Poll: Are aliens associated with any of the following

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  1. #61
    No I don't believe aliens are involved in any of those things. I don't really think there is intelligent alien life out there, but since you just asked about aliens, intelligent or otherwise, I voted yes.

    Intelligent life might be very rare. Here on this planet, multicellular organisms evolved into animals and plants.....and the concept of intelligent plants doesn't even make SENSE, seeing as how they been around for something like a billion years and never even developed a brain. Plants are as alien as it gets in our experience, and we treat them mostly as inanimate objects.

    When it comes to intelligent life, you're asking not just for life to evolve, but for that life to develop in a way that is conducive to creating a brain of some kind, and also that the brain develops in such a way that it achieves "intelligence", as however you want to define that. I don't like the odds of that.

    But if we're just talking about a lifeform, possibly developing like a plant or something even more bizarre that does not have a brain, I think that's likely.

  2. #62
    aliens do exist, and they are not here, and they probably never came, ever.

  3. #63
    Void Lord Elegiac's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by RICH1471 View Post
    Why is it stupid?
    For starters, if they had any concept of rigor they would know better than to cause disruptions of a species' natural behavior by letting themselves be detected.

    No, I do not think aliens have ever visited us, given how unfashionable this part of the galaxy is.
    Quote Originally Posted by Marjane Satrapi
    The world is not divided between East and West. You are American, I am Iranian, we don't know each other, but we talk and understand each other perfectly. The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our governments are very much the same.

  4. #64
    Quote Originally Posted by Xilurm View Post
    Yeah, but we were made billions of years after the Big Bang and that's just because our planet which was just a rock, got struck by another planet and fused together, which made a series of I don't know what that made it possible for life to exist in our planet.

    All I know is that after they were struck together, the planet was blazing hot. At the same time it released gasses that at the end made the atmosphere.

    So before that, nothing existed in the universe? Everything was just lifeless? What if there was some kind of civilization that existed back then, at the time the two planets crushed and they have the same technology as we do right now? Surely by now - which is billions of years after - they are capable of interstellar travel.
    If we're going to speculate about entities which existed billions of years before humans, then you might as well make an assumption that we would never be able to recognize them as alien life in the first place - they would be gods by now. Given human's own speed of evolution (from cavemen to cosmos in 100k years), it would be fair to assume that any alien race that developed even a million years before humanity would be so far advanced that we would no more be able to understand and recognize them as entities then ants can understand and recognize human civilization.

  5. #65
    Quote Originally Posted by Darsithis View Post
    It all makes sense in the context of what we'd do. After all, we're not going to make a 200 year trip to some other star for the purpose of just saying hi. We'd go because we want something from it. Same with the idea of bombarding the earth from orbit...it's the most efficient way to do it. They're not really going to come down to Earth and slowly kill us, one by one. That's like trying to exterminate roaches.
    Let's also not forget that humans are a hostile, unpredictable and violent species that can, and will, come up with several armed and unarmed means to kill you.
    Much safer to just hang out there and bomb the place, wait for most of the humans to die out, and then take it all.

  6. #66
    Scarab Lord DEATHETERNAL's Avatar
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    Put both "None of the above, but aliens exist" and "Aliens do not exist" as I do not think they have involvement in any of those things and I do not know or have a belief as to whether they exist or not.
    And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.
    Revelation 6:8

  7. #67
    i'm willing to believe that life on other planets could have evolved. so in that sense, i suppose i'm open to the idea that 'aliens exist.' are they advanced enough to make it all the way out to earth for a visit? doubt it.

  8. #68
    I Don't Work Here Endus's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Ashnazg View Post
    If we're going to speculate about entities which existed billions of years before humans, then you might as well make an assumption that we would never be able to recognize them as alien life in the first place - they would be gods by now. Given human's own speed of evolution (from cavemen to cosmos in 100k years), it would be fair to assume that any alien race that developed even a million years before humanity would be so far advanced that we would no more be able to understand and recognize them as entities then ants can understand and recognize human civilization.
    Even 100k years isn't really a fair comparison. There was a shift from evolutionary to technological advancement in there, and they aren't the same thing; we're the same species as the cavemen were, 90,000 years ago. The difference between then and now isn't evolutionary, it's technological. Technological advancement, particularly with the addition of writing (to maintain knowledge through generations) and metalworking (which allowed for pretty much everything else in physical technology) is what drives us as a species, and we have to assume the same would be true of any species who can travel interstellar distances.

    And technology builds on itself. It accelerates. That's why we went from bronze knives to easier-to-produce iron knives over a few thousand years, and from no "computer" other than an abacus to the systems we're typing on here and the portable versions as small as cell phones in about 50 years. We're probably at the tail end of a big breakthrough, but even those breakthroughs occur more and more quickly; compare the developments in ancient Greece to the last hundred years.

    So realistically, it's more like caveman to space travel in about 20,000 years. If we allow for even just twice that, another 20,000 years, we can't effectively predict where technology will have taken us. Even 1,000 years is the far-distant future. A Roman general could have grasped and made use of 17th Century technology. Marveled at it, certainly, but adapted. Drop him in today's world, though, and he'd be totally lost.

    The idea that a spacefaring sentient race will just happen to be at the same technological level as we when we encounter it is ridiculously unlikely. We're either likely to encounter what are effectively gods, as you say, or encounter nothing, until we're effectively gods ourselves.


  9. #69
    Void Lord Elegiac's Avatar
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    The number of people that answered anything except 'None of the above, but aliens exist' and 'Aliens don't exist' is depressing, and the reason why the History Channel produces such shit programs nowdays.
    Quote Originally Posted by Marjane Satrapi
    The world is not divided between East and West. You are American, I am Iranian, we don't know each other, but we talk and understand each other perfectly. The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our governments are very much the same.

  10. #70
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    It's like Mass Effect. They are waiting until we are smart enough to invite us to their inter-galactic empires.

    But in all seriousness, Aliens probably exist. Have they visited us? Maybe. There's surely a lot of unexplainable things on Earth. I wouldn't say that its obviously aliens, though.

  11. #71
    Void Lord Elegiac's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by CaptUntsAhts View Post
    It's like Mass Effect. They are waiting until we are smart enough to invite us to their inter-galactic empires.

    But in all seriousness, Aliens probably exist. Have they visited us? Maybe. There's surely a lot of unexplainable things on Earth. I wouldn't say that its obviously aliens, though.
    Unexplainable things? Like what, exactly.
    Quote Originally Posted by Marjane Satrapi
    The world is not divided between East and West. You are American, I am Iranian, we don't know each other, but we talk and understand each other perfectly. The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our governments are very much the same.

  12. #72
    Bloodsail Admiral Bad Ashe's Avatar
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    none of the above.

    personally i have no doubts that aliens exist.
    intergalactic travel and "star trek" like races of aliens, realistically, that i dont believe in.

    edit: if i were an alien of a super race considering a visit to earth, after watching for a short while, i wouldnt let my presence be known either. humans are assholes.
    Last edited by Bad Ashe; 2013-02-04 at 02:23 AM.

  13. #73
    Honorary PvM "Mod" Darsithis's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Didactic View Post
    Unexplainable things? Like what, exactly.
    I wonder, too. I haven't yet seen anything not easily explainable another way, and I don't buy into ridiculous conspiracy theories, either. They're impossible to discuss objectively with evidence.

    It's like the Bermuda Triangle. People love to point out all of the ships that have gone missing there under "unexplained or mysterious circumstances" () but have nothing to say when evidence showing just as many disappearances all over the world and that the Bermuda Triangle is nothing special.
    Last edited by Darsithis; 2013-02-04 at 02:29 AM.

  14. #74
    I Don't Work Here Endus's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Darsithis View Post
    I wonder, too. I haven't yet seen anything not easily explainable another way, and I don't buy into ridiculous conspiracy theories, either. They're impossible to discuss objectively with evidence.
    Most of the "unexplainable things" are pretty easily explainable, too, they just don't fit within the "standard" view of history.

    For instance, the Olmec heads; these are enormous carved stone heads in central America, dated back to the Olmec civilization. Almost exclusively, they have distinctly negroid features; wide noses, thick lips, etc.



    Pic included has a dude sitting on it, for scale purposes. The conspiracy theory here would be "OMG, must be aliens, they must have transported people all over the place!" This is malarkey. It's much more likely that there was an African culture that successfully crossed the Atlantic, at least one-way. They may not have had any long-standing presence, but enough of an impact to have these heads created in their honor. Or perhaps they're just stylized in a way that happens, by complete chance, to resemble negroid features. Either of those is infinitely more plausible than "aliens did it".


  15. #75
    Quote Originally Posted by Darsithis View Post
    Why? We're not a technologically advanced civilization by any means on a galactic scale (so why visit us?), never mind that that at the moment, as we understand the universe, it is not possible to travel to Sol from any nearby star system that could even remotely support life in a reasonable timeframe.
    While I don't personally think we've been visited, on the subject of inter-stellar travel there's:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeJoVeKSsyA&t=7m32s

    You could even replace the 1% with 1,000,000 years. If an intelligent species got just a million year head-start on us, imagine what they could have discovered about the universe in that time. Hell, it doesn't even have to be a million years. Maybe just a thousand.

    Just because we're too unintelligent or too uninformed to know how to effectively travel the stars, it doesn't mean other species are in the same boat.

  16. #76
    Quote Originally Posted by Endus View Post
    Most of the "unexplainable things" are pretty easily explainable, too, they just don't fit within the "standard" view of history.

    For instance, the Olmec heads; these are enormous carved stone heads in central America, dated back to the Olmec civilization. Almost exclusively, they have distinctly negroid features; wide noses, thick lips, etc.



    Pic included has a dude sitting on it, for scale purposes. The conspiracy theory here would be "OMG, must be aliens, they must have transported people all over the place!" This is malarkey. It's much more likely that there was an African culture that successfully crossed the Atlantic, at least one-way. They may not have had any long-standing presence, but enough of an impact to have these heads created in their honor. Or perhaps they're just stylized in a way that happens, by complete chance, to resemble negroid features. Either of those is infinitely more plausible than "aliens did it".
    You know, I truly believe the beginning of the Ice Age and the last 100 years of the Ice Age, did a lot more damage then we can possibly imagine. It segregated humanity for a long time. Once we adapted, ice allowed travel that wasn't possible before. Humanity was far more interconnected.

    We once traveled far and all over. We knew of every people. The Ice came and put a stop to it for awhile, once we and the animals adapted to it. We could travel even farther. Then the Ice melted, and we have the world today.

  17. #77
    I voted both "aliens do not exist" and "area 51", because I'm convinced that they have area 51 as a backup hiding spot in case of ever finding evidence of aliens, so that no one would believe anything if the information was somehow leaked.

    In the meantime they probably just use it for other secretive projects.
    Quote Originally Posted by Aucald View Post
    Having the authority to do a thing doesn't make it just, moral, or even correct.

  18. #78
    I don't know about those, but they definitely dropped off my ex-wife.

  19. #79
    The Patient Ycarene's Avatar
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    I think aliens exist, I don't think that anything in the survey have anything to do with aliens. I can imagine a scenario where aliens "visit" but don't have the ability to destroy us. They send a generational ship to our system because they found a habitable planet there (Earth). They have no indication that we're here because either they were too far away when they found our planet for any of our transmissions to have reached them or, our transmissions are far too weak to be detected until you get well into our solar system. (Keep in mind, they use a huge transmitter/reciever array to communicate with the voyager probes and they're just barely now leaving the solar system.

    They get here, and they get a rude surprise, we're in the way, but there's a problem. They're geared for colonization, not an invasion, the ship was built for a one way trip so they have no way to get back, even if they did, they certainly wouldn't be welcome in their own syste because they've been gone for hundreds if not thousands of years. They don't have the kind of weapons they'd need to eradicate us, or if they did, they'd leave the planet itself uninhabitable, which would leave them high and dry. They're also facing an entrenched species that has been on the planet for the entire span of it's existence. They'd have to be friendly or we'd either leave them to rot in orbit, or shoot them down and steal their technology.

  20. #80
    None of your poll options fit my view.

    I don't think aliens has anything to do with anything other than conspiracy theories & nut-jobs. But it's likely that there exists alien life in the universe, but not alien visitation (let alone intelligent).
    "In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance." Paradox of tolerance

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