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  1. #141
    Quote Originally Posted by Hammerfest View Post
    Why isn't this thread banned under the conspiracy rule here?
    Why do you care? I think you are just spiteful because we have been to space and Earth is a sphere and you keep being infracted for saying otherwise.

  2. #142
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    It's naive to think that Earth is the only planet with life. We're a tiny spec of sand in a universe almost too large to comprehend. There are just way, way, too many Goldilocks zone planets in the universe for us to be it. Plus, we've seen how life will adapt and survive in super-harsh environments on Earth. There's still a chance we'll find life on Europa or IO in our own solar system in water oceans under frozen ice.

    True story as a kid a friend and I were camping one time we both saw 3 UFOs at once, and they were identical to those in some of the recently Pentagon released video from Air Force pilots with very fast moving craft. I'm referring to the video where they were moving far faster than any current known tech, including drones. The UFOs we saw looked and behaved the same. They hung around for a few minutes stopping and starting, moving around quickly, then when they left they took off so fast it was a blur. My best description would be like in Star Trek when the Enterprise goes warp speed, but without all of the special effects. Just in the air still to boom gone in an instant like a hyper-sonic missile. I'd have thought I was crazy if my friend and I didn't see the same whole thing start to finish right in front of us standing side by side.

    Actually I'd be more terrified knowing others have seen what appears to be the same UFOs, but the fact that whatever it is has been around for years and apparently hasn't bothered us in a noticeable way seems comforting. Maybe it's one of those observe but don't interfere General Order One sort of things. Maybe we're being farmed long-term without knowing it. Maybe we're just a giant terrarium experiment for them. Who knows. And it's always possible that the US, Russia, or China really do have some super-advanced tech that has been able to do mind-blowing things for many years that are being mistaken for these UFOs. But I sure think life is out there, both scientifically in an astronomical sense...and in my case knowing what I've seen personally myself.

  3. #143
    Quote Originally Posted by Tuor View Post
    All i know, is that life in other planets could not, and most likely isn't, carbon based, i know that because life forms based in other elements have been found in our planet.
    I'm pretty sure that all natural life on earth is carbon- and water-based, and come from common ancestry - based on almost all using the same RNA to protein-coding.

    There are some speculations on non-carbon life (primarily silicon), but it's not clear that it could exists. We have been able to synthesise organic molecules, but as far as I know nothing similar has been done for silicon.

    That doesn't mean that all life will be the same as on earth, even if it had DNA it could be mirrored and the mapping to protein be vastly different; and I believe there are some known alternatives to DNA.

  4. #144
    Banned Hammerfest's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Calfredd View Post
    Why do you care?
    I just find selective applications of rules interesting, I guess.

  5. #145
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    Quote Originally Posted by Hammerfest View Post
    I just find selective applications of rules interesting, I guess.
    Not true... there is an article that is actually leading to a discussion. This isn’t Nathan Oakley getting arrested for giving out conspiracy panflits to little kids... from his van...
    Folly and fakery have always been with us... but it has never before been as dangerous as it is now, never in history have we been able to afford it less. - Isaac Asimov
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  6. #146
    Banned Hammerfest's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Felya View Post
    Not true... there is an article that is actually leading to a discussion. This isn’t Nathan Oakley getting arrested for giving out conspiracy panflits to little kids... from his van...
    I just figured "vehicles not made on this Earth" would qualify as a "conspiracy theory" and would therefore not exist as an open thread given what I've seen here in the past.

  7. #147
    Herald of the Titans Tuor's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Forogil View Post
    I'm pretty sure that all natural life on earth is carbon- and water-based, and come from common ancestry - based on almost all using the same RNA to protein-coding.

    There are some speculations on non-carbon life (primarily silicon), but it's not clear that it could exists. We have been able to synthesise organic molecules, but as far as I know nothing similar has been done for silicon.

    That doesn't mean that all life will be the same as on earth, even if it had DNA it could be mirrored and the mapping to protein be vastly different; and I believe there are some known alternatives to DNA.
    Yeah, my mistake, i was basing myself in this...
    https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-...-using-arsenic
    without knowing its status had been updated...
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GFAJ-1

  8. #148
    Quote Originally Posted by Tuor View Post
    Yeah, my mistake, i was basing myself in this...
    https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-...-using-arsenic
    without knowing its status had been updated...
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GFAJ-1
    Ah, thanks for the correction, yes, extremophiles(sp?) are amazing at pushing the boundaries, but even they have some limits.

  9. #149
    Quote Originally Posted by Endus View Post
    The universe is finite. That means you can't presume that anything, no matter how unlikely, will happen multiple times. The emergence of intelligent life may be so rare that this universe is the one in a googolplex of alternate universes where it even happened once.

    Your position is, fundamentally, a form of survivorship bias; it happened to you, so it must not be that rare.

    To put it another way; you speak to how "unfathomably large" the universe is, but not how "unfathomably rare" the emergence of life is.
    The latter is a complete unknown though. You're arguing because we have no proof the answer is no. (Well, not exactly that, you use more sophistry). But calculations done by people smarter than either of us postulate that its overwhelmingly likely that the universe is teeming with life.

    Also, bear in mind that civilisations rise and fall. You could have observed earth for 6 billion years but only seen proof of intelligent life from afar for a couple of hundred of those years. Distance (space) isn't the only limiting factor against observation, its time.

  10. #150
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    Quote Originally Posted by Deja Thoris View Post
    The latter is a complete unknown though. You're arguing because we have no proof the answer is no. (Well, not exactly that, you use more sophistry). But calculations done by people smarter than either of us postulate that its overwhelmingly likely that the universe is teeming with life.

    Also, bear in mind that civilisations rise and fall. You could have observed earth for 6 billion years but only seen proof of intelligent life from afar for a couple of hundred of those years. Distance (space) isn't the only limiting factor against observation, its time.
    Why do people keep jumping to this? It is explicitly not what anyone is saying. We have no proof, so we have no answer. It isn't an answer of "No", it is lack of an answer, because there is insufficient evidence to answer it. All anyone is saying is that there is no logical reason to tie unidentified atmospheric objects to an extraterrestrial life form. There is no connecting evidence. That doesn't mean they couldn't be aliens, it just means it is illogical to assume they must be.

    It certainly doesn't mean there isn't something very real and interesting going on, which is why I am very interested in the story as it develops. Past "UFO" trends have led to all sorts of interesting scientific discoveries, mostly of electrical phenomena. I just highly doubt there are alien civilizations at the end of this rainbow. Again, it doesn't mean there can't be, I just doubt it, because I haven't seen anything suggesting there is.
    Last edited by Thekri; 2020-07-30 at 12:07 PM.

  11. #151
    I Don't Work Here Endus's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Deja Thoris View Post
    The latter is a complete unknown though. You're arguing because we have no proof the answer is no. (Well, not exactly that, you use more sophistry). But calculations done by people smarter than either of us postulate that its overwhelmingly likely that the universe is teeming with life.

    Also, bear in mind that civilisations rise and fall. You could have observed earth for 6 billion years but only seen proof of intelligent life from afar for a couple of hundred of those years. Distance (space) isn't the only limiting factor against observation, its time.
    No, I am arguing that because we have no understanding of the factors and how to quantify them, we do not even know how to ask the questions, let alone how to answer them.

    Also, those "calculations" involve things like the Drake Equation, and literally just making up imaginary estimations on many of these factors (including imagining, without concretely qualifiable basis, what factors to include in the calculation and which to ignore), and then asking us to believe their imagination. If any of them are anywhere close to correct, it will be by absolute chance, not any success of intelligence or reasoning.

    The Drake equation particularly runs afoul of the Fermi Paradox, where your imagination as to how many intelligent species may be out there is concretely compared to the utter lack of any evidence of any kind whatsoever to suggest anything of the sort; we have been scanning the skies for the wisps of any kind of signal from beyond for decades, and we have seen nothing.

    Including time is another one of those vague factors, based on assumptions you cannot quantify. We have no basis on which to frame these answers; they're literally just things we're making up, based on nothing. Active imaginations make for interesting science fiction, but they do [i]not[i/] provide answers as to what the truth of the origins and prevalance of life in the universe may or may not be.

    And note; I am not saying life cannot be widespread. I'm saying we have no grounds on which to make any real discussion. All we can say is that the odds can't be zero; we exist, ergo it can't be zero. But it could be so vanishingly rare that we exist as the only planet with life in all this universe, or in a thousand other universes; the odds could be that slim. We don't know. Or our solar system might be particularly inhospitable and the Earth is a Death Planet and there's a ton of other civilizations out there and we just can't tell because they shift to ansible communications pretty quickly, leaving off radio transmissions almost immediately. It hasn't happened to Earth because we're frighteningly horrible and none of them want to risk it. Could be. Can't begin to figure it out, because we have no data. It's all science fiction, until we have facts to derive a conclusion from.


  12. #152
    I get what you're saying but my personal belief is its conceited if we believe that we are that special that we are the only life in the universe.

    Space is big. If our solar system was on a 6ft long table, then to scale the next star would be 6 miles away. Thats one star in 200 billion in the galaxy, with another 200 billion galaxies etc etc.

    Of course I can't prove it, nor can I be proved wrong, call me crazy but thats my take on it.

  13. #153
    I Don't Work Here Endus's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Deja Thoris View Post
    I get what you're saying but my personal belief is its conceited if we believe that we are that special that we are the only life in the universe.

    Space is big. If our solar system was on a 6ft long table, then to scale the next star would be 6 miles away. Thats one star in 200 billion in the galaxy, with another 200 billion galaxies etc etc.

    Of course I can't prove it, nor can I be proved wrong, call me crazy but thats my take on it.
    I would 100% jump down the throat of anyone pulling the "God loves us and made us so we're unique and aliens don't exist" thing, too, FWIW.

    But without data, and a qualifiable argument as to what factors apply to the origins of all forms of life (not just carbon-based, hypothetically), we can't even begin to have a real discussion. It's all just "I choose to believe X, in the absence of any evidence whatsoever". It's a faith-based position, not a reason-based one, whether you think aliens exist or that they don't.

    The only rational stance really is to understand how completely devoid of information we currently are on the subject. Even the Fermi Paradox makes a buttload of unjustifiable assumptions.


  14. #154
    Quote Originally Posted by Deja Thoris View Post
    I get what you're saying but my personal belief is its conceited if we believe that we are that special that we are the only life in the universe.

    Space is big. If our solar system was on a 6ft long table, then to scale the next star would be 6 miles away. Thats one star in 200 billion in the galaxy, with another 200 billion galaxies etc etc.

    Of course I can't prove it, nor can I be proved wrong, call me crazy but thats my take on it.
    You use the dizzying and incomprehensible size of the observable universe as an argument for the existence of alien life wich make sense...but do you see that same argument supports the idea than interstellar travel is extremely complex and therefore contacts between civilizations are rare?

    My crazy take on it ( we all are speculating ...no statement about aliens is falsifiable and therefore is not scientific) is that alien life is common and rare and the same time ( rare as in one in every hundreds of millions planets and common as in the former sentence implies theres billions of planet with life) but distances are so vast that there's barely no contacts.

    We are like a candle. We shine the time we can until extinction but that time is so short and the distances so mindblowing that most ,if not all , the candles shine alone for all their existence.

    And I get why my position is not popular: it's fucking depressing and yours is exciting and sugestive but we can not let what we want put a bias on what we believe and I believe in the life bubble scenario. We live in a bubble,other life live in theirs and there's barely no intersection of bubbles.

  15. #155
    Quote Originally Posted by Gaexion Ramza Beoulve View Post
    You should be prepared to accept that earth, cosmically speaking, is a backwater planet that advanced species actively avoid. Sometimes they dump their trash here, other times some degenerate comes and retires here as a self-styled billionaire/mogul/entrepreneur/etc. Rarely do they get involved in earthling politics.
    Or it could be that we are just an experiment planet and throughout pre-recorded history they have been selectively breeding all the most advanced ape species and fucking about with our DNA. It would be quite hilarious if we were a failed science experiment.

    This is just a funny idea I came up with, obviously don't take it seriously lmao.
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  16. #156
    Quote Originally Posted by PrimiOne View Post
    You use the dizzying and incomprehensible size of the observable universe as an argument for the existence of alien life wich make sense...but do you see that same argument supports the idea than interstellar travel is extremely complex and therefore contacts between civilizations are rare?

    My crazy take on it ( we all are speculating ...no statement about aliens is falsifiable and therefore is not scientific) is that alien life is common and rare and the same time ( rare as in one in every hundreds of millions planets and common as in the former sentence implies theres billions of planet with life) but distances are so vast that there's barely no contacts.

    We are like a candle. We shine the time we can until extinction but that time is so short and the distances so mindblowing that most ,if not all , the candles shine alone for all their existence.

    And I get why my position is not popular: it's fucking depressing and yours is exciting and sugestive but we can not let what we want put a bias on what we believe and I believe in the life bubble scenario. We live in a bubble,other life live in theirs and there's barely no intersection of bubbles.
    I don't know that we'll come across other civilizations, I just think they exist. And finding them would be like finding a needle in a haystack the size of our solar system, time factors aside.

  17. #157
    Banned Hammerfest's Avatar
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    I'd be willing to believe they're extra-dimensional...

  18. #158
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    Quote Originally Posted by Hammerfest View Post
    I'd be willing to believe they're extra-dimensional...
    Like from the third dimension?

  19. #159
    Merely a Setback breadisfunny's Avatar
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    i see they finally found the draenei.
    r.i.p. alleria. 1997-2017. blizzard ruined alleria forever. blizz assassinated alleria's character and appearance.
    i will never forgive you for this blizzard.

  20. #160
    Did they do this yet? I'm bored and need something fun to read about.

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