The Futility of the Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence

dupe

 

A collision between a rock and a conventional spacecraft isn't the same as between a rock and a UFO spacecraft. A friend who has more time than I do for keeping up with the latest news is aware of a Russian or other jet fighter firing a missile at a locked-on UFO target. No score.

 

All I can say is I'm glad that wasn't a passenger plane he shot at!

The idea of Russian fighter pilots shooting at stuff they can't even identify is just plain insane.

Think of that as a method of going after Sasquatch. So, some hunter is sure he sees a Sasquatch, so he starts shooting?

There should be special long term prisons for people this lethally stupid.

 

Considering what our pilots have encountered and the way they have perceived the UFO capabilities as scary potential danger/threats that could take advantage of their embarrassing vulnerability, I don't think they would welcome your judgmental condemnation of their supposedly reckless shoot-from-the-hip reaction.
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I'm sure you are aware that the last round of releases by the Navy have been totally debunked as evidence of foreign invaders - from Earth or beyond.

I believe those Navy pilots didn't lie - they were just wrong. That's OK.

But, I have NO idea what you are claiming.

And the very idea of shooting at unidentified craft would not be just "reckless" but ABSOLUTELY UNACCEPTABLE. Remember that at least one of those Navy tapes was found to be an airplane from Earth. In fact, besides the criminality and moral abhorrence, it would be just plain STUPID to shoot at craft that have more capability than Earth possesses.

It is NOT OK is for some ******* to ride around shooting at targets that aren't even identified.

Even if they are RIGHT that there are little green men inside, these pilots do NOT get to represent Earth in that way.

 

Seriously - I want to know:

How the HELL did you come to the conclusion that it would be OK for fighter pilots to shoot unidentified targets???

 

The Russians learned that lesson the hard way.

 

There is a surprisingly long list of these cases.

We probably aren't the worst offenders (depending on definition of "worst"), but the US has been involved on both the side of shooting passenger planes and having passenger planes be shot.

 

Out of trillions of planets, not one planet with intelligent life?

On earth and in the universe, there is hardly one of anything in a given category, not one rock, not one horse, one bee, one planet, one sun, one solar system, etc. How could it be then, that there is only one planet with intelligent life? If defies the universe, does it not?

 

People at Lockheed Skunkworks (I know several who worked there for decades) have been reverse engineering alien spacecraft for decades. There are hundreds of credible US Military people who have witnessed and interacted with alien craft and beings. The only mystery is why and how the ruling class refuses to reveal these facts.

 

What are the odds that if you had a bucket of dice, throwing them all on the floor and they all turn up sixes?

The number of throws it would take to play out the odds is an astronomical number.

But, compared to infinity, all numbers are miniscule. If you tossed them on the floor into infinity, the odds would eventually play out, at some distant point in the future, perhaps billions and trillions of years form now, they would turn up all sixes.

Given infinity, therefore, all that is possible, is inevitable.

Thus, life merely has to be possible, against the backdrop of infinity, for it to occur.

Some say the universe is a finite period of time, but in my view, given there must be an astronomical number of factors to be in play for life to occur, it would take infinity to produce life happening by chance. However, maybe 500 million years, which was about the time that life began, or some say, is enough time. But, perhaps the earth was seeded by older material falling to earth, material that had organic matter on it, coming form somewhere that was much older than earth?

If the universe is some 14 billion years old, that should be enough for the odds of the astronomical number of factors to fall into place, to play out, by chance.

Now, I'm just a simple layperson, some knowledgeable folks might shoot the above to bits, no doubt they will.

I think the evidence points to the concept that even though the odds seem impossible to us, but compared to the universe, the number of factors that must occur for life to occur, that number isn't that big, at all. We are just so small, we can't fathom it all. There is no evidence for an 'intelligent designer', if you can scrutinize the subject on a deeper level, in my opinion.

 

There has been around 4,000 confirmed exoplanets found so far that could support life as we know it. There's thousands of others not confirmed yet. So ET might exist. As far as trying to contact him, I agree with most of what you say. I think it is probably a waste of time. Then again, maybe we don't want to contact them. They could be thousands of years ahead of us and capable of squashing us like an ant. Maybe it might be better to try not to bring attention to ourselves.

Even if an advance ET discovered us, they may not want anything to do with us. We'd be very primitive in their eyes. Probably primitive than an APE to us. Maybe good zoo specimens to them. If ET is out there and capable of travel between the stars via various means we haven't even thought of, it might be best to just hope ET bypasses our little planet and let us destroy ourselves.

 

Of course, the most famous of which was Iran Air 655 in 1988. Where the plane was flying into a known war zone, just hours after several Iranian patrol boats and helicopters had been making high speed runs as US ships in the area that had been protecting civilian tankers. And the aircraft ignored multiple attempts on the radio for them to identify themselves.

 

Well since there is zero evidence that we can observe that out of trillions of planets there is another one with intelligent life...I think my dollar bet is safe.

Given the opportunity for intelligent life (those trillions of planets) I don't begrudge anyone thinking there is amply room for lightening to strike twice, or millions of times, but I'm struck by the scarcity of intelligent life over 4 billion years on our own planet. We've had multiple mass extinctions where life had to start from almost scratch to develop over and over. It seems that if there was a normal path to intelligent life after life develops on a world, we should have had multiple intelligent species that have evolved on earth by now. There should be multiple intelligent species now.

This leads me to believe that intelligent life may be such a one off that it happened just once, and the odds of it happening again are miniscule. Or at least that's a conclusion easy to make based on the available evidence.

 

Imagine a beach of sand, within the beach are seven dayglow orange grains. You are tasked with finding them and only have your lifetime to do it.....I give you 50/50 odds. Now imagine the beach is all Earth beaches and the day glow grains are bight green boulders...we will even give you a plane to search....Maybe 1 in fifty odds. Imagine a Universe with a Trillion planets and 20 years to search for life...then think of how many moons they might have. Imagine the odds of chemical reactions making something alive in the amount of seconds in a Billion years when there are trillions of reactions happening every second.

There IS life elsewhere but we are unlikely to see it let alone understand it.

 

I don't necessarily disagree with you here.

But, I think it's worth noting how much we seriously do not know.

Let's remember that we can not get even ONE PIXEL of uncompromised light from any planet outside our solar system. Thus, we have no way of examining anything from their atmospheres.

In fact, we can't even do any real investigation of the possibility of life (now or in the past) on the planets and moons within our own solar system.

I THINK the Webb telescope due to launch in December will be able to get 1 (one) pixel of light information from a very few nearby exoplanets.

As for multiple life forms on Earth, it's again the case that our ability to look is seriously limited. The stuff we look for when looking for life doesn't last through time periods as long as Earth could be reasonably expected to support life. Maybe there WERE multiple starts of life on Earth. Maybe they lost the competition before they had a chance to leave a trace that would last long enough for us to find.

Also there is the question of timing. This universe is more than 13B years old and has many billions of years to go. One question might be whether there is some other life right now. But, there is also that fact that we could simply be missing other life forms that came before or will come after. After all, OUR tree of life has been around for only a quarter of the age of the universe so far. And, life on this planet will be ended before another half billion years as the sun evaporates our oceans, etc., into space.

So, even if we advanced to the point of being able to verify that there is no other life in the universe today (an impossible task) it wouldn't mean that there hasn't been in the past or that there won't be in the future.

That's not quite the same question, of course. But, it seems worth consideration in general.

 

Only the universe isn't infinite. It's not infinite in size and not infinite in length of existence. So if you had infinite time, maybe a monkey could type out Hamlet by accident, but if the time is limited, that seems less likely.

 

Basically what you are saying is that there is far more that we don't know than what we do know, which I agree with. I don't know that there isn't life, or intelligent life out there, but I sure can't prove it nor do I have any sort of theoretical reason to think it's existing out there somewhere.

 

I agree with that.

The most that can be said in favor of life elsewhere seems to be that there are large numbers of places that look to be reasonably like Earth and there seems to be no natural thing where there is only one of them in the universe.

 

On the other hand, a few trillion planets and moons multiplied by 13 billion years is one hell of a lot of lab time.

 

There is a thing called a preponderance, not of direct proof, but of evidence.

For example, say I wake up in the morning, and there is snow all over the landscape as I look out the window.

Now, that's not direct proof it snowed the night while I slept, i mean, it is possible that someone with a big snow machine came by and carpeted the neighborhood, eh?

But, can I not safely presume it did, in fact, snow, given the presumptive evidence?

See what I mean? There is a place in the state of affairs, based on relative evidence, called 'presumptive logic', where we can presume there is intelligent life in the universe. The evidence that leads us to the presumption is overwhelming, but you have to be curious enough to look for it. It is there.

it goes back to what I said before, in the universe, in any category, there isn't one of anything, not one flower, not one person, not one rock, not one horse, one fly, one fish, etc. Therefore, how could it possibly be true, that out of trillions of planets, there would be only one planet with intelligent life? It defies logic.

Can we not 'presume', therefore, that there is intelligent life on other planets?

Do you really need direct proof to come to that presumption?

Now, if you were a scientist, I would accept that, as a scientist, you do not have the luxury of presumption.

But, if you do not, then you do.

But, I disagree with you, there are tons of compelling presumptive evidence of alien visitation.

You just haven't looked. And the reason you haven't looked is that you are not curious.

 

Lil Mike, we do not know, for a fact, that the universe is finite. Our ability to perceive it is finite, that is all.

But how could it not be infinite? If the universe ended, as the evidence does suggest, there is still something beyond it, which, by definition, is still part of the universe, not to mention it is entirely possible there may be other universes, into infinity.

An infinite universe, to me, is far more logical than a finite one.

 

I remember project Blue Book. And I remember being surrounded by" evidence ". Books, magazines, and news stories. I remember the "swamp gas" explanation of the UFO phenomenon. There were 2 main types, cigar shape and saucer shape. We had all kinds of pics. Even portholes in the saucer with aliens looking out. I agree with the Air Force. Most evidence is horse manure. I do think that there is a high probability that there is life out there. But I also think a visit would be a pretty big deal.

 

We've come a long way since project blue book, and it sounds like you haven't read Hanek's book, or any book.

Like I said, you are not curious.

 

It's not the lack of curiosity, at least originally. When I was younger, I wanted to believe, but there has been nothing in UFO evidence or in our understanding of the universe that has been added in the past few decades that has actually made me more open to the possibilities of intelligent life, in fact, just the opposite. I'm not sure why you think healthy skepticism based on the actual lack of evidence is a privilege reserved for scientists, but not laymen, but I'll claim that privilege until the time I have to pay up on my dollar bet.