Thats so funny

This thought also occured, if they wanted to remain so aloof, is that the right word?, you'ld think one of them would switch the headlights off, just a thought

Coincidently enough on our supper hour newscast there was a report and pictures of a strange object that shot out of the ocean near a place called Harbour Mille on our south coast.The pictures showed a large wedge shaped object streaking through the sky with a long smoke trail,this was seen by several people and the Coast Guard is investigating it.

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'65 Strat,65 Mustang,65 Jaguar,4 more Strats,3 vintage Vox guitars,5 Vox amps,'69 Bassman with a '68 2-15 Bassman cab,36 guitars total-15asst'd amps total,2 vintage '60s Hammond organs & a myriad of effects-with a few rare vintage ones.

genius!!

So it's cold outside, and I have had a few, so sorry in advance for some rambling.

Of coarse there are UFO's. but that doesn't mean they are space aliens. it just means the people who saw them don't know what they are.

there is exactly zero compelling supportable evidence of alien visitors.
that said i truly believe there is 'life out there' I would imagine it likely that some microbe made its way here, or something like that, and possibly that's where our journey on this rock kicked off.


Unless you ascribe to the divine nature of the human spirit then you have to look at the evolutionary model of the development of life on earth.

given the myriad of uncontrolled and largely unrepeated or unrepeatable random events that lead to development of life on earth it seems highly unlikely for life to have developed along a parallel line. Not to say that it won't or hasn't happened, but keep in mind it was only a series of happy accidents that allowed for our species to dominate our planet. for the vast majority of our planets lifespan 'intelligence' was not the dominant trait.

Even using a single well known event (one out of literally millions of events,) that NEEDED to happen to send life on earth down the path it went will show how high the odds are stacked against a mirrored path.

For a very very long time Dinosaurs were the dominant lifeform. Our mammalian ancestors were food. It took a catastrophic meteor strike which almost destroyed all life on earth to set the stage in which they could thrive. The saurion threat was obliterated.

This alone wasn't enough for our lineage to prosper and become what it is now. we needed a bunch of other things to happen, and to happen when they did. Any changes and our line may have died off. or it may have survived but developed along a different line.

Later:
Evidence shows that part of what set us apart from other hominids and allowed us to have a more developed neocortex was a genetic mutation in which we had weaker jaw muscles, this changed the shape of the skull and allowed our brains to grow differently. This was a fluke. It could also have hurt us in the short term, sometimes species die out before they can adapt.

ouch this is turning into a novel.

any way these couple examples were to point out that higher intelligence isn't necessarily the goal of evolution. Sometimes the most successful species possess vastly different qualities. It would be folly to assume that every earth similar planet has developed like we have, or even remotely close to how we have.

Sure the math says that if there are a near infinite number of earth like planets out there then mathematically there nearly must be other intelligent life. But if we say (to pick an arbitrary number,) there are a million earth like planets out there.

To develop like us they would have to be in the right zone around the right kind of star. How many do you eliminate on that criteria? lowball it at half? i would say more than half, since there are many many kinds of stars, different than our own.

Next, how many of those would have been struck by comets with the same chemical make up as our, to supply them with water? Gotta eliminate at least half of what's left.

How many would have a single satellite with the same kind of mass ratio as ours to govern tides and tectonic upheaval. These 2 things played a big role in shaping life on this planet. Eliminate 90% or more of what's left.

Then there's the matter of the billions and billions of interspecies interactions that hapened here, the cosmic accidents, the endless conflicts that could have gone either way. There could easilly still be donos dominating the landscape, or maybe nothing happened to move creatures out of the sea, or maybe even some form of single celled life would so dominate it's environment that further development wouldn't happen. Maybe a meteor or comet strike didn't happen or wasn't big enough to level the playing field for a different species, and brute strength continued to dominate? maybe a similar strike was so big it killed everything?
With this in mind the chances of what we have here happening anywhere else start to approach zero.

So if you accept that similar intelligence to us is at best exceedingly rare you have to accept that if it did occur the odds of it being anywhere near our cosmic neighborhood have to be ridiculously low.

So assuming there is other intelligent life it would have to be very very far away. Could they have evolved fast enough to be way ahead of us technologically, enough to traverse the stars? possibly, but equally possible we are way ahead, or even they are about where we are. crap shoot really, but i would guess possible that they could be way ahead of us.

However until(or if,) OUR understanding of space time changes fundamentally we have to consider the cosmic speed limit 'C' the speed of light. How close would they have to be to get to us? Warp speed and hyperspace travel make for good movies, but it's fiction until we can do it.
it's all speculation at this time. So there again considering what we know, even if these green or grey guys are out there, they probably couldn't get to us.

in fact the odds of them even being aware of us are diminishingly small. even if they could fly around all willy nilly, space is pretty gigantic. Any signs of us out in the cosmos are still very local. Our earliest transmissions are still only a hundred light years away. So how do you find a single dust mite in a basement in China from my home in Canada? that would be orders of magnitude easier.

So to sum up, you're gonna need better evidence than some badly filmed grainy picture of pie plates or military flares to convince me we have had alien visitors.
Condolences to anyone who actually read all that.

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I'm not an expert, but I play one on the internet.

I find the whole conspiracy theorist POV on alien visitation hard to swallow. How can any goverment that cant keep what their leaders get up to in their bedrooms Conceal or stop beings capable of traveling a distance it takes light 8000 years to span (nearest star aside from the sun), from revealing themselves to us. They'd either have to be a kind of nomadic space dwelling race (not good), or capable of time travel. In which case why not just travel back in time and take over when we were cavemen and seize control with zero resistance. Aside from a few humans theres no evidence for benevolence between lifeforms. Animals certainly aren't caring of each other. Mankind is bad enough with people of differing nationalities or beliefs. You never hear of a lion wanting to make anykind of meaningful contact with a gazelle. Other than the kind that involves ketchup.

Not saying were alone in the universe, I really dont believe they've made any kind of contact yet or that their presence is being covered up.


YZFJOE

Those egyptians had loads of stuff going on. Gold wallpaper, batteries and lightbulbs. Impossible structures we still cant build today. Then so did the South Americans too, even to the point of nuclear fusion.
Theres nothing new under the sun.

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No no and no

Hey guys...
Didn't a bunch of aliens come down here years ago? I believe Jack Nicholson and some kid from a doughnut shop kicked their arses by blasting them with Slim Whitman Recordings

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Hey, Boy Blue is back!

Now that you've all discovered my presence here on earth, time to return to the planet Mongo!
Adios muchachos y caballeros!

P.S. They are out there...
12Bar, fabulous post; I read it all, apologies accepted. Have you ever read "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson? A great book full of well explained science that even my 6th graders can understand (I read them Chapter 1 at the beginning of the year).

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Current Gear: Ron Kirn Barnbuster Tele,
Marshall: 1971 SuperLead 100>1997 1960-TV, bunch of pedals
and a 1987 Porsche 911 Carrera coupe named Veronica

I'm a believer.

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The blues ain't nothin but a good man feelin bad.

very well reasoned response. i do believe as others have said that it is possible that other intelligent life may exist somewhere in the vast universe...

however, to think that other intelligent life has evolved to the point that they have solved the problems related to traveling vast distances is highly unlikely.

In the relatively short time that intelligent life has existed on this planet, we have gone from primative hunter-gathers in small groups to the great societies we live in today. And, in that brief time, we have gained much knowledge about ourselves, our planet, and the universe. Less than five hundred years ago we believed the world was flat and the sun and stars revolved around us. Now we know the world is a sphere and orbits the sun. We know there are other planets in other galaxies and that the universe is larger than you could possibly imagine and still expanding. We have even left the bonds of gravity to visit the Moon and sent probes and satellites to other worlds all in the last sixty years. Life has surely existed and evolved in some fashion on worlds other than this one. In the vastness of the universe there is a chance that intelligent life has evolved on other worlds long before it did here.
Just imagine how far along we may be in the next millenium much less in the next million years, if we survive that long. The advances that will be made would be difficult for us to comprehend. Imagine if you could go back in time and meet one of our early ancestors on a dark plain in Africa while carrying a flashlight to find your way. That simple tool that we all take for granted would seem like something magical, or maybe even terrifying, to him. The point being, it is beyond his comprehension how such a thing could even exist. Just as we may not be able to comprehend the advances of an intelligent civilization that may have existed long before us.

Could there be celestial aliens among us? They could be remote viewing you as your reading this post!

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The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.

Thomas Jefferson

Believe life exists elsewhere, yes.
Way too many stars out there and many planets already located near by for earth to be unique.

I've seen them, well thought I saw them during the 60's.

But for them to be visiting a backwater like earth in the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of this galaxy not likely.

Maybe has more to do with the distances involved and that annoying C constant .
Unless you want to get into Membrane theory, that opens a whole new can-o-theoretical-worms.

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Keep on Truckin, Going full speed ahead down the highway to hades.

Are there 'aliens' - yes, probably

Are they superior in their technology - not necessarily - they could easily be bacteria or dinosaurs, or even ssimple plants. The conditions and historical events and extinctions or evolutions of their planet will never in all probability match up to ours. It is perfectly plausible that the freak genetic mutations that caused us to have opposable thumbs and stand up right haven't happened yet...bear in mind also that our planet is unique in our solar system in having plate tectonics, most planets are gassy, and also our planet only supports our life because it just happens to lie ata particular distance/ratio that by chance happens to be an optimum for maintaining an atmosphere capable of supporting life

Can they get here 'just like that' - in all probability no - there is no real physics that sugests that space ships could travel at the speed of light. the nearest habitable planet is light years away which could mean it would take centuries to get to us, assuming they have the technology to support life cryogenically for that length of time (or maybe they'll just bvreed on board so a later generation actually sees us?)...

Condolences accepted. Remind me what town you are in, Twelvebar. I'm on my way over - I want to be in on one of your drinking sessions. Sounds like fun!

Using this wormhole in space I can be there in exactly no time. ...Ooops - what a giveaway...

Greetings from the planet Zaarl - C

I have always believed there is life out there other than us, and as Joe pointed out IMHO I think they landed here during the time of ancient Egypt and had something to do with the building of the Pyramids. There is just to many references to space and beings in the drawings inside of them. Plus the mathematical formulas are to damn perfect. I also seen the show with that high ranking officer who saw the body at Roswell. If I was president for a day I would want to read all the documents.lol