Posted on 10/07/2015 8:37:31 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Here’s what happens if astronomers make contact with a civilization on another planet.
The false alarm happened in 1997.
The Green Bank Radio Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia, was picking up some unusual signals—and Seth Shostak, then the head of the Center for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Research in Mountain View, Caifornia, was convinced that they had come from intelligent life somewhere in the universe.
“It looked like it might be the real deal,” Shostak recalled. Within a few hours, he had a call from The New York Times.
But within a day, it became clear that the source of excitement was actually a European satellite. To make matters worse, a second telescope in Georgia, which would have told the scientists about the true nature of the signal, wasn’t working....
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
Somebody made a point once that the reason why we aren’t hearing intelligent signals is that they are encoded, similarly to how we encode messages so the Russians don’t hear, and it comes across as space static to us.
Another possibility is that, just as we are going, everything might be fibre optic out there and there are no signals to send because it is limited to cables.
“The size of the universe also means we will never encounter it, ever. Mathematically, the odds are far greater that two individual grains of sand on planet earth would find each other.”
Except we are not talking two grains of sand. There could be hundreds of thousands or more.
I hope the alien hunters are patient.
I suspect it will be millennia before they find proof.
All creation groans because of the Curse. God would not have cursed the entire universe for the sins of man if there were other sentient beings out there not guilty of our sin. For those of us who found our thinking in Scripture, the logic is very clear that apart from angelic beings there is no other intelligent life in the universe. Regardless of the “neato factor” that leads most people to blandly assume there must be something out there. (There is, but since it’s not what they want or imagine they ignore it.)
I don’t know if there is life on other planets. I kind of doubt it. But if there is - God created it.
Fortress Earth: We all start secretly moving underground, meanwhile we broadcast out to space news broadcasts that we are getting into a giant nuclear world war and then we nuke all the empty cities in staggered order, so that there is background ambient radiation and it looks like a nuclear war.
The animals and plants should be fine (as long as we stagger the planned nuclear devastation) , look at Chernobyl.
The idea is to make the aliens think we destroyed our selves and irradiated the planet.
Also we place into geostationary graveyard orbits large satellites with nuclear waste emitters to give the whole planet a “nuclear wasteland” signature.
As we’ve yet been able to communicate with our biological neighbors on this planet, be it whale, dolphin, cat, ape, etc, I doubt we’d have the slightest ability to communicate with life from another planet.
If we were able to, however, I would guess that the churches would fill with those who are seeking to repent their sins, as odds are that anything we’d recognize as life and be able to communicate with would be also be created by God.
I question the remark ‘there is no other intelligent life in the universe’. All created animals have intelligence of/to some extent and creative purpose. Even trees seem to have intelligence as to when and where to grow. I can buy the statement as/if taken to mean human intelligence.
Yes, unless you believe in God. If you don't believe in God, then you will know that statistically there should be billions of places teaming with life out there... it should be all over the place, and pretty easy to see.
There are two reasonable possibilities:
God is a creator God, creation is his essential nature, therefor life is ubiquitous. We are going to find it in myriad forms scattered across the universe.
Or, God the creator planted us here and it will be our grandkids who carry life across the universe.
I lean toward the second, just because when you look out across the universe it looks like a big frozen debris field. But, granted, we can’t see very well very far so who knows. They could well be out there, we just haven’t found each other yet.
I don’t even grok what you mean by that.
If life on Earth arose by random chance, then it should also rise on some fraction of other planets and objects by random as well. Given the enormous number of planets/objects in the universe, even if life self-assembled in only .000001% of the places there would still be billions of places with life.
You’ve lost me.
I had to go back and reread it. I misread it the first time.
Thought it said “the chances for life on Earth are non existent”.
I disagree with that "pretty easy to see" part.
We only recently have been close enough to Pluto to see it's surface.
We only know of 'goldilocks' planets because of their occultation of the light from their star. We couldn't see 'life' on another planet in another solar system even in our own, tiny, indistinguishable galaxy.
If ‘natural selection’ is a universal constant like gravity and light, of course they will be way more advanced than us and will turn us into pets.
If life can self-assemble from available materials on a celestial body, then odds are it should have done so on at least one or two other planets in our own solar system. We've gotten pretty good looks at those and see nothing...nada...zilch.
I often think about how if we are the only “intelligent” life in the universe, what a pathetically failed petri dish we have been. We have some zippy fun technology but we seem to be on the verge of total self-destruction.
I know there are explanations for this theologically - fallen sin-filled humanity and such - but it’s still disillusioning as hell. A glance at the Drudge Report on any given day only confirms my viewpoint.
I’m obviously not an optimist! Ha!
Yeah, but what if it takes an entire solar system to produce one possible life bearing planet ?
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