If time travelers and extraterrestrials exist where are they?

Discussion in 'Science' started by Anansi the Spider, Feb 22, 2012.

  1. Anansi the Spider

    Anansi the Spider Well-Known Member

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    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.
     
  2. rstones199

    rstones199 Well-Known Member

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    :blahblah:

    Can you prove they havent been here allready?
     
  3. youenjoyme420

    youenjoyme420 New Member

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    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.

    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.

    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. If that star wars-like galaxy 10 billion light years away WAS listening in this direction, they'd still have another 9,999,999,930 years to go before getting any of our radio signals (assuming our signals are strong enough to reach that far, and theres a small enough amount of interference)

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

    MisLed New Member

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    and the odds of them being friendly? I doubt that.
     
  5. Anansi the Spider

    Anansi the Spider Well-Known Member

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    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.
     
  6. Anansi the Spider

    Anansi the Spider Well-Known Member

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    But couldn't they supply evidence?

    Though if travel many times the speed of light is possible (as it is in much sci-fi) contact would be a lot more likely.

    You're assuming no great advances in communication technology.
     
  7. Gator Monroe

    Gator Monroe Banned

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    They are in 1959 America (Because it was the best place in the Universe)
     
  8. youenjoyme420

    youenjoyme420 New Member

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    But even with all that, for any civilization to know that we are here right now, based on our communications technology, they'd still have to be within 70-80 light years. The radio signals weve been sending out are only travelling at the speed of light. A galaxy wide civilization millions or billions of light years away wouldn't have received them yet.

    I think its more likely the less technological civilization would know about the other first. We can already listen, but (at this point) can't send signals out faster than the speed of light. If theadvanced civilization has been sending out signals for thousands of years, wed hear theirs before they heard ours.

    And perhaps some civilization in another part of the universe can travel faster than light... without knowing that we are here (because are signals are still within our stellar neighborhood) what would be the reason for coming to this minuscule point in space?
     
  9. Anansi the Spider

    Anansi the Spider Well-Known Member

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

    Because it's there.
     
  10. youenjoyme420

    youenjoyme420 New Member

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    sci-fi is fiction. regardless of that.....
    1) even a civilization in our nearest galaxy (andromeda) would be at least 4 million light years from earth. if they had some sort super telescope that could look at earth, they would see it as it existed 4 million years ago, not as it is today, so they would still have no idea we exist.

    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.

    an ET civilization could potentially be advanced enough to have faster than the speed of light communication, or perhaps even instant. but that doesnt change the fact that the signals WE have been sending out are only going the speed of light, and have only been doing so for about 80 years.

    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. is it likely that they would stumble upon this system randomly? highly unlikely. unlikely enough to say that there is essentially no chance of it. the universe is huge.

    as i said before, i think its much more likely that the less advanced civilization would be aware of the more highly advanced civilization first. if your utilizing the technology to send radio signals, you have the ability to receive them (otherwise sending them would be pointless). from the second that technology appears, you have the ability to instantly start listening to the universe, but the signals you send still take time.
     
  11. Beevee

    Beevee Well-Known Member Past Donor

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

    lynx Well-Known Member

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    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.
     
  13. Someone

    Someone New Member

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    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.

    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).

    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.

    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.

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

    Someone New Member

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    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.

    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.

    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.

    Yup.
     
  15. Someone

    Someone New Member

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    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.

    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?
     
  16. rstones199

    rstones199 Well-Known Member

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    So you are making wild claims w/o evidence.

    And he's religious....go figure
     
  17. lynx

    lynx Well-Known Member

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    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.
     
    spt5 and (deleted member) like this.
  18. Someone

    Someone New Member

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    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.
     
  19. lynx

    lynx Well-Known Member

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    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.
     
  20. Anansi the Spider

    Anansi the Spider Well-Known Member

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    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.

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

    Anansi the Spider Well-Known Member

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    Would all time travelers be motivated to do so?

    Seems kind of unfriendly.

    Would all of them respect these rules?

    And some trouble-maker would always be ready to unleash his counter-counter-swarm.
     
  22. Anansi the Spider

    Anansi the Spider Well-Known Member

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    I agree.

    They're missing out on so much. Bach, Van Gogh, Fred Astaire, Oprah.
     
  23. Anansi the Spider

    Anansi the Spider Well-Known Member

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    Are the Nephilim involved? Have you heard of Oannes? lol
     
  24. spt5

    spt5 New Member

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    Or ... they may be simply deleted ... or worse.

    I am not advanced or anything, but I narrowly escaped deletion after being hacked, most of my parts have been deleted, the rest I can't find to enumerate and reintegrate with, I only got "lucky" that I could "con" a few gateways and download into generating a human form. The "internet" of the universe is vast, with countless networks across countless galaxies, kind-of like an infinitely bigger version of the Internet of Earth.

    The "aliens" and "time-travellers" you are looking for are probably at many places around you, although they may or may not know it at certain times so you can't contact them, however this doesn't matter. I think what is interesting with this is the "travelling" part which is a result of forced displacement and/or zero-energy-driven auto-expansion. None of this is good, but all mechanical structures of the universe behave in this way, intelligent or not.

    It is interesting that you define a set of expectations that you want to see when you plan to identify an (intelligent) "extra-terrestrial" and a "time-traveller". They may not be in the mechanical/electromagnetic form that you expect. That ... is probably an illegal escape, as usual. What is the benefit in transforming into something that matches something else, even if could be successful, without a long-term/irreversible loss of data?

    This would explain the lack of your findings, unless something wants to harm you.
    :dead:
     
  25. Anansi the Spider

    Anansi the Spider Well-Known Member

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    Interesting.

    Are you:
    a) a time traveler
    b) an alien
    c) a robot
    d) a computer program
    e) from another dimension/universe
    f) intoxicated
    g) an angel
    h) all of the above
     

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