

I can say that exolife is Silicon based and could be right or wrong. We just don't know. SO lets look and try to find out.K?

When the concept of aliens came to popular culture it was widely accepted that they would be savage, evil enemies of humanity. After quite some time this became old hat and it was fashionable to portray them as benign, even superior beings. Most recently, the tide turned back and they are now, generally, portrayed as space bad guys.

Hell, even The Engineers of the movie Prometheus who, according to the story, gave birth to humans, were a pretty nasty bunch.

I suspect that if any visit earth, they will be quite similar to us, keeping in mind that within the scope of possibilities an intelligent, bi-pedal lizard with opposable thumbs and a spoken language is quite similar to us.

It's a coin toss on whether they will come with good or bad intent.

What would make a race of beings leave it's homeworld? Exploration is a possibility. Boldly going where no L' athu has gone before! But surrvival is possibly a more likely reason.

We are a long way away from exploring our solar sytem, let alone our galaxy, but nothing would focus our minds and resources like the certainty that our planet was doomed to be destroyed within the next 50 to 100 years. Whether or not we could manage an exodus into space in such a short period of time is highly questionable, but if we could it probably would be on a wing and a prayer, and we wouldn't have the luxury of scouting out a nice uninhabited new home for ourselves.

The first suitable home we found would be the one we would be committed to, and if the existing inhabitants didn't welcome us, it's very unlikely that we would say "Oh well, time to go extinct."

If we are visited by an alien race in need of a new home, they may or may not ask us if they can co-habitate earth, and if they do, we may or may not welcome them.

It's great fun to speculate about this topic, but of course that's all we can do.

It is pretty hilarious that people assume that we would be visited by "aliens." This is part and parcel of the naïve assumptions which underpin the so-called Fermi paradox. Fermi wasn't really thinking when he proposed it--he failed to "get" a good many things about the idea of interstellar travel. One is the enormous expense which "manned" missions would entail; that's expense in absolute terms. As we now realize--and Fermi, as intelligent as he was, should have been able to figure out--living beings will have to be shielded from cosmic radiation. That requires either massive amounts of material shielding or the generation and maintenance of a magnetic field around the vessel. The latter option would require massive amounts of fuel. Even an entirely automated exploratory probe would need some shielding for its main CPU, although the weight requirements of that for an automated probe would be trivial. This is all without even canvassing the problem presented by micro-gravity.

Fermi also ignored the implications of light speed. Interstellar, intragalactic distances are so huge that even a vessel able to travel at a significant fraction of C would be out there for many decades at the least, probably many centuries, and possibly even a few millennia just to reach our end of the galaxy. There isn't much probability that an intelligent species would be just wandering around out there seeing what they could find. Which brings us to another consideration which people love to bullshit about--why would they come here? We live about half-way out on one of the spiral arms of this galaxy. We essentially live in the galactic boondocks. There is nothing more hilarious than the notion that "aliens" are whizzing around out there in large numbers which mean that they are likely to stumble across us, and then take our planet away from us. It's a really, really stupid idea which can only be produced by someone who is not thinking clearly.

There are several social objections to the so-called Fermi paradox based on the kind of societies which would spend massive amounts of materials and energy to go larking around the galaxy which i won't go into here.

If the earth were ever visited by "aliens," what they most likely would be like is machines. Any other speculation is firmly in the realm of bullshit. So-called science fiction is just fantasy with unwarranted presentions to science. As far as we know here and now, there is not way to get around C. That being the case, even if there are technological civilizations our there somewhere, we are essentially alone. They won't be visiting us, and we won't be visiting them.

I think your "style" is redolent of your hateful contempt for anyone who doesn't think as you do--you're a hateful gobshite, and there's no better way to put it.

I have repeated no one's hype about "aliens," and did not speculate on what "aliens" would be like. You just want to spew more of your vitriol. At no time in that post did i speculate on what life off the earth would be like. You're so eager to sneer at everyone else, that you either didn't bother to read and understand what i wrote, or you are just incapable of understanding it.

Obviously, you are too dense to have grasped the point of what i wrote. Because of the limitations imposed by C, and because of the dangers of cosmic radiation and micro-gravity for living organisms, if the earth is ever visited by anything "alien," it likely to be a machine. See this Wikipedia article about self-replicating probes. If a technological species exists out there, and survives long enough, and can work around the destructive tendencies inherent in self-replicating probes*, an automated system is most likely to be the first contact with "aliens" that we will have. (*See the section of the above linked article on the implications for the Fermi paradox.)

I frankly think you're not intelligent enough to have understood the implications of what i wrote.

You'd be lost without straw man fallacies. Since you can't argue with what i wrote, you just make **** up. I suspect that you're that little Welsh holy roller who was here a few years ago. You've got the same MO. Telling us how you defeated everyone in your university in debate, and then prancing around making assumptions about what others think, so that you can argue against that rather than against what they actually write. You're a sad case.

If you think aliens can be machines then obviously you think that bits of metal and plastic are alive.

JohnJonesCardiff wrote:

If you think aliens can be machines then obviously you think that bits of metal and plastic are alive.

Do you limit your definition of life to organics?

Dead things don't organise. They move.

JohnJonesCardiff wrote:

Dead things don't organise. They move.

Ok, do you do limit your definition of life to Organics. That's fine if you want to limit yourself that way, but the common definitions of Life don't talk about composition, they talk about functionality; consumption, excretion, reproduction, etc.

If bits of metal and plastic start to move in such a way that they consume, excrete and reproduce, then it becomes hard to differentiate them from bacteria, except by composition. So I guess you are Organo-centric in your thinking.

What are aliens like? Are they nasty or nice, or strange in some way?