Posted on 07/22/2015 8:36:50 PM PDT by garjog
Professor Matthew Bailes said 'the history of weak civilisations contacting more advanced civilisations is not a happy one'
"... he warned that making contact with aliens capable of transmitting powerful signals to Earth over tens of thousands of light years could lead humanity into disaster, because they're likely to be so much more advanced."
(Excerpt) Read more at pressreader.com ...
anybody spending even a moment worrying about this is failing to understand the vast distances and timeframes we are talking about before any alien civilization (if such exist) could detect our presence and respond, much less come visit us.
even if they were as close as say... 1000 light years away, we’ve only been sending out radio waves for about 100 years. that’s 900 more years to get there and 1000 years for a reply message to reach us. in other words, 2 millennia.
for all intents and purposes, unless an advanced alien civilization was within maybe a hundred or two hundred light years of us, it’s irrelevant whether other life exists in the universe, because we will never interact with them. the vast distances involved preclude that eventuality. forget about sci-fi novels and hollyweird movies... we will not be visited by aliens during our lifetimes. and if we are, we’ll all know it. they won’t just show up secretly to meet with top governmental officials... they will broadcast messages back to us on the frequencies that we are broadcasting to them... which means common AM, FM, and TV frequencies. anyone will be able to pick up these broadcasts in their homes. unless they have evil intentions, in which case our descendents will be screwed anyway because we’ve been sending out radio waves for the past century and there is no way to get them back. of course, if the closest civilization is 10,000 light years away, it won’t matter. by the time our signals reach them, we’ll be far more advanced than we are now.
so it’s all a silly moot point anyway. fun to ponder, but not anything we really need to worry about. asteroids on collision courses with us are much more worrisome than alien invasions.
We are on a shitlist - Crim
God could only count to 6.
You assume much.
OK. If they are so smart, they couldn’t be democrats. Perhaps that is what the professor is worried about.
I had this very discussion with another FReeper.
Why couldn’t God be an omnipotent being from another dimension.
The Bible even refers to the Universe as a “sheet”, and now most astrophysicists believe in the multiverse theory as how the “big bang” (another thing I don’t find mutually exclusive from God) happened. Some force (God) caused two of those sheets to slam together, and the energy from that collision caused the birth of our Universe.
So people moving through dimensional portholes, doesn’t sound far fetched to me at all. As a matter of fact I believe everyone who’s had a “near death experience” has, in one way or another, seen the entrance to one of these portholes (ie, the bright light, that didn’t hurt to look at).
Shakespeare said it, “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, than are dreamt of in your philosophy Horatio”, or something like that.
Irrelevant.
I’ve got caller I.D. I never answer when a Martian calls.
it wouldn’t affect me. 2000 years ago, God would not have sprung the existence of other alien species upon people who didn’t even know that the stars in the night sky were other suns. the Bible was written for people at the time to understand what they needed to understand and could understand... it’s not a complete explanation of everything.
we don’t understand the true nature of God, nor do we understand our place in the universe. if God wants us to be all alone, then we are. if God wants us to be part of a larger community beyond our ability to comprehend, then we are. how we feel about it is irrelevant. trying to guess which is the case in the absence of any evidence is pointless. in other words... we know what we need to know and that’s all. which is why a good scientist doesn’t try to use “science” to prove or disprove God’s existence. it’s beyond the scope of the tools we have at our disposal to answer that question. it’s a matter of faith. those who believe do so out of faith. those that don’t also do so out of faith (or lack of). one group is right and one group isn’t. we won’t really know for sure until it’s too late so better to follow God’s laws than not, which is essentially the argument that Blaise Pascal put forth many years ago.
Dear Twit Brain Bains:
If they are advanced enough to pick up our deliberate signals they are advanced enough to watch I Love Lucy, a signal that has traveled further than SETI.
So they are already pissed.
But maybe Breaking Bad calmed them down a little.
Anyone who hates the Jews is an Amalek.
Isnt wasnt irrelevant....it was an explaination to “where are they”
I happen to think the equation still holds.
We should be in the middle of a galatic highway...yet no one has landed on the whitehouse lawn.
Part two does not negate part one.
There could be a reason for it.
LOL
my stunted scientific knowledge???
hardly. just explaining with an example why such silly worries are better left to sci-fi writers than serious people.
i think i likely have a more practical background in the application and understanding of science than you do. but go ahead and delude yourself... i don’t much care. build an alien proof fallout shelter if it makes you sleep better at night.
BTW...if you are correct and God created this universe for the sole purpose of mankind......we should get busy exploring his creation.
Either way.....we need to move beyond our own star system to fulfill our destiny.
The universe awaits.
My Bible speaks of vast numbers of intelligent life not bound to our planet or any other. They go by name of cherubim, seraphim and others. They have specific names such as Michael, Gabriel, Lucifer and Molech. While I doubt any other planet based life such as we are, God has made a multitude of angels some of whom have since fallen.
can’t hurt to communicate with them,
we already have the worst of them in our WH
I’m not holding my breath until they show up.
I said OUR...as in OUR collective scientific knowledge.
Just becuase we have not discovered a technology does not not mean that technology doesnt exist.
Before the light bulb there were no light bulbs.
E doesnt = MC squared...there is something missing in the equation...becuase we cannot reverse it.
We can quite easily turn matter into energy.
But we cannot as of yet reverse the equation and create matter out of energy.
The abilty to reverse this equation is the the key to + light travel.
And I’m quite sure the answer involves the secrets of gravity and time space displacement.
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