I know this is all hypothetical, but I feel obliged to say this:

Genocide is bad, mmkay?

Sure, but Jupiter is big. To reach the size it has, it must have taken millions upon millions of years. And in the hypothesis that it once was like the earth, and became into a gas giant, doesn't seem plausible. It's not like was something solid, then vaporized into gas all of the sudden. But that's just what I'd guess.


What's ironic then, is that we become the hostile alien invaders hell bent on war and genocide.

there machines, how can it be genocide? im not committing murder when i unplug my freezer.

Now I'm a little confused. It sounded like you said something about "nuking the [censored] out of" first contact. What exactly did you mean then?

oh.......in my earlier post i explained that its more than likely that they will be machines ala terminator that killed off the species that created them. on the off chance that they arent machines then simply destroying a mountain chain or vaporizing a lake should hopefully be enough of a deterrent. either way we have to do something to counteract the horrible decision to send out golden hippie records. :facepalm: we are the laughing stock of the galaxy right now. when the aliens talk about humans they probably think we are all part of some church ladies book club. we look like a bunch of pussies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_2 wants to fight you.

:verymad:

Oh! well pff.. Ya there is always going to be something that comes along to stump our current understanding of what classifies life. I know there is way more stuff out there that we haven't even begun to understand yet. I am pretty sure there are still things on our planet that we haven't figured out yet, or haven't even found yet that could alter what we think classifies life.

But as of yet, there is no "living" thing found that doesn't utilize the six critical elements of life: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur. That was the whole basis of the Wolfe-Simon study. The bacterium in question were thought to be able to utilize arsenic in place of phosphorus.

those are the key words though "as of yet." What I meant was there will always be something that will make the human race think differently. I'm not sure if you thought I meant short term or long term. I meant long term.

OR :
Amazingly advanced philosophical aliens, who grew beyond war when they were at a much lower technology level than us, and used their racial unification to develop as a species and explore the stars, reach Earth and realise we lied in our advertising.

racial unification, growing beyond war, philosophy practicing aliens........

what are you smoking......pass it around cause i want some. :rofl:

i do agree with the false advertising part though. what we should have sent are movies like the godfather, clint eastwood movies, the sopranos collection and star wars and bragged about our fleet of death stars that could annihilate entire solar systems at will. that will keep them nervous and at bay.......hopefully long enough for us to actually build a fleet of planet annihilating death stars.

@eindecker: OOH, a fellow Pop Sci subscriber,

I do think there is life in the cosmos that doesn't operate according to our laws.

Intelligent life? Sometimes I doubt we found that yet even on Earth.

some of the guys at work were talking about some guy who is supposed to be a genius or something who talks about all kinds of conspiracy stuff but specificly they were talking about this guy and a video of buzz aldrin talking about how they found aliens on the moon and the aliens told them to never come back or some nonsense like that.

obvious I think that is all bunk, but I could not even find this video (I found some videos of buzz aldrin talking about a phenomenon they encountered but the videos take and edit out the context of what he is saying).

any ways... any body know of this guy/video. my coworkers say that this genius guy can't be proven wrong so I want to see him my self so I can point out to them every detail of why they are stupid.

Anything that doesn't build weapons of mass destruction can be called intelligent. In fact, I think that since we did build them in first place, only proves how low and primitive we truly are.

how advanced or primitive a species may be is irrelevant considering the context that even though we may consider ants very primitive compared to our technology such as automobiles and electronics even though ants and most insects are more efficient and successful than humans.

ultimately much of what the human race considers to be advanced or vital in defining the achievements of life forms are completely irrelevant to survival or beneficial to the species ability to become more successful. if yo consider the fact of it, all most every part of your daily job is dedicated to the production of luxuries that are not necessary to survival as a species, unless you work in agriculture or production of building materials and so on.

And there you have humanity in a nutshell. Let's prepare for war. Why? Well, everyone else is. How do we know that? Well we are, so everyone else must be too; besides, it's just human nature, of course they are looking for a fight.

Eh, what? My point simply were that if you think you need WMDs, you shouldn't get WMDs. And that already having them is a testament to how destructive and primitive human nature is.


Aldrin stated that he saw unidentified objects that could have been some panels that had gotten loose. Not some phenomena or aliens. His clarifications were actually bluntly ignored, and made him look like some crackpot, though it didn't last long, I think.

+2
We can barely get to the bottom of the oceans of this planet or be politically friendly with other nations so the idea of trying to contact an alien species, which won't know English, is stupid as naturally it will become violent.
I like believeing that there is other things out there besides us on Earth but I'd rather we knew everything about this planet and how to peacefully live on it before we go stroming onto other planets

The so called "believers in science" can just use logic to tell us there is (almost certainly life out there).

As the size of the universe tends towards infinity, the chances of there being other life tends towards one. And we all know how big the universe is .

It's near impossible that we would be the only living being in the universe studying it.

There is no doubt that the amazing combination of natural selection and random chance can and has produced things far beyond what we could ever imagine.

This is why I have trouble ever enjoying movies with aliens. They're always so unrealistically similar to life on Earth that I can't bear it. Bipeds, with heads, eyes, ears, mouths, arms, legs, skeletons, muscles, feet, hands, veins, scales, teeth... I could go on forever.

While I'm sure there there are anologous parts on many alien organisms, and maybe even exact structural copies (the eye has evolved multiple times, independently just here on earth), I suspect that there are complex organisms that have almost none of these attributes, and I'm tired of people designing boring aliens for fiction.

One interesting concept that deserves lots of exploration is organisms where the line between colonies of unicellular, and multicellular organisms blurs. What is a human but a colony of clones created by a self-replicating cell, that have differentiated in response to environmental conditions? There are other organisms that we consider unicellular, but have differentiated individuals that serve different roles within a colony.

Yeah, I love Pop Sci.. My sis got me my recent subscription as a gift, and as soon as I got that first issue, I forgot how much I missed it.



Well stated.
I often think about how trivial our work and lives are at times, especially those who's only aspirations are being more popular and wealthy than the next.




One thing that has always fascinated me are colonies of microorganisms working together to perform the function of one larger, more complex organism, such as Siphonophores.

actually technology is the defining factor. 99% of all species that have existed on earth are now extinct. some of them were massive and powerful and others extremely adaptable even leaving the waters and migrating to land. yet the vast majority of them are long gone simply because they are slaves to their environments. humans have the capability of surviving in a much broader range of environments than any other species save leprechauns. and those are magical so its not a fair comparison. its all do to are ability to shape the environment around us to suit are needs. given enough time we will be conquering the galaxy one solar system at a time with a clone/droid armies and fleets of deathstars. no other species on earth will be able to make that claim. and since its a matter of if and not when the next giant object collides with earth even if we cant deflect it ourselves we will have colonies elsewhere.

someone brought up the point of we cant even get along with other countries even when they speak the same language. imagine the possible miscommunications that could occur from two completely different species. the best example i have ever seen was a campy twighlight zone where aliens appeared to detonate a large explosion on the side of the moon. humanity interpreted it as threat and a display of force but in actuality the aliens where showing off a form of inifinite energy but we werent sophisticated enough to recognize it. i definitely agree with the avoid at all costs or if not possible scare the [censored] out of with some nukes method.

99.99%.

The Universe is too big to not have life in it other than our own ( No guarantee that we will ever see any of it though)