Alien invasion

tallaghtmick

yekahS wrote: »

If it was possible to travel back through time. Shouldn't we have already met some time-travellers. Unless they are really careful not to let people know they're travelling through time.

Its a good theory and I read that the reason we have not met any of them is because.............................

It hasnt happened yet

:pac:

Lone Stone

This is whats going to happen they will come kidnap half the population stick shock collars on that explode if we remove them, and force us to fight as a slave army and unleash the wrath of man kind on other pussy ass alien race's for our overlords !! rawwrr

osnola ibax

okeanes wrote: »

we can travel into the future and already have we just cant prove it yet as we will have to meet them in the future first . all we need is a giant train or a space craft to travel around a planet just outside our galaxie for say 100 years and in that time our world would of only advanced say 70 .

for the average size of a humen and our weight i dought we will ever reach the speed of light but we definatly will get closer .

Apparently if you travel though space for 200 years at a speed approaching the speed of light, you will have aged only 28 years. The closer you get to the speed of light, the greater the dilation of time. Einsteins Special Theory of relativity. Future time travel is,definitely possible.

Undergod

Yeah, but that's not really very useful time travel - it just gets you into the future faster. And requires vast aounts of energy too.

seamus

Undergod wrote: »

Yeah, but that's not really very useful time travel - it just gets you into the future faster. And requires vast aounts of energy too.

I wouldn't really call it "time travel" in the traditional sense. In essence we're all time travellers, moving into the future at 1 hour per hour (in Earth's reference frame). Travelling faster simply changes this rate of time travel.

Although locally there's an argument that people who travel more during their lifetimes will live longer than those who don't. The effect is probably minimal - a few minutes over the course of one's lifetime, but still.

Undergod

Of course, their subjective experience of time isn't changed, so it's of no benefit to them really.

jargon buster

If you want to live longer get a job watching kettles boiling.
Its a well known fact that a watched kettle never boils, immortality can be yours.

Nathan Berburoc

The Skulls wrote: »

Anyone read the book by Travis S. Taylor & Bob Boan? Having read it I must admit the scientific possibilities of alien contact are worrying! The general premise of the book is that it's just a matter of time before ET turns up & that statistically they'll be hostile. It also gives what I think are plausible reasons why governments remain largely silent on the subject. Any else here read it? If so what do you think? Or are governments actively planning for this in the meantime?

What do you think?

Its unfortunate that fantasists and hack sci fi writers like Taylor are able to make a lucrative living from scare mongering and pandering to typical human paranoia about "the other" , whether it be little green men, witches , homosexuals or commies.its always the same suppositions which are made, and always the same cogitive biases involved:

THEY WANT WHAT WE HAVE :
the childish Homocentrism, which saw us all think we were the centre of the universe until comparitively recently , still dictating that average old earth despite being unremarkable and swimming in a galaxy teeming with similar planets, is somehow special and a magnet for conniving greedy aliens.Spectrescopic analysis shows that all the elements and most of the compounds present on earth are also present in copious amounts throughout the galaxy, whether it be in stars,exoplanets or interplanetary nebulae.So if they are out for resources theres no need to bother us

THEY WANT TO CONQUER INVADE AND COLONISE:
the misinformed opinion that a space faring species would ground itself in the kind of territorial pissing that our 2D geographically based nations currently reside in is laughable and says more about our current warlike plundering colonial history then theirs

THEY WANT TO DESTROY US:
Im afraid Mr Taylors gung-ho war movie w*nk fantasies about facing alien hordes head on in some kind of macho video game-cum sci fi movie scenario are childish and show up the huge inconsistancies in his arguments about alien life and their technology.Any civilisation capable of harnessing enough energy to cross space,the associated artificial intelligence required aswell as the manipulation of resources on a sub atomic scale would mean that whatever fate they had planned for poor old earth would be as far beyond our ability to prevent it or intervene as a bacteria which is being cleaned from a toilet bowl.... by a bazooka

In my opinion we can all relax,nothing to see here folks.Im sure they are going about their business, amused and dissappointed at how monsterous greedy and ultimately unimaginative humans are.

The Skulls

For anyone interested, the authors of this book are featured in a documentary titled 'alien invasion' that's on National Geographic this afternoon at 2pm.

Jonny7

If we have mastered basic stealth technology, then I sure some ultra advanced civilisation would be able to observe us without being seen.

Regarding space-travel, we are absolutely in the stone age. The very best of our "conventional" methods limit us within our own tiny solar system.

To get outside our own back yard we'd have to bend physics basically. That kinda tech we're probably hundreds of years away from. Any ultra advanced civ that has managed that will most likely not be interested in "invading" or "attacking" us - far from it.

Nathan Berburoc

Jonny7 wrote: »

If we have mastered basic stealth technology, then I sure some ultra advanced civilisation would be able to observe us without being seen.

Regarding space-travel, we are absolutely in the stone age. The very best of our "conventional" methods limit us within our own tiny solar system.

To get outside our own back yard we'd have to bend physics basically. That kinda tech we're probably hundreds of years away from. Any ultra advanced civ that has managed that will most likely not be interested in "invading" or "attacking" us - far from it.

completely agree , its absurd and egomaniacal to think we have anything to offer the outside community technologically or even philosophically.whatever interest they might have in us could be quite easily sated with long range surveillance or invisible nanoscale probes....

Dont get me started on the "UFOs" with their blinking lights and whirling noises.For whose benefit are these lights? If you can observe it with radar or the naked eye then its one of ours.any logical person can see right through it (pardon the pun)

The Infrared ones are slightly more intriguing

Tomk1

nyarlothothep wrote: »

SETI is a terrible idea, we're advertising our vulnerability and technological inferiority simultaneously.

SETI is an ear, listening only. If you want to stop the 'advertising' that's pretty much impossible, as all radio/TV/satellite transmissiosns blinks Earth as unnatural EM radiation, nevermind the light spectrum reflected of the atmosphere showing the signs of life.

What did Columbus want do after finding the new-world, colonize, and convert the natives to the true-religion, so my biggest fear would be ET's beaming in while I'm eating lunch with 'have you heard the Extraordinary good news'

Nathan Berburoc

Tomk1 wrote: »

SETI is an ear, listening only. If you want to stop the 'advertising' that's pretty much impossible, as all radio/TV/satellite transmissiosns blinks Earth as unnatural EM radiation, nevermind the light spectrum reflected of the atmosphere showing the signs of life.

What did Columbus want do after finding the new-world, colonize, and convert the natives to the true-religion, so my biggest fear would be ET's beaming in while I'm eating lunch with 'have you heard the Extraordinary good news'

SETI is ineffectual psuedoscience of the worse kind, in that the fruitfulness of its premise will be impossible to disprove in the medium to long term.The idea that extra terrestial craft which are physically travelling at FTL speeds,or even ones which are planet based,would be using narrow band light speed communications is moronic.

SETI would have us believe that aliens are using a medium of communication which is slower than their vessels,its analagous to us being able to travel as fast as emails, but using carrier pidgeons for correspondance.There are also some extremly irresponsible agencies which are involved in so called "Active Seti" which an extraordinarily bad idea, involving purposefully sending high intensity pulsed messages out in to space.When the local neighbourhood are silent,its for a reason, we should think twice.

Scarily Tomk1 , you might have a point about the alien equivilent of jehovahs witnesses turning up with dogmas its always the irrational and evangelical which have the persistance and down right crazy needed to make it out in to the great beyond

The Skulls

What Columbus did apart from 'bringing the light' was virtually wipe the natives out, illnesses & pathogens to which the native Europeans were merely inconvenienced by had a detrimental effect on the locals, they were virtually wiped out albeit unintentionally. I think it's rash to say we may not have 'anything to offer' advanced ET's, they might come here BECAUSE of our technological inferiority i.e. We'd be quickly defeated/enslaved etc. As a previous poster said we may be judged as not being worth the effort. There could be other civilisations who aren't as 'advanced' as we are & they might have already been invaded. Assuming the laws of physics are constant throughout the universe then mathematically it seems that the chances of being contacted seem to be remote in our lifetime. Fingers crossed.

hooradiation

Nathan Berburoc wrote: »

SETI is ineffectual psuedoscience of the worse kind, in that the fruitfulness of its premise will be impossible to disprove in the medium to long term.The idea that extra terrestial craft which are physically travelling at FTL speeds,or even ones which are planet based,would be using narrow band light speed communications is moronic.

Firstly this assumes that FTL travel is possible - and unless you can bend or break the laws of the universe, it isn't.
Secondly, even if radio isn't the best possible communication method it is a reasonable thing to look for, given that it's plausible that any other sapient species that managed to get as far as we have would use it and also it gives us something we can identify as being artificial in nature.
Yes, our nearest alien neighbour may well be using inverted neutrino-beams through the warp nacelle to send messages that arrive before you've sent them but seeing as we have no idea what that may look like, radio waves are a good place to start,

Nathan Berburoc wrote: »

SETI would have us believe that aliens are using a medium of communication which is slower than their vessels,its analogous to us being able to travel as fast as emails, but using carrier pidgeons for correspondence.

Except SETI would have us believe no such thing.

Nathan Berburoc wrote: »

There are also some extremly irresponsible agencies which are involved in so called "Active Seti" which an extraordinarily bad idea, involving purposefully sending high intensity pulsed messages out in to space.When the local neighbourhood are silent,its for a reason, we should think twice.

Well, setting aside the fact that we've been sending out transmissions for a good sixty odd years now anyway, I'm not sure how you're managing to get to the point where the neighbourhood being silent means there is a malevolent force and we ought not to be drawing attention to ourselves.

Nathan Berburoc

Some interesting points HooRadiation , and i realise that of course in the absence of data and with only extrapolation and theory we are both guilty of making speculative
leaps , but at least we both appear to be doing so with reference to observable phenomena and theory....that said I think its a fairly pessimistic leap to say that
FTL travel requires breaking the laws of the universe.There is nothing in general relativity which prevents wormholes or warping of space, its just a matter of vast
amounts of energy,which we are currently unable to access at our type 0 kardashev scale civilisations.im sure our cousins with a few thousand
years head start would have a very different playing field

as for Radio transmissions , heres a few scientific papers which show speculated means of communication faster than the speed of light , and ideal for interstellar communications
interesting and encouraging stuff i think you`ll agree

Quantum Non Locality communications and entanglement
http://www.npl.washington.edu/npl/int_rep/qm_nl.html

Dispersion Phasing
http://academicearth.org/lectures/dispersion-phase-velocity-and-group-velocity

Evanescent Wave Coupling and Quantum Tunnelling
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=157143

The Great Silence has nothing to do with the leaking electromagnetic shell of radio communications from Earth , its actually a reference to the Fermi Paradox ,which
describes thet fact that although through probability the universe should be teeming with life (and the indicators of life such as transmissions,mega structures or even evidence of destruction)
there is absolutely nothing.No signals, no movement,no forensics apparent.This is reffered to by astronomers as The Great Silence.If you look at some of the "solutions" for the
Fermi paradox you will see one rather interesting and frankly frightening one , than it is dangerous to communicate ( possibly to avoid or as a result of so called Beserker Von Neumans )

Im sure youve read about the highly irresponsible proposals of ActivSeti (http://www.activeseti.org/default.html) you will see that there are many short sighted and self serving
buffoons who would like nothing more than to announcer are unrepared and unworthy human asses to everything withing earshot, which thankfully will still be confined
to , presuming of course that the only recievers of our gobbledegook are system based

If Seti are not expecting aliens to use radio communication can you explain why they are seeking them instead of several other less costly methods ( one of them
being to cease completly and get down to some serious scientific research ?
im sorry im not being disrespectful to them but Seti is snakeoil of the worst kind in my opinion and a classic case of Escalation of Commitment Cognitive Bias

Nathan Berburoc

The Skulls wrote: »

What Columbus did apart from 'bringing the light' was virtually wipe the natives out, illnesses & pathogens to which the native Europeans were merely inconvenienced by had a detrimental effect on the locals, they were virtually wiped out albeit unintentionally. QUOTE]

I think the chances of ETs being biological at all is quite slim given the fact that even earth is looking at a post human AI future if we make it to the next century.Also its far more practical to send artificial intelligence which would be immune to both the biological frailties of spacetravel (radiation, long duration,need for life sustaining resources and environment) as well as the tendancy for error,mutiny or god forbid "going native" We wont be catching any diseases from the tin man im sure

The Skulls wrote: »

I think it's rash to say we may not have 'anything to offer' advanced ET's, they might come here BECAUSE of our technological inferiority i.e. We'd be quickly defeated/enslaved etc. .

your correct of course in that its purely speculation to imply id understand what meaning or value we would have for an ET ,but it seems unlikely that any technology we have which is inferior to theirs would not be better observed and studied using simulations....as for our allure of being easily enslaved again whats the point?

the only value i can see for earth would be if it was being kept as a wilderness reserve ,out of kindness and politeness to allow us to develope or disintegrate according to our own destiny,watched dispassionately and recorded for historical reasons much as we treat so called "primitive" uncontacted tribes in papua new guinea etc (called the Zoo Hypothesis)

hooradiation

Nathan Berburoc wrote: »

Some interesting points HooRadiation , and i realise that of course in the absence of data and with only extrapolation and theory we are both guilty of making speculative
leaps , but at least we both appear to be doing so with reference to observable phenomena and theory....that said I think its a fairly pessimistic leap to say that FTL travel requires breaking the laws of the universe.

Well, accelerating to light speed would require infinite energy, that's pretty hard to break - which is why I used the "bend or break" caveat - which would include things you listed, like wormholes and 'warping'. But for all intents and purposes travelling at the speed of light is impossible.

Nathan Berburoc wrote: »

as for Radio transmissions , heres a few scientific papers which show speculated means of communication faster than the speed of light , and ideal for interstellar communications
interesting and encouraging stuff i think you`ll agree

Quantum Non Locality communications and entanglement
http://www.npl.washington.edu/npl/int_rep/qm_nl.html

Dispersion Phasing
http://academicearth.org/lectures/dispersion-phase-velocity-and-group-velocity

Evanescent Wave Coupling and Quantum Tunnelling
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=157143

I had a feeling that quantum entanglement might come up - it's certainly plausible but it does hit the same problem as I mentioned earlier, it is possible that IF there are advanced species that they might be using one of those methods, however we have no real way of detecting that.
We do however, know how to pick out artificial radio transmissions, so if we're going to look for something it may as well be something we can actually identify.

Nathan Berburoc wrote: »

The Great Silence has nothing to do with the leaking electromagnetic shell of radio communications from Earth , its actually a reference to the Fermi Paradox ,which
describes thet fact that although through probability the universe should be teeming with life (and the indicators of life such as transmissions,mega structures or even evidence of destruction)
there is absolutely nothing.No signals, no movement,no forensics apparent.This is reffered to by astronomers as The Great Silence.If you look at some of the "solutions" for the
Fermi paradox you will see one rather interesting and frankly frightening one , than it is dangerous to communicate ( possibly to avoid or as a result of so called Beserker Von Neumans )

Well, but as you say there are several possible explanations to the Fermi Paradox - in fact some postulate that the reason it's so quiet is that every other civilization is doing what some might advocate, keep quiet and don't draw attention to yourself.
All that said, simply because one of the explanations is frightening it doesn't follow that we should accept that as the reality and act accordingly. Appeal to fear I believe they call it.
Frankly, I'd imagine that we're simply too far apart and it's too expensive for us to ever meet another alien species - the best we might hope for is to pick up on signs of other civilisations once we've been looking for long enough.

Nathan Berburoc wrote: »

Im sure youve read about the highly irresponsible proposals of ActivSeti (http://www.activeseti.org/default.html) you will see that there are many short sighted and self serving buffoons who would like nothing more than to announcer are unrepared and unworthy human asses to everything withing earshot, which thankfully will still be confined to , presuming of course that the only recievers of our gobbledegook are system based

Once again, assuming anyone is listening and even then that arrogantly enough, these species that would have evolved on a distant world and be actually alien would be exactly like us.

Nathan Berburoc wrote: »

If Seti are not expecting aliens to use radio communication can you explain why they are seeking them instead of several other less costly methods ( one of them being to cease completly and get down to some serious scientific research ?

I never said they weren't, I just disagreed with your strawman of SETI looking for lightspeed communication from ships capable of FTL - they're looking for evidence of radio communication from any civilisation. By the time we pick them up the originator civilisation may very well have annihilation itself or progressed to something more sophisticated. But the point is to find signs of intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy.

Nathan Berburoc

Hooradiation, I think we overlap on most of our ideas but disagree with some.
Light itself seems to do a perfectly good job at travelling at the speed of light , and hence so does information.A post technological singularity society would have the computation ability to upload itself, and transmit itself to waystations etc where it could incarnate or rebuild itself using the local resources (the stations being set up over the course of decades by von neumans as one solution)

You are right though , whatever the technology which our neighbours are (might) use its going to be a bit of a Black Swan kind of science when and if we eventually stumble across it again , but if i had the resources to be looking for signs of intelligence i would be looking for von neuman probes (due to how relatively efficiently they could disperse throughout the galaxy at sub light speeds) or looking towards G type stars which were in binary systems or at least within only a couple of light years of each other , such as Zeta Ret A/B (its amazing how much of a initiative toward enterprise a close horizon is)


But what do you think of the original premise of the thread,which was The Skulls
queries and concerns about Alien Invasion ? I presuming by your understandible pessimism that you think its unlikely too

hooradiation

Nathan Berburoc wrote: »

Hooradiation, I think we overlap on most of our ideas but disagree with some.

That's pretty fair, I'd reckon.

Nathan Berburoc wrote: »

Light itself seems to do a perfectly good job at travelling at the speed of light , and hence so does information.A post technological singularity society would have the computation ability to upload itself, and transmit itself to waystations etc where it could incarnate or rebuild itself using the local resources (the stations being set up over the course of decades by von neumans as one solution)

Well, this does also assume that what we've predicted as one of the possible paths of progression for humanity is a universal path for all species.

Nathan Berburoc wrote: »

You are right though , whatever the technology which our neighbours are (might) use its going to be a bit of a Black Swan kind of science when and if we eventually stumble across it again , but if i had the resources to be looking for signs of intelligence i would be looking for von neuman probes (due to how relatively efficiently they could disperse throughout the galaxy at sub light speeds) or looking towards G type stars which were in binary systems or at least within only a couple of light years of each other , such as Zeta Ret A/B (its amazing how much of a initiative toward enterprise a close horizon is)

Which is fair enough, but wouldn't that surely run into the problem of us not really having an idea what to look for when attempting to find a alien von neuman probe?
I understand the idea, and I know that NASA seem to be moving more towards it, as in more focus on unmanned probes and less on sending men to mars - but I am unsure how we look for something we've never seen before?

Nathan Berburoc wrote: »

But what do you think of the original premise of the thread,which was The Skulls
queries and concerns about Alien Invasion ? I presuming by your understandible pessimism that you think its unlikely too

Very unlikely - considering the size of the universe another race finding us would be very remote. And even then, without wanting to make the mistake I remind others not to make, I have to wonder what possible need could they have for this world that could not be serviced by another uninhabited one?

I would imagine that the acquisition of material resources would be easier to do without having to incur the extra hassle of displacing or exterminating the native life.

But this is getting dangerously close to projecting human ideas onto truly alien beings, so I'll settle for the sheer size of the universe as a reason why it's so unlikely.
To quote philosopher king Philip J Fry "Space. It seems to go on and on forever...... But then you get to the end and a gorilla starts throwing barrels at you. "