If you are an alien from another world please respond ...

This is an off shoot from Kandahar's post, and just intended to be a bit of fun for the holiday season.

Quite a few smart people believe we have already been contacted.

But sooner or later we are going to encounter THE microbe I believe, the one that establishes without doubt that life exists on worlds other than our own, and therefore throughout the Universe.
When that finally is made public, maybe 10 years after the first discovery and with lots of media leakage beforehand, a lot of questions will arise, and a lot of people will go insane, as they should.

But my question to the minds here is, how would you approach planet Earth as a captain from an alien star system on an exploration mission, or perhaps on a search mission? You are in stealth mode obviously simply monitoring the goings on down below on that blue planet Earth. Now what? How do you explore?

How do you contact the political and other powers that be, without ending up in captivity or dead? How do you bypass the military? How do you present your credentials as an alien with six eyes and 12 appendages (oh choose your appendages - because your civ is 100 million years older than Earth's you can morph into human type if you feel like a challenge). Do you talk to all governments at once or just the UN or the US? Do you avoid goverments?

What would be the first thing you would do? What would be the thing you would avoid most?

 

There's no evidence whatsoever to suggest that this is true. While we may (or may not) be contacted by extraterrestrials in the distant future, it almost certainly has NOT happened in the past. Such a story would be impossible to keep secret.

Well, this is just speculation...but I speculate that you are correct.

I don't see why aliens millions of years more advanced than us would be any more interested in talking to us than they would be in talking to bacteria.

 

Open your mind.

I think Drake’s theory is unduly pessimistic but even he postulated 100’s of civs in our galaxy alone.

Just because we have no idea how to travel faster than light doesn’t mean someone else out there hasn’t figured it out. There may be civs that are BILLIONS of years older than ours. Jeez I can’t even imagine what we will be talking about 100 years from now, let alone a billion. Try two billion.

As for why they would be interested in us as microbes, well we are interested in microbes aren’t we?

 

We need more out-of-the-box thinking in the U.S.

If aliens had visited the Earth in the past, they would have likely left a satellite in orbit if they wanted us to know they were here. They would have been more creative and intelligent and used better techniques than drawing lines in the dirt as a sign, as some romance science fiction writers claim. It's possible someone visited the Earth in the past, but if they did, they didn't leave signs or we haven't noticed them.

If we are interested in life outside the Earth, we are going to have to spend some money on it, whether it's something like an interplanetary mission like Cassini ($2 billion), a study of the atmosphere of extrasolar planets (ten billion or more), or manned missions to Mars (a couple trillion dollars).

None of them can be said to give the desired results with 100% chance. SETI is relatively cheap, but the chances of a positive result can't be predicted easily. Cassini type missions give immediate results if nothing goes wrong with the craft, but are expensive. Manned missions are extremely expensive but offer the advantage of intelligent, human interaction with the environment on another planet, plus the joy of saying we actually went someplace else.

Take your pick.

 

I agree that the Drake equation is a good way to guage the number of civilizations in our galaxy (probably much more than a few hundred), but that doesn't translate into success for SETI. It seems to me that any civilization that wanted to hide from us would have the technological capacity to do so, and any civilization that wanted to contact us would most likely choose a medium of communication that would be more obvious (such as directly visiting us). Radio waves seem like a completely arbitrary thing for us to be searching for.

The difference between faster-than-light travel and most other forms of "advanced" technology is that physics - as we currently understand it - actually prohibits travelling faster than light, even in theory. There is no such prohibition on, say, teleportation or mind control or molecular assembly.

If there are exceptions to the theory of relativity that we as a species have overlooked, I agree with you that someone else has probably found a way to travel faster than light. But as of now there's nothing to indicate that it's possible.

We're interested in observing them to see if their characteristics could somehow apply to us...but we're not interested in trying to "understand" them or communicate with their "leaders."

We'd probably be even less interested if they were on some distant world, and we already had evidence of extraterrestrial life. So unless we're the first extraterrestrial species another civilization has ever encountered (probably unlikely), I doubt we'd be of much interest.

 

Dollar for dollar, robots are better able to do their jobs than humans. Also, robots can be expected to "live" much longer on a distant world for an equal cost.

A manned trip to Mars would economically bankrupt America, for little or no scientific gain.

 

I agree with that. Missions like the Mars Pathfinder and the two recent landers are giving us excellent science returns for the money. They are also needed to gather data needed for a manned mission, if and when it comes down the road. We need that data before we can intelligently do a manned trip.

 

I think we on Earth will become more interested in extra-solar life if and when we find life on another world in the solar system. It would give impetus to other life-exploration projects, such as studying the atmopheres of extrasolar planets and even projects such as SETI. Certainly, the discovery of extra-solar planets in the 90s gave impetus to the cause.

 

I have this image in my mind of a cartoon showing two little bacteria on Titan. One of them is saying to the other, "Those humans on Earth are so far ahead of us that they would never be interested in us. At that moment, the Huygens probe is coming down right above them ready to hit them on the head.

 

It is a bad idea to suggest that light speed is IT!

The tachyon, if they exist, exist ABOVE light speed.

Light speed may be a variable too, perhaps not in this Universe but more probably elsewhere if you accept the 10 (or 11) possible dimensions predicted by string theory.

 

I agree we'd probably be interested in it for a little while. But after hundreds or thousands of years go by, if we've discovered lots of examples of extraterrestrial life (maybe even an intelligent species), finding one more won't be a big breakthrough.

New species, or species thought to be extinct, are being discovered in our rainforests and oceans all the time...but no one other than zoologists really cares anymore. I think eventually the same would happen with extraterrestrial life. If extraterrestrial life were commonplace, I don't think we'd really make an effort to travel for light-years without good reason to study a random species of microbe that had been discovered.

Similarly, I think it's fair to assume that any extraterrestrial civilization that may be aware of us is also aware of lots of other extraterrestrial civilizations. Why would they be particularly interested in one as backwards as ours?

 

It's a matter of how you look at it.

If we really consider ourselves backwards, an extrasolar civilization may want to study us to find out why we are so backward and what went wrong.

Why should we be interested in bacteria on Titan when we have lots of bacteria and other life right here on Earth that we already know about? (and some that we don't know about). For that matter, why even study something as low as bacteria on another planet when we have people here on Earth to study?

There are lots of cultures we communicate with today, and then there are others from ancient times that we try to understand, even though they were not at our level. For some, it's a study in how things evolve. Others are just curious. It's a matter of one's frame of mind. If someone is not interested in it, they are not interested. Why bother looking for more ancient civilizations when we've already found a number of them?

We can come up with reasons to not look by saying only zoologists are interested in those new species; only anthropologists are interested in those newly discovered civilizations; only geologists are interested in those new Mars rocks.

I would say in the context of science, endeavors shouldn't be contingent solely on the interest of the general public. Becoming bored and giving up on an endeavor is a trap that's easy to fall in. Scientists usually have enough discipline to not fall into it like the general public does. That's one of the characteristics that separates scientists from the general public.

Some people became bored with the shuttle missions when they became common, but the missions are still needed. The discovery of extrasolar planets is becoming common place, but it needs to continue, even though the general public may become bored with it. If we go down the boredom road, many projects would get cancelled half-way through, just as Cassini almost did.

Hundreds of years from now (or maybe sooner) we may find a better way of communicating with extrasolar civilizations and we may be able to teach them something that helps them.

 

the spaceman will know a universality and speak direct to nature . if you have been educated by the govt and have yet to de-program then this will make no sense so go eat shrooms and blabber freely into the cosmos until you can hear what's of you that's all true . truth is the common language .

 

There was some guy in Birmingham claiming to be a spirit with contact with an alien race. Was all kind of weird and had quite a following for some time. http://www.globalmission.co.uk

 

the language LINCOS was specifically invented for alien consumption and i believe it was connected to the N.A.S.A .Voyager Project . it's mathematical and consists of an extremely lengthy progression of equations from which meaning is presumed deducible . when presented to some M.I.T. students , they failed to make much sense of it . When i first read of it i myself had a project in progress , not at all focused on aliens , just with an interest in language and logic . we shared a theory of how a transmittable universal language could work . i did it in 40 lines . some lutheran college students with brains ablazing solved it handily .


crazy ?

 

A while back I saw these IQ exams in a science book that didn't have any instructions. They just had a sequence of symbols. I didn't get it at first, since I'm used to reading instructions. After I thought about it, I could figure out what the test was asking for. They were used to gauge people's IQ without having to revert to ordinary language for instructions. It's an interesting field.

 

transmission




. j j j

. i j i

. i yj y

. yi j a

. a yj a

. ia j b

. ibi j q

. qbq j id

. d j dd


O
yaya qdiq

 

IN 1969....A CHIP WAS PLACED IN MY BRAIN....I WAS AN EXPERIMENT, NEVER MIND THE DRUGS I TOOK,.....WAY B4 GPS...I KNEW I WAS An ex....PERIMENT....GENERATIONS, NO ONE WOULD SPEAK....MY MOM AND DAD DEAD, AGREED//////I ENDED UP NOT OF THIS WORLD

 

Thats pretty clever. I thought it was an anagram of a beer buddy of mine, COLIN'S, who after a few brews tends to make up language and generally acts like the alien he is.

That said, I had not heard of this, but it is heartening to know that people are at least thinking about the issue ...

I thought this was a pretty good site ...

http://socialfiction.org/lincos.htm

 

i'm from the future. i'm from ten seconds from now...