Thread: If time travelers and extraterrestrials exist where are they?

Originally Posted by Anansi the Spider

If time travelers and extraterrestrials exist where are they?

Some possible reasons for their absence: 1) Time travel and interstellar space travel are impossible or next to impossible. 2) Their movements are tightly controlled by some authoritarian organization/government. 3) Something inherent in technologically advanced societies leads to their self-destruction: Nanotechnology run amuck (gray goo)? Particle accelerator disaster? Nuclear war?

It looks like much of science fiction will remain just fiction. Some of the more fantastic technological utopias will never be realized.

They have taken a look at this God forsaken hell on earth and decided to give it a miss.

Aliens exist since the ancient time, and they are the time travelers too.

In ancient time, they just fly down in front of our ancestors, so our ancestors would worshipped them like gods.

As of today, they may portrait themselves as advanced civilization if they decided it's time for them to show themselves.

Don't know why they are still hiding.

The signs of aliens are everywhere, you just need to look around.

Originally Posted by Anansi the Spider

If time travelers and extraterrestrials exist where are they?

With regard to time travelers, it would be entirely possible for them to erase records of their interventions. I mean, if they make a mistake and get caught, they can just reset and avoid being caught until they are successful. And those of us in the affected time stream would never know it. There's other potential explanations (perhaps time travel does occur, but creates alternate timelines when it happens, which are not observable from the main timeline).

As for extraterrestrials, there is no particular reason to think that they ought to be interested in Earth at all, even if they were capable of reaching Earth. It kind of betrays an inflated sense of self-importance to think that we would be interesting enough to bother visiting. Or maybe they have ethical reasons for avoiding non-interacting planets and surrounding regions of space--they might simply respect our privacy enough not to go tromping around in our backyard, so to speak.

Some possible reasons for their absence: 1) Time travel and interstellar space travel are impossible or next to impossible.

Well, interstellar space travel obviously isn't impossible. There is always the option of taking the brute force approach and going at sublight speeds. That seems inconceivable to us given our lifespans right now, but if members of an advanced society could expect to live indefinitely, or were willing to cram themselves into generation ships, or had some method of suspended animation, or were willing to clone more of themselves once a non-living probe reached the target, or could upload their consciousness into computers that could be loaded into slow probes...

There's lots of potential options for taking the slow way with advanced technologies, though some of them are just as theoretical as faster-than-light travel (uploading consciousness, for example).

2) Their movements are tightly controlled by some authoritarian organization/government.

How would an authoritarian government maintain control of time machines? I think social maturity would be a better explanation than that, and it isn't a very good one.

3) Something inherent in technologically advanced societies leads to their self-destruction: Nanotechnology run amuck (gray goo)? Particle accelerator disaster? Nuclear war?

Technologically advanced societies also have technologically advanced solutions to problems like that. A society with mature nanotechnology would be able to create counter-swarms to any gray goo it might accidentally develop. Indeed, creating such a counter before the gray goo is itself created would be a sensible precaution.

It looks like much of science fiction will remain just fiction. Some of the more fantastic technological utopias will never be realized.

Or we're just not thinking about the problem sensibly.

Originally Posted by youenjoyme420

I don't know about time travellers. Although lets say they had come back and claimed openly to be time travellers, where do you think they would have been sent?

As for extraterrestrials, I see no reason to believe they've already been here, but think its fairly likely that there are plenty of other civilizations out there. Two this to keep in mind...1) the universe is unimaginabley huge, and 2) we've only been broadcasting into space for about 70 or 80 years.

The problem with our broadcasts is even worse than that, because the signals are still subject to the inverse square law. They would become indistinguishable from background radiation before long.

1) a star wars-like galaxy could exist out there somewhere, but if its 10 billion light years away, wed likely never know about it, even thousands of years down the line. The distances are just too great.

Yup. There's also separation by time to worry about too. Maybe our own galaxy was a more active place... 15 million years ago. Or will be a more active place... 5 million years from now.

2) for ets to know for certain that we are here, they would have had to focus in on this point in space (tiny tiny tiny tiny.... relatively of course) at some point in the last 70-80 years. And even then, said civilization would have to be within 70-80 light years from us, which in galactic terms is pretty small.

Much less than that because of the inverse square law and background radiation. Basically all we've established is that there is no technologically advanced life around the Alpha Centauri system or Bernard's Star. That's it, literally. And our signals might not even get that far in a recognizable manner. Unless we start making a real effort to send massively powerful radio signals to other stars, no alien civilization that might exist would even stand a chance in hell of detecting us except by essentially blind random chance of happening through the area.

And of course the odds of an alien civilization just stumbling upon us by accident, considering the vastness of space, is pretty much zero.

Yup.

Originally Posted by Anansi the Spider

Some of the super-advanced civilizations we read about in sci-fi would be aware of our planet despite the distance.

Super-advanced civilizations (relative to ourselves) are not that unlikely. Super-advanced civilizations that possess the technological magic found in science fiction, however, are not so likely. It's not hard to conceive of super-advanced civilizations still constrained by the laws of physics. I mean, even if they do have some trick for making faster than light travel work that we haven't realized, that doesn't mean they would be able to magically pick out signals no stronger than the background radiation.

Because it's there.

There is an awful lot of "there" out there. Maybe Earth was cataloged 300,000 years ago and no one bothered to check up on it since then?

Originally Posted by Anansi the Spider

I don't know of any solid evidence. Contact always seems to be made with some New Age loon who has a book to sell. Erich Von Daniken is fun to read, but I can't take his work too seriously.

So you are making wild claims w/o evidence.

And he's religious....go figure

Originally Posted by Someone

As for extraterrestrials, there is no particular reason to think that they ought to be interested in Earth at all

Yes, they do.

In Biblical view, the aliens are either fallen angels or angels. The fallen angels got thrown out of the heaven(space) and down to the earth or near it. They are stuck here. They have to live amoung us. And the world is temporary given to them.
As Christians, we actually live in the enemy's territory.

Besides, there is a battle going on, between God and evil(both are aliens), human are unwillingly caught in it. The earth is the center of this battle.

If you look at the abductee's reports, you'll find that , the aliens are very interested in human's reproduction system. Why? May be because the fallen angels want to create an army by mixing alien gene and human gene preparing for the last battle or just simply pollute the human DNA to destroy the human race eventually.

Who knows, this is just my theory. I may be wrong.

Originally Posted by lynx

Yes, they do.

In Biblical view, the aliens are either fallen angels or angels. The fallen angels got thrown out of the heaven(space) and down to the earth or near it. They are stuck here. They have to live amoung us. And the world is temporary given to them.
As Christians, we actually live in the enemy's territory.

While this is certainly far less improbable than the idea of an omnipotent deity and his somewhat less omnipotent servants getting into a metaphysical fight with each other, I see no reason to accept either interpretation as fact.

Besides, there is a battle going on, between God and evil(both are aliens), human are unwillingly caught in it. The earth is the center of this battle.

There is obviously no battle presently occurring, nor is it reasonable to assume that the obviously moral dilemma posed by Christian doctrine is reflective of an actual battle taking place between space aliens with Earth as a battlefield. Sin, for example, makes no sense in that context. Why would aliens give a (*)(*)(*)(*)?

If you look at the abductee's reports, you'll find that , the aliens are very interested in human's reproduction system. Why?

Because human beings are normally sexually obsessed, especially on an unconscious level.

May be because the fallen angels want to create an army by mixing alien gene and human gene preparing for the last battle or just simply pollute the human DNA to destroy the human race eventually.

Ludicrous.

Originally Posted by Someone

While this is certainly far less improbable than the idea of an omnipotent deity and his somewhat less omnipotent servants getting into a metaphysical fight with each other, I see no reason to accept either interpretation as fact.



There is obviously no battle presently occurring, nor is it reasonable to assume that the obviously moral dilemma posed by Christian doctrine is reflective of an actual battle taking place between space aliens with Earth as a battlefield. Sin, for example, makes no sense in that context. Why would aliens give a (*)(*)(*)(*)?



Because human beings are normally sexually obsessed, especially on an unconscious level.



Ludicrous.

Oh, no!

Humanoid is not a joke. And the alien did leave some evidence--alien device in the abductees's bodies

Let me go search again.

Originally Posted by youenjoyme420

as are an almost infinite amount of other stellar systems in the universe. could an ET civilization be picking out stellar systems at random and going there? possibly.

If these civilizations are numerous and can travel many times the speed of light (the situation in many sci-fi stories) then contact becomes more likely.

2) even if they theoretically had the technology to speed up the radio signals weve been sending out into space, they would first have to be aware of those signals. for any civilization to be aware of those signals at this point in time, theyd have to be within 80 light years, which is next to nothing.

Some of the super-advanced civilizations imagined by science fiction would escape this limitation.