Is Anybody Out There? Detection Devices are in the Works for Rooting Out Extraterrestrial Life

ScienceNews ^ | 1/21/2006 | Christen Brownlee

[furball4paws]

For all you science and space buffs, engineers are making a whole new generation of gizmos designed to find extraterrestrial life. I look forward to success in my lifetime.

[fishtank]

http://www.ourpla.net/cgi-bin/pikie.cgi?FermisParadox

Fermi's Paradox

We are alone.

[PatrickHenry]

Lots of explanations here, some good, some goofy, to account for the "silence:" Fermi paradox (Wikipedia).

[oldleft]

There happens to be something to that.

Much as libs hate to admit it, the human race has achieved the level of sophistication that we have due to our highly aggressive nature. If all species in the universe fall into two categories of hunter and hunted, only hunters will tend to reach a high level of technology. This has to do with the development of intelligence needed for spacial realization only comes from chasing after other animals. The social order which hunters have also has aided the human race in creating a space fairing society.

Despite what hippie science types like the pot smoking Carl Sagan would have you believe, any ET's we come across would have to be very competitive and aggressive just to have the ability to communicate with us. It's a natural law. There's no reason to think they would welcome us with open arms (or tendrils.)

[taxed2death]

http://www.subversiveelement.com/Dulce_Index.html

[hang 'em]

Wish this technology had been available before I got married.

[Buffettfan]

[[Surely the aliens will respond to this innovative idea}

We've got 20 million of them here. All of them illegal! /sar

[ModelBreaker]

I look forward to success in my lifetime.

I hope that, if it ever comes, it happens a long, long time from now. The odds that our first contact with another intelligent species will have a good outcome for both species is, IMHO, very, very low.

[colorado tanker]

Kay: Today there are approximately 1500 aliens living and working in Manhattan and most of them are decent enough, they're just trying to make a living.

Jay: Cab drivers?

Kay: Not as many as you'd think.

[MensRightsActivist]

If they're out there, they're too far away to make contact in their lifetime.

Of course, if they're really advanced, they've mastered access issues through inter-demensional transit, worm hole conduits, anti-matter acceleration or other outrageous exploitations of principles of physics.

[MensRightsActivist]

"I dont think we really want to know what is out there considering how far advanced we have not become. Sounds like trouble to me."

Spoof:

If they're greatly advanced from us in technology and science, they may interested in us in terms of colonization and harvesting of available resources. Let us hope they are advanced in regards to compassion for other lifeforms. Oh my God they're compassionate conservatives. Take me to your leader. Let's negotiate for some of that advanced technology and science.

On the other hand: when they attach the wires to your skull, when you feel the anal probe going in, when you feel your mind revulsing to the new thoughts being indoctrinated into you, then you'll know the Democrat, body snatching aliens have got you. You are about to be assimalted into the Borg-o-crat collective. Run to the hills. All you have ever known is about to be lost for the good of the collective Borg-o-crat agenda - never to exist again.

[sandbar]

I do believe that in all the universes, galaxies, etc... there is some form of intellegent life. I just don't think we need to waste money trying to contact them.

[sandbar]

>>>I, on the other hand, think the milky way and the whole cosmos is crawling with life and there's no reason to think we are the advanced kind.>>>

Yep, pretty arrogant to think we are top of the line. (not to mention sad)

[MensRightsActivist]

"It's a cook book!!!"

***Classic Twilight Zone***

[verity]

"gizmos designed to find extraterrestrial life."

I have had some suspicions about pissant. I wonder if...........lol

[ßuddaßudd]

lol

[LanPB01]

I believe the movie with the little furry thing named Gizmo was Gremlins. I don't think they were aliens. There was a movie about little furry aliens called Critters.

[MensRightsActivist]

"The main elements of the signature are oxygen atmosphere and some water vapor."

But there's much more to our tenuous existence than just that. Without: the tilt of the earth, the moon in orbit, the rotation of the earth, the atmosphere sheilding off solar radiation, etc., climactic conditions would be so harsh as to prohibit human life. If that series of comet impacts that hit Jupiter a few years back, had instead hit earth, there would be no life on earth of any higher order. The clouds of dust from the impact were larger than the earth. Jupiter

It is an awesome and wonderous site to view the works of the almighty God of the universe. It is humbling to meditate, by comparison, on the frail, yet beautiful aspect of our individual existence.

[furball4paws]

I don't think extraterrestrial life is that far away, extraterrestrial intelligent life is probably way out there. Considering cosmic distances, I don't think you need worry about them sticking a straw in your ear.

[Physicist]

I have a very relevant question --- This SEARCH FOR EXTRA TERRESTIAL INTELLIGENCE --- IS THIS PROJECT BEING FUNDED BY PRIVATE ORGANIZATIONS, OR BY OUR TAX DOLLARS ?

If there's one thing conservatives and liberals can agree upon, it's that scientific research is a waste of money. They'll split hairs over whether two trillion dollars in handouts and sinecures should increase by 6.04% or 6.07% in the sixth-to-next budget cycle, but bellow in shared outrage over some reporter's list of wasteful government projects, nine-tenths of which are peer-reviewed research projects they don't understand, and which together add up to almost a million dollars.

[GOPJ]

We can't communicate with the animals and plants we evolved with - why would we be able to communicate with beings we hadn't evolved with?

Also, knowing how we see other living things - as pets or food - why wouldn't beings, if they were like us, see us the same way? It ain't Star Trek out there...