Posted on 08/18/2010 11:43:50 AM PDT by LibWhacker
SANTA CLARA, Calif. Even if humanity could reach out to an intelligent alien civilization, scientists are polarized over whether we should.
Famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has argued that the extraterrestrials we contacted would be likely to harm us, a view that divided the experts here at the SETIcon convention.
*SNIP*
However, Douglas Vakoch, director of interstellar message composition at the SETI Institute, said of aliens: "Even if they tend to be hateful, awful folks, can they do us any harm at interstellar distances?"
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
“did they have mirrors then?”
What could a bunch of little green men do to us that would be any worse than what the war chimp has already done?
If they have the technology to harm us at interstellar distances, then they already know we’re here and just don’t care. We aren’t a threat.
On the mirror? Just funning you. I was just saying that the demon could well have been him. Maybe he had a vision of his ego after too much poppyseed...
According to reports from his era, Mad Mo was a sufferer of seizures. One of his twelve year old wives used to attend him closely during these seizures. She being much smarter than Mad Mo learned to read and write and wrote down things she claimed he babbled during his seizures, even using palm fronds for writing 'paper'. These were later collected as part of what the caliphates who followed Mad Mo's death gathered up as the 'holy Mad Mo Writings' dictated by Allah (that would be al allilah, the hindu lesser moon goddess, prior to Mad Mo assigning her a greater religious role).
“:The average star is more than six billion years old. The Sun is 4.5 billion years old. So the average advanced civilization could be a couple of billion years more advanced than we are. Is it possible they could harm us across interstellar distances? Absolutely! It is IMPOSSIBLE for us to conceive of their motivations or capabilities. Hawking is right. Advanced aliens might view us the same way we view cockroaches and zap us from a distance. We have no way of knowing. So... Shhh!”
I concur. Most life is hostile to other life.
The dominant species is typically the most virulent -— islam, for example.
If they are tuning into our TV and watching The View, Rachel Madcow, presidential speeches or 2 1/2 men, they’ve already sent the flaming comet our way!
“This article is funny. Is someone proposing that we open the big ball that keeps all the radio waves contained to our galaxy thereby accidentally contacting them.”
Our Sun does that, actually. (Not the “galaxy” but our solar system.)
As if by design our particular solar system sucks up the radio waves we generate, turning them into noise as they leave not far from Pluto.
I found this rather comforting.
...”just the poppyseed talking”
“What could a bunch of little green men do to us that would be any worse than what the war chimp has already done?”
Knock an asteroid out of orbit and drop it in the middle of the ocean and pretty much put an end to civilization, if not mankind.
It could be worse-
Pinging Quix to this thread...
I’m more fearful about what God could do to me than ‘aliens’.
That’s how it breaks down though, doesn’t it? Atheists worry about aliens and space rocks battering earth, the rest worry about what God might do or allow to happen.
“The average star is more than six billion years old. The Sun is 4.5 billion years old. So the average advanced civilization could be a couple of billion years more advanced than we are.”
True, however the galaxy is a dangerous place to hang out. Our solar system is on an offshoot of a spiral arm, about 3/4ths of the way from galactic center. A rather dull place, but there’s a good chance that either closer, or further away from GC is too violent and destructive for life to last long enough to evolve intelligence.
Add to that supernovas, that will sterilize a large area of space so relatively fast that a space vessel hundreds of times the speed of light would be needed to escape its wrath.
And there’s the next problem. If you go one way or another along the habitable band of the galaxy, you’re probably looking at anywhere from 200-500 light years before you encounter a habitable planet.
At best, you need a spaceship capable of 128 times the speed of light, and it will still take 1.56 years for just 200 light years. 256 times the speed of light for nine months of travel.
200 light years is not diddly in space travel. Beyond that the distances along the habitable band get significantly greater.
So I’m not particularly worried.
Not only are the distances vast between the stars, but the timescales of civilizations are miniscule. Many civilizations could have once found their way to our solar system, but that could have been during the Jurassic age.
We could stumble upon another world that might have once housed a mighty civilization- but they could have long passed millions of years ago.
Time may very well be the answer to Fermi’s paradox, civilizations are out there, but we’re unlikely to live during the same epoch of history.
That’s what they were saying in 14th Century Europe when the Black Death popped up and exterminated perhaps two-thirds of them. Too bad they weren’t a little more intellectually curious about the world around them. But that’s the way it goes, isn’t it?
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