Do you believe in UFOs & flying saucers ?

Wibbs wrote: »

..... TL;DR? we can't know until we find evidence of life elsewhere. That life could be almost always simple life. Intelligence could be very rare and intelligence like ours could be rarer again. There might be only one intelligent life form per galaxy, or none.

dubstepper wrote: »

When you think about it, an alien species would need to develop around a star. The nearest to us, traveling near the speed of light, would be a 4.3 year journey. Extremely unlikely you would undertake something like that, if it was even possible, and not make yourself known. Also for those travelers if they returned home after 9 years traveling near the speed of light their families would be something like 70 years older. Again unlikely to do this without some purpose beyond scaring some yokel.

ShatterAlan wrote: »

Something that's always baffled me is how long it took us to take to the skies. Forget about the internal combustion engine. That took a while to develop and a lot of the physics and chemistry were still evolving at the time. But we were seafaring with sails and oars and rudders for millenia. Take a look at the hang-glider. What could be simpler? It has no moving parts and the bow and arrow or church bell or windmill is a space-age technology by comparison.


How come people weren't floating around the friggin' skies in hang-gliders and para-gliders since Christ was a child?

Wibbs wrote: »

Well kinda. The Asians had glass but it wasn't very good quality and that was down to another quirk of fate, they had porcelain of very high quality and had it for ages so glass was left on the to do list or ignored. Europe had much less fine ceramics so glass had gotten a leg up from early on.

These quirks of fate can impact massively on development. Take the Chinese again. They had gunpowder, the compass, blast furnaces, the ships rudder, paper, printing long before Europeans, but didn't do nearly so much with any of them. Why? Well first off they were already had an empire so weren't really looking to build one, rather defend what they had. Europe after Rome fell was a bunch of heavily competitive nation states looking to build another Rome(while being somewhat cohesive and connected by a common faith), so after internal empire building was a dead loss they looked outwards. And because of this internal competition for advantage innovations were jumped upon, then the guys next door innovated on that and so on. It was a hothouse for it.

Secondly China had developed a massive bureaucracy over a thousand and more years old, originally built around their truly gargantuan irrigation and agricultural schemes. This bureaucracy and the associated social strata was very strict and social mobility was low, so innovating wouldn't tend to get you cash or social cache. In Europe, and it had been like this for a very long time, you invented a better mousetrap you got the cash and the social cache and again because of its many nation states if your own didn't appreciate your mousetrap the country next door might. Which again plugged into the internal competition.

Thirdly philosophy and religion played a part. In Europe the notion that the universe was a logical and divisible thing made by a logical god(s) understandable to humans who were lords over lesser nature meant that humans could look at it more closely and understand it and turn it to it's needs. Even in early Greek times we can see this. Whereas the eastern notion of a reed bends with the wind, with nature, the Greeks sought to conquer nature to their own purpose. If the wind broke the reed, you don't go off and sit on a mountain going OMMMM, you build a better stronger fecking reed to resist the wind.

And all of those Chinese ideas passed through the Arab world before they got to Europe and again did little in the region and again because of local culture. Take printing. Arab scribes were highly thought of and thought highly of themselves so printing was rejected hard by them and all "right thinking" men. To the degree that the first printed Quran was a small run in 16th century Italy, another in 18th century Russia and the one around today is based off the first truly large print run and in a Muslim nation in Egypt in the 1920's. In Europe the bible was the first thing to be printed pretty much and sold like hot cakes, which of course then had people read it from cover to cover, discover errors of faith by the church and then you get the reformation which was driven by the printing press, which in turn had people questioning absolutes and printing their answers and cue more internal competition and innovation and the age of enlightenment.

Basically the tiniest things can have huge effects and where these things are created or move to can have equally huge effects.

Plus you need your ducks in a row to come together for things to happen. So if Europe had bamboo, then maybe flight would have taken off(sorry) or maybe not. The need has to be there, or a very wealthy patron who has the horn for it, who then finds a Leo DaVinci to get it working(if you can keep the bugger interested for long enough...). And what need would there be then? Telescopes gave you observation from a distance without faffing about dangerously in the air. Actually telescopes really get their initial popularity not because of observation of the heavens or anything so lofty, or because of the military considerations, but because Galileo had a brainwave for making a bit of spare cash, as you do, and developed better ones and sold them to Italian merchants to spot goods ships coming in ahead of their competitors so they could better fix the prices. Could you predict that ahead of time? Or today, if we didn't know that?

What you know is a product of the truth of your time and that truth can be hard to shift for a new one. A philosopher(whose name escapes) noted this in a conversation with his students who remarked that people must have been stupid back then to think the sun went around the Earth. His reply was would a sunset have looked any different to them? Some of the greatest minds in history believing the sun did orbit the earth came up with fantastically complex maths and models to prove it did, so it did. Until it didn't.

Gretas Gonna Get Ya! wrote: »

Why does practically everyone imagine an alien life form, as being more intelligent that us humans?

Isn't it just as plausible, if such aliens do exist, that they could be less intelligent than us or perhaps just on par with us in terms of advancement?

I think it's quite possible, that we could discover life on another planet in the next 100 years... but we may have to help these aliens to reach our level of intelligence and expertise.

bangkok wrote: »

Symington also noted that he requested information from the commander of Luke Air Force Base, the general of the National Guard, and the head of the Department of Public Safety. But none of the officials he contacted had an answer for what had happened, and were also perplexed.[31] Later, he responded to an Air Force explanation that the lights were flares: "As a pilot and a former Air Force Officer, I can definitively say that this craft did not resemble any man made object I'd ever seen"

Frances Barwood, the 1997 Phoenix city councilwoman who launched an investigation into the event, said that of the over 700 witnesses she interviewed, "The government never interviewed even one

unhappys10 wrote: »

Oh well if they said that, case closed...