Astronomers Hope to Find E.T. in Next 25 Years

Reuters via Yahoo! ^ | Tue Jul 16, 6:34 AM ET | By Belinda Goldsmith

[Momaw Nadon]

[Valin]

Astronomers Hope to Find E.T. in Next 25 Years

And I hope to spend a week with Jamie Lee Curtis and a large jar of chocolate syrup.

[Northpaw]

[RoughDobermann]

Argh! My eyes!!! My eyes!!!

[Ahban]

Ugh! stop hat, will you?

[RoughDobermann]

How pretentious to believe that we are the only living things in the universe.... Few centuries ago we were suppose to be at the CENTER of the universe and only atheist believed othewise.

So, are you saying that we are not!? Heretic! Get thee to thy death!

Oh, BTW, just pretentious? I'll throw in hyper-arrogant, deluded, closed-minded, dogmatic, self-righteous, lordly, overbearing, supercilious, and so on.

[Ahban]

I have heard a pretty convincing case that UFOs do exist, as demonic manifestations to keep mankind searching after the wrong things. Unless one rules out the possiblity of extra-dimensional (read demons/angels) beings in advance, the case is much stronger for that explanation than is the case that they are 'traditional' aliens.

As far as being lots of Earth's out there, I doubt it. It is literally a miracle that WE are even here. The more we learn about the earth the longer the list of things we realize had to be JUST RIGHT for this planet to support human life. Even if they discover 100 billion solar systems, that is not enough to make it likely that there is even one other Earth.

[RoughDobermann]

Man, that stubble really makes him look masculine, don't it?

[Shryke]

Isn't it also a little pretentious to "believe" that we aren't alone? It can go both ways.

Actually, no, it's not, based on probablities as well as ego. Saying "we are unique" is obviously alot more pretentious than saying "we are not unique" - the first sentence implies special status, the other does not. Additionally, believing in something is that is VERY VERY VERY probable, mathmatically, versus believing something very very VERY improbable is pretty much the opposite of pretention - it's common sense.

[Momaw Nadon]

Him? More like it.

[TrappedInLiberalHell]

You are correct about the pretention. Isn't it also a little pretentious to "believe" that we aren't alone? It can go both ways.

If one believes in life evolving through chance chemical interactions, then it is short-sighted NOT to consider that life could have evolved elsewhere. Given the billions of galaxies, each containing billions of stars, then the sheer magnitude of star systems suggests that, if we are the only life forms in the universe, we are extremely lucky. We are the Powerball winners of the life lottery.

I can't say for sure that there is life elsewhere, nor would I myopically state that we MUST be the only ones. As the saying goes, absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence. That applies to the scientific view as well as the religious one.

[Frank_Discussion]

Ok, I'll bite:

Please don't reach for the Tinfoil just yet!

In general I support the SETI Project, because it actually runs on a cheap budget while sincerely working on looking for ET signals. And in the radio spectrum, I'm betting that someday we'll find something that'll knock our socks off.

However, having said the above, I think Shostak is blinded by his crusade and too close association to Carl Sagan and his expectation of how alien life should be characterized. Both men have espoused that alien life will be so different that we will have a hard time recognizing it, and that its technology will challenge us too greatly. This view leads folks down the path that we are so very backward technologically that finding signals will be very hard and, in addition, we certainly aren't being visited by anyone. "Even at the speed of light interstellar travel is too slow..." that sort of thing.

There have been some very recent advances in technology here on Earth that have shown that practical teleportation of light (and hence, information) has been achieved. Why is this important? Two things:

1. Faster-than-Light communication is achievable. The galaxy just got a lot smaller.
2. We humans, y'know, we primatives in the universe, have found this technology and are ably poised to exploit it.

Those two factors show that Shostak's view is biased and ultimately flawed. He and and the other SETI "priests" think the only way to communicate is via slow radio waves, so any chance of galactic travel or community is pretty much impossible. I take a contrary view: Radio is a phenomenon that is found in nature, and all technological species stumble upon it and use it for remote communication to start out. Perhaps the next step is to devise an artificial but much more useful transmission technique that is faster than radio. The upshot of this stuff is that the real communication in the universe may actually be happening with this "next-step" technology. When we begin using such techniques ourselves, we may find we're on a galactic "party-lne".

Alright y'all, I promised no tinfoil required, so hang with me here on the next point, then I'll go back to conservative political stuff. There has been another breakthrough in technology as of late, through the virtual creation of matter. Artificial atoms, if you will, used to control incredibly small computer circuits. The application beyond electronics, however, may not be apparent to you. Basically, to create the artificial atoms, the researchers had to have information available to describe the atoms. If you join this idea with the transporter technology I described above, the implications are that there may be a "Star-Trek-Scotty-Type" in reality sometime in the future. Commucating in and travelling around the cosmos doesn't appear to be nearly as impossible as SETI may have you thinking.

[Frank_Discussion]

EXACTLY how I see it! Why do we continue to put God in a box? He can do whatever he wants. The book of Genesis didn't say in a footnote somewhere "This is the only time God has made a solar system".

Sheesh.

[biblewonk]

I have heard a pretty convincing case that UFOs do exist, as demonic manifestations to keep mankind searching after the wrong things. Unless one rules out the possiblity of extra-dimensional (read demons/angels) beings in advance, the case is much stronger for that explanation than is the case that they are 'traditional' aliens.

Demons certainly have the ability to manifest themselves as angels or aliens of light. To a dead world an alien would be an angel of light. It gives them more hope in their vain thoughts of reincarnation, extended life, and evolution. I have to wonder if they aren't working up some way to ping SETI or something like that to increase the hopes and waste in this effort.

As far as being lots of Earth's out there, I doubt it. It is literally a miracle that WE are even here. The more we learn about the earth the longer the list of things we realize had to be JUST RIGHT for this planet to support human life. Even if they discover 100 billion solar systems, that is not enough to make it likely that there is even one other Earth.

Yes, I heard that the original list was some trivial 5 or 6 things needed for a good ole "class M" star trek, planet. Now they have something like 70 or 80 things needed for the earth to be as perfect and stable as it is. When you consider the fire of the sun and the cold of space and we sit here on this planet under a quilt of atmosphere that never varies but enough to give us some interesting weather. What an amazing creation.

[Wm Bach]

These atheists can look all they want but they are going to find any UFOs. They don't exist.

Don't look at that green man behind the curtain, eh? Protest all you want, but we're closing in on your home planet.

[Conservative Chicagoan]

LOL!!!

[Billthedrill]

Well, we don't know what they look like, how to find them, or how to communicate with them when we do, but (1) we can make categorical statements about whether they exist or not, and (2) we can put a timeline of 25 years out there for finding them.

A whole lotta smoke gettin' blown here...

Patience, Commander Zebronk. We must lull the Earthlings into a sense of security before the invasion fleet arrives.

[Virginia-American]

Any thing to add?

[Conservative Chicagoan]

Is it in the Good Book? No!