ET Hunter: We Will Find Space Aliens within 20 Years

Why would they be using slower than light communications? They're assuming that aliens are at the same level of technology as us. They are more likely much less developed or much more developed.
 
cyclone3d said:
I guess you have never heard of NASA then, have you?

There is a reason why Huntsville, AL is called Rocket City.

There is also at least one company that makes stuff for Nuclear Power plants here. They have parts in plants all over the world.

Sure, once you get out of the large cities, it is pretty much red-necks and hicks, but that it not all there is.
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I have and been there. Just because there is one small bright spot of intelligence that got built there doesn't make the rest of the state not a complete black hole of retardation. Unfortunately I have had to go there more times than I want and had to deal with them. Stereotypes exist for a reason about that state. Doesn't mean everyone there is an inbred redneck, just a big enough percentage to be notable.
 
niconx said:
Why would they be using slower than light communications? They're assuming that aliens are at the same level of technology as us. They are more likely much less developed or much more developed.
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Unfortunately we can only receive messages using the same tech we already know of. If they're using some quantum effect messaging we're not advanced enough to transmit or receive such messages yet. It's also questionable if quantum traffic can be intercepted, it's supposed to be undetectable to anyone but the intended receiver AFAIK.
 
DeathFromBelow said:
According to who? The 'trinity' is never mentioned in the bible, it was made up by the early Christians. Most of the old testament is borrowed from other cultures. Genesis is a retelling of the Babylonian creation myths, the story of Noah is a retelling of part of the epic of Gilgamesh, and so on. It's so haphazardly thrown together that the bible can't even keep it's own story straight. Genesis 1 has the gods creating animals, then the humans in their image. Genesis 2 has the gods creating Adam, then the animals, then Eve from Adam's rib.

The authors of the bible didn't seem to be aware of distant cultures in China and the Americas, why should we even be thinking about the bible in a discussion about extraterrestrial life?
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You do know that the Bible doesn't always have things in order, right? Just like if you are telling somebody something and then go back to go into further detail.

Kind of like a class overview, and then you go over stuff in more detail.
 
Can't we leave The Bible out of discussion of Extraterrestrials ... all that will do is bring down a lock or a trip to the soapbox ... although extraterrestrials are a question they are a problem of science and not faith and can be debated adequately on that level alone ;)
 
B00nie said:
The technologic progression has been so fast that it can well be the same elsewhere. And one thing is for sure - if we one day start to get alien messages, we better be prepared to the teeth on first encounter. It may get ugly if and when we're technologically disadvantaged if meeting the aliens on our home soil and not vice versa.
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I don't know, I would think aliens capable of interstellar travel would see invading planets as a waste of time. We don't have anything special that they would want, Earth is made of the same elements as everything else in space, and it takes a lot more energy to get stuff off of the Earth than to go mine it from an asteroid somewhere. I think they'd be interested in our art, history, and genetics. I'm more concerned about how people would react to the news than how the aliens would react to us.

rudy said:
We have yet to discover any extra terrestrial life let alone intelligent. And while I have not been following it I don't think we have even found any meaningful sign of the possibility of such life intelligent or otherwise.
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I talked about this in an earlier post. We don't currently have radio telescopes that could detect Earth-like radio noise from a planet more that a few dozen light years away. We have detected odd radio events, but it appears that we can only see them on the rare occasion that they get lensed by interstellar gas. We need better telescopes.

Radio telescopes are used by astronomers for more than just SETI. Even if SETI never finds anything the telescopes are still valuable science assets. They aren't very expensive to operate, either. Big particle physics labs like the Large Hadron Collider cost billions of dollars, a serious SETI program could be funded for $10-20 million.

cyclone3d said:
You do know that the Bible doesn't always have things in order, right?
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It's not just the order of events that differ in the two Genesis creation myths.
 
B00nie said:
Given the galactic distances if some other planet like earth would have created life and intelligent life around the same time like we did, it would take around 100 years still before their first radio transmissions would start to reach us. So it's completely possible that the sky is filled with alien messaging, we're just too far to hear them yet.

The technologic progression has been so fast that it can well be the same elsewhere. And one thing is for sure - if we one day start to get alien messages, we better be prepared to the teeth on first encounter. It may get ugly if and when we're technologically disadvantaged if meeting the aliens on our home soil and not vice versa.
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Not necessarily ... it likely depends on how prevalent inhabitable planets are and how the mechanism of evolution works on other worlds (we only have our own planet as a reference so far)

If habitable planets are plentiful then there would be little competition for resources and thus no need to eliminate that competition through hostile means ... if they are scarce then the chances of life being anywhere remotely close to us are so rare that we might never encounter another life form

On our planet, evolution has been a dog eat dog process that has created violent tenancies in us and other species ... that has shaped much of our thinking and reactions ... it is quite possible that on other planets the natural selection process isn't nearly so violent or that herbivorous species achieve dominance (which would make them less hostile)

Personally I will hope for the version of aliens proposed by the quote from Contact, "You're an interesting species, an interesting mix. You're capable of such beautiful dreams and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you're not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other." ... also, as Carl Sagan proposed in the first Cosmos series, when two cultures meet for the first time the chances of them being equals are highly unlikely ... since a war would be one sided in that situation he proposed that other civilizations would interact peacefully with each other
 
I firmly believe that there is life outside our solar system and within our galaxy. I doubt there's even a chance that this guy will find life even within in our own galaxy in the timeframe he's looking at achieving.

Then beyond that, there's like a few hundred billion other galaxies to look at. Good luck.
 
ech3lon9 said:
Don't we have to break through the light speed barrier first before 'first contact'? :p
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We already have.

Radio waves travel at the speed of light, and we've been broadcasting those for over 100 years now. So we have already "announced" ourselves, so to speak, and tv waves aren't that far behind them.

First contact would likely come from some sort of communication as that, rather then the usual happenstance "meeting" physically or vice versa.

The thing is we can only listen to so much of the sky at once.
 
It is almost guaranteed that if they find us, we are getting enslaved. They may not have bad intentions but since they found us first, it is likely that they will posses a much greater technology than we do, probably smarter than us as well.

I mean look at pets, dogs cats.... People who own dogs and cats treat them very well, they are good people and they love their pets but the dogs and cats are still owned by their owner, they are almost prisoners/slaves who have no right to be free, vote, have families etc....

So best case scenarios we are going to be house pets.....
 
kbrickley said:
And what makes you think it won't be the Zerg :p
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Well, with the way our society is shaping up, I doubt the Zerg will want to have our idiocracy to fold into their gene pool. I don't think the overmind will tolerate zerglings forming unions and striking. Throw them Kanye West and suddenly their structure will completely fail when each zerg unit believes they are Yeezus.

At least the protoss will try and study how humans devolve.
 
Andyk5 said:
It is almost guaranteed that if they find us, we are getting enslaved. They may not have bad intentions but since they found us first, it is likely that they will posses a much greater technology than we do, probably smarter than us as well.

I mean look at pets, dogs cats.... People who own dogs and cats treat them very well, they are good people and they love their pets but the dogs and cats are still owned by their owner, they are almost prisoners/slaves who have no right to be free, vote, have families etc....

So best case scenarios we are going to be house pets.....
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Except the cat owns the human not the other way around. The human feeds the cat, he/she does whatever he/she wants, cleans up and stretches to bask in the sun. The 'owner' is the slave. Yes I have a cat lol.
 
kbrickley said:
Not necessarily ... it likely depends on how prevalent inhabitable planets are and how the mechanism of evolution works on other worlds (we only have our own planet as a reference so far)

If habitable planets are plentiful then there would be little competition for resources and thus no need to eliminate that competition through hostile means ... if they are scarce then the chances of life being anywhere remotely close to us are so rare that we might never encounter another life form

On our planet, evolution has been a dog eat dog process that has created violent tenancies in us and other species ... that has shaped much of our thinking and reactions ... it is quite possible that on other planets the natural selection process isn't nearly so violent or that herbivorous species achieve dominance (which would make them less hostile)

Personally I will hope for the version of aliens proposed by the quote from Contact, "You're an interesting species, an interesting mix. You're capable of such beautiful dreams and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you're not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other." ... also, as Carl Sagan proposed in the first Cosmos series, when two cultures meet for the first time the chances of them being equals are highly unlikely ... since a war would be one sided in that situation he proposed that other civilizations would interact peacefully with each other
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So are you saying that the Spanish were running out of living space and resources when they annihilated the indigenous population of America?
 
First thing is we would have to find a way to get past Mars which is only possible by a nuclear powered spaceship.
Second, of the handful of goldielocks planets that have been discovered they are so far away you could not get there in a lifetime.

Let's start by trying to land/explore in our own neck of the woods first.
 
B00nie said:
So are you saying that the Spanish were running out of living space and resources when they annihilated the indigenous population of America?
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I would find it highly unlikely that an alien civilization would mirror a very human time of history ... the Spanish encountered the New World at very unique time in their history ... they had just vanquished a foe they had been fighting for hundreds of years (the Moors) and they had a society totally built around warfare and a feudal system controlled by Warlords (since they got to miss out on the reformations happening in the rest of Europe during the Renaissance) ... it was at that exact moment in time that they discovered a new frontier and they were driven by the three G's (Gold, God, and Glory)

My original assessment stands true ... if resource rich planets are prevalent then they will have no need to conquer us and take ours ... if resource rich planets are rare they might be too far away to ever encounter us (it is a big universe out there) ... we also tend to judge other species by our own yardstick ... maybe we are the violent aberration and other societies are much less violent than we are ;)
 
ep0x73 said:
First thing is we would have to find a way to get past Mars which is only possible by a nuclear powered spaceship.
Second, of the handful of goldielocks planets that have been discovered they are so far away you could not get there in a lifetime.

Let's start by trying to land/explore in our own neck of the woods first.
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Finding doesn't mean we have to physically go there ourselves.

We already have signals and things that extend far beyond our own solar system.

We are more likely to receive or have our own signals received before we actually physically "run into" some kind of other intelligent life.
 
Stiler said:
Finding doesn't mean we have to physically go there ourselves.

We already have signals and things that extend far beyond our own solar system.

We are more likely to receive or have our own signals received before we actually physically "run into" some kind of other intelligent life.
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Other than saying Hey we are here I don't see much of a meaningful dialog occurring though if we have to wait 200 years for a reply (100 years for our answer and 100 years for theirs if we are 100 light years apart) ... if we are 1000 or 10000 the situation gets much worse ... considering we are towards the far edge of a galaxy 100,000 light years in diameter it might be quite some while before someone heard us and was able to respond (assuming they even cared to do so) ;)
 
kbrickley said:
it is quite possible that on other planets the natural selection process isn't nearly so violent or that herbivorous species achieve dominance (which would make them less hostile)
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You'd better hope that they know about violence, so that they understand the meaning of it, imagine some herbivorous species coming here and start eating our plants, which we need ourselfes, and we tell them to "Stop that", they wouldnt understand it as they are used to happily fearless munching, and you telling them to stop may trigger a fear that could wipe out mankind completely.

Knowing about violence there's a chance for a treaty.
 
How can people believe in all its infiniteness that there isn't other life in the universe..?
 
Apparently no one read the article.

The guy in the article is saying within the next 20 years we will find intelligent life in our own solar system. By intelligent life he is saying life that has some type of intelligence, just like a dog has intelligence. He is assuming if there is funding and we can do real exploration of some of the moons in our solar system where there is water, we will find some type of life that exhibits some type of intelligence.

I personally don't know if there is or if it can be done in 20 years, but he isn't' saying we're going to find aliens flying spaceships on worlds that are hundreds of light years away. He is only talking about some type of living life in our solar system that's not on Earth.
 
i am pretty sure planet earth is an exclusion zone where no alien would voluntarily go to
 
m33pm33p said:
How can people believe in all its infiniteness that there isn't other life in the universe..?
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Because the chances of intelligent life were statistically impossible to begin with so why would you expect something with a statistical impossibility to happen more than once?
 
m33pm33p said:
How can people believe in all its infiniteness that there isn't other life in the universe..?
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Well, since we are scientists and not religious zealots it takes more than faith to believe ... is there life in the universe ... probably, you can make lots of statistical guesses that favor that proposition ... however there are an awful lot of unknowns that can really monkey with that equation (especially when the question of "intelligent life" comes into play):

- We know that life formed on our own planet very quickly but it never evolved beyond single cell organisms for several billion years

- We know that our planet experienced several near sterilization events during its early years (asteroid strikes and such)

- We know that it took a billion years and several extraordinary events (climate and astrological) to produce intelligent life on this planet (if you assume that humans are the representation of intelligent life)

- We know that we were very nearly knocked out with the Toba Super Volcano 75,000 years ago (some estimates take us down to just a few thousand people left)

- We do not know whether our situation is unique or common. Maybe we were the statistical anomaly and there are many planets with primitive life (especially microbial) but very few that make it to intelligence

So we play probability games. Is it possible that life exists? (Yes) ... Is it probable (Maybe ... depends on what factors you choose in your guess) ... Is it likely (we have no idea ... we can make a guess but with only one data point it is about as blind a guess as you can make) :cool:
 
kbrickley said:
Other than saying Hey we are here I don't see much of a meaningful dialog occurring though if we have to wait 200 years for a reply (100 years for our answer and 100 years for theirs if we are 100 light years apart) ... if we are 1000 or 10000 the situation gets much worse ... considering we are towards the far edge of a galaxy 100,000 light years in diameter it might be quite some while before someone heard us and was able to respond (assuming they even cared to do so) ;)
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It would give them a location of us and a point of reference (signals travel in straight lines so they would merely have to follow the direction).

Not to mention imagine the history lesson, getting radio (then video) of our entire history.

Seeing how we've evolved/changed over a short time and what humanity is capable of.

It's basically letting them see us/get to know us before we might even know they are out there.

Or vice versa if we received such a signal (from a place much further away).

Imagine if we started to receive radio/video signals that other life forms have sent from say a thousand years ago and we get to watch how their civilization grew/changed long before we are even able to attempt to make contact back, they might give us valuable information or things we haven't even dreamed of.
 
kirbyrj said:
Because the chances of intelligent life were statistically impossible to begin with so why would you expect something with a statistical impossibility to happen more than once?
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The universe is infinite, so even if the chances of life happening on our planet statistically impossible, due to the infinite span and time of the universe it probably could occur again.

However 2 advanced life forms existing at the same time with technology to be able to see/talk to each other is probably very low/not going to happen.
 
Xrave said:
Apparently no one read the article.

The guy in the article is saying within the next 20 years we will find intelligent life in our own solar system. By intelligent life he is saying life that has some type of intelligence, just like a dog has intelligence. He is assuming if there is funding and we can do real exploration of some of the moons in our solar system where there is water, we will find some type of life that exhibits some type of intelligence.

I personally don't know if there is or if it can be done in 20 years, but he isn't' saying we're going to find aliens flying spaceships on worlds that are hundreds of light years away. He is only talking about some type of living life in our solar system that's not on Earth.
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Within 20 years we could definitely get to Europa and back. That it the best place within our solar system to find life; many agree. Whether we find something akin to bacteria, or a more complex life form like a jellyfish type creature, or even something as complex and intelligent as a dolphin type creature is what's debatable (if we find anything at all).
 
niconx said:
Why would they be using slower than light communications? They're assuming that aliens are at the same level of technology as us. They are more likely much less developed or much more developed.
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Such as by spoken word? Especially since radio waves travel AT the speed of light.
 
Stiler said:
We already have.

Radio waves travel at the speed of light, and we've been broadcasting those for over 100 years now. So we have already "announced" ourselves, so to speak, and tv waves aren't that far behind them.

First contact would likely come from some sort of communication as that, rather then the usual happenstance "meeting" physically or vice versa.

The thing is we can only listen to so much of the sky at once.
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The problem with radio waves is the inverse square law proportionality for signal strength. When you combine the cosmic background interference, our super strong radio waves are just a minor part of the cosmic noise that all gets blended together.

We would need to use an RF collating lens of sorts if we wanted to transmit a signal far enough to be picked up in another solar system. Maybe we can focus the radio waves like how we modulated light into a focused laser beam, then point it out somewhere we think may have a chance of life capable of receiving the signals.

Or, better yet, why not just use laser beams to transmit signals. Which begs the question: Why are we not pointing optical receivers at space instead of RF dishes? We know RF reception is nearly theoretically impossible over vast distances.
 
BBA said:
Why are we not pointing optical receivers at space instead of RF dishes?
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?

You mean every single telescope in the IR, visible, X-ray, and gamma ray bands?
 
Xrave said:
?

You mean every single telescope in the IR, visible, X-ray, and gamma ray bands?
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No, I mean optical laser receivers that demodulate the signal instead of just taking pictures.
 
The point I am making is we are using lasers to transmit data from here to the moon...and back, so who is to say advanced alien civilizations would not be doing the same? It's the only truly long range noise free medium we know of.
 
Considering we are already looking at the sky with all the bands we know of/are able to measure, we would be able to see an artificial vs. natural signal. That is, after all, what SETI is doing with radio waves.

Anything not natural, or more specifically not something we have seen before/understand, would stand out like a beacon on any wavelength.
 
Still, if one million monkeys type randomly on a keyboard for one million years, they would at some point have produced Sharespeares writings, which would wrongly be picked up as an intelligent signal.

And as there a billions of stars in billions of galaxies, we could pick up Britney Spear songs without it actually being her.
 
All that funding and they never bothered to pick up some decent infrared cameras? Whole lot cheaper.

SETI is a narrow banded joke. And yes, I ran it for yonks back when things like P3s, Celerons, K6-2s, Durons and Athlons were around. Joke was on me. Societies capable of FTL travel methods are unlikely to persistently use transverse EM communications, due to inherent slowness between likely FTL travel locations.
 
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