Christianity vs UFOs

[Cute Wolf]

Well... this was an UFO cloud



UFO again



Ufo saucepan

and many more......

Well... God doesn't said that He create only human as intelligent life... He does imply that humans are His Images... perhaps we could use that to judge that all the "space aliens" are just intelligent animals.... or did they count as "humans" too...? ? ?

[Hax]

Well... God doesn't said that He create only human as intelligent life... He does imply that humans are His Images... perhaps we could use that to judge that all the "space aliens" are just intelligent animals.... or did they count as "humans" too...? ? ?

Ah, intelligent animals?

That's a sickening thought. You do know we use mice for testing purposes and they used dolphins in the army? Sickening.

[Rhyfelwyr]

Is it that ridicolous to believe in UFO's? If you consider how big the universe is, and how many planets there are out there that may well be harbouring life... then if there are many different life forms out there, surely the chances that we are the most developed would be fairly small? We don't know how far technology can go, so who knows, it doesn't seem that unlikely that some alien species may have got its own 'UFO'.

Although, I don't believe in all that for other reasons.

[Aemilius Paulus]

Is it that ridicolous to believe in UFO's?

Yes, because even with the more optimistic interpretations of the Drake equation, the space-faring civilisations will be far apart enough to make any visits quite rare. The chance that in all the thousands of millions of years an alien race visits us in the last 100-2000 years is quite laughable. Not impossible, but still unlikely. And our earliest radio signals have not reached far at all - in fact, they are barely touching the closest stars. If this was not enough, the modern signals we send are efficient, and with the end of analogue television, we are basically silencing ourselves.

Additionally, most races would probably rather avoid getting our attention, for various purposes, one of which may be to let ourselves civilise or destroy the whole planet. There is a hypothesis that the advanced civilisations are very peaceful, as intelligent life tends to be quite self-destructive and will destroy the planet/themselves unless it becomes pacifistic before. This is one very significant variable in to the Drake equation. We came far too close to wrecking the planet at numerous times during the Cold War to be comfortable. And if a state like the Nazis arose again/the Nazis were more powerful... You get the point.

Finally, there is another giant variable that may twist the Drake equation very significantly - we have no idea how frequent the gamma bursts are from current or former stars, quasars, etc. Those bursts are so intense that they scorch, no, sterilise, hundreds of star systems at once. Only an expansive space empire can insulate its survival from that.

[Centurion1]

UFO's are a rather ridiculous idea. Mostly peoples inability to think that the universe does not revolve around them. I at least am honest enough to say to myself, "hey maybe aliens have more important things to do with their time" I like to believe those UFO's are either fabricated hoaxes or military secrets.

[Aemilius Paulus]

UFO's are a rather ridiculous idea. Mostly peoples inability to think that the universe does not revolve around them.

Hehehe, but the same is even more true of those who completely deny the existence of alien intelligence. Do you not see how? On the contrary, the prime argument of the UFO believers is that the universe does not revolve around us and that there are other sentient spacefaring species out there.


But yes, I do see what you mean. Earth is not so special that we have all sorts of aliens fawning over us every year...

[Centurion1]

Exactly we are a rather poor example of a super race. Physically we leave much to be desired......

Im not saying its impossible i believe intelligence exists there somewhere, i just doubt the idea of a spacefaring race that spys on us.

[HoreTore]

UFO's are a rather ridiculous idea. Mostly peoples inability to think that the universe does not revolve around them. I at least am honest enough to say to myself, "hey maybe aliens have more important things to do with their time" I like to believe those UFO's are either fabricated hoaxes or military secrets.

Or simply stuff we don't know what is.

I love the logic FAIL most "UFO believers" use: If something can't be explained., then it's a UFO. They don't need any proof at all that there is a UFO, they just need the lack of an alternate explanation.

[drone]

I love the logic FAIL most "UFO believers" use: If something can't be explained., then it's a UFO. They don't need any proof at all that there is a UFO, they just need the lack of an alternate explanation.

No, that is not a logic fail. UFO stands for Unidentified Flying Object. So if it can't be explained (i.e. unidentified), it is a UFO. The fail comes from automatically assuming every UFO is piloted by extraterrestrials, instead of the sighting being moonlight reflecting off of swamp gas, or Venus, or the Aurora Project, etc.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Ah, intelligent animals?

That's a sickening thought. You do know we use mice for testing purposes and they used dolphins in the army? Sickening.

In the NAVY, Hax....dolphins don't do well in ghillie suits (take that Gregoshi!).


Kad:

A funny thing happened on the way to the troll-bridge, an actual thread appeared!

[Aemilius Paulus]

@Gaelic Cowboy: Not sure how do I put this so this does no insult others or you, but all of us (me, you, etc) here are pretty small minds, in the sense that we are not at all experts on this field. There are numerous flaws in your argument, but they stem from ignorance of certain scientific theories, hypotheses and laws - as opposed to logical flaws - your argument indeed makes sense in a purely logical sense, devoid of supporting information. Here, you are using deductive logic whereas very few things are purely deductive, in the sense that there are always supporting and conflicting facts that make a rhetorical proof inductive instead of deductive.

Yes, you could just dismiss my argument very quickly by saying that you are a being of logic, common sense and that you have a mind that works well enough - this supposedly making you qualified to speak on this subject. But the truth is, that if we had the knowledge to make such judgments, then we would not need real scientists.

Basically, what I am saying is that your argument contains too many flaws and incorrect assumptions for me to answer it. What you need is to read, read those books that I mentioned. Read more books. Seeing where your weaknesses are, Sagan would be the one to read, but he should not be your only selection. So many times I see people come in to scientific arguments and try to use common sense and logic, which is useless without background facts. I am not saying I am smarter or better knowledgeable than you are - but I am saying that you need to read on this field. I should have just Ctrl+V-ed from Sagan instead of making up my own arguments based on what I read, but that spoils all the fun, frankly.

In fact, you could even read Stanislaw Lem, an incredibly famous Polish writer who wrote books that were thinly-veiled philosophical discussions on the nature of alien life, human spacetravel and such topics - but mostly, on the 'alienness' of alien life. They call him a sci-fi writer, but he disliked the label, as his books were not written for simple pleasure, but to make people think. You may find some of his books tedious. But he is a true modern-age, xenobio-philosopher. Perhaps his writing will lead you to challenge your assumption that alien species have to be like us, with similar motives and desires. In fact, simply being a sci-fi fan (but NOT a fan of any specific purely-fiction works, as that generally leads to nowhere) will cause you to think deeper on this subject.

A knowledge of sociology will also help here. As I said, your flaw is that you have too many assumptions regarding the nature of other species (as well as about the nature of astronomy, but that is another, although more serious problem), whereas the variables are so large.









To start off: what makes you think the alien species will expand? Why should they expand? What is the purpose of that? We went through a fiercely imperialist stage ourselves.

We no longer strut around land-hungry, or at least not as a society - the leaders may have other views. But eventually we will change. Human personality will change. Just as we think of racism, for instance, as a bad thing nowadays, and so we will have negative views on some of the other currently acceptable things... A society so advanced as to travel through space will be advanced enough to have more lofty and benign social views - such is the trend, normally speaking.




Second, the environment affects the average personalities of species through evolution, believe it or not. A psychologist may argue nature vs. nurture (genetics vs environment), but in the scale of the world, in the scale of billions of years of evolution, everything is 'nurture' or environment. The genetics in the beginning are nearly non-existent, if I follow your hypothetical scenario of spontaneous abiogenesis.

So what is the environment on Earth? Well, we have plenty do water, and about an atmosphere, of say, average density with high oxygen content due to the early stromatolites, which poisoned themselves with their waste product - yes, oxygen. So plants as we know naturally arise due to all these conditions. Plants grow and die and fertilise the surface of the planet, at the same time breaking up the rock, 'fixing' nitrogen, extracting minerals. They create billions of tonnes of biomass. The environment we no have produces an even greater profusion of plants. Plants are common, and easily obtainable. Plants are not sentient, and very easily accessible. They have not out-evolved the grazers enough to make grazing difficult.

So, with this, the species which become the herbivores have it fairly easy. At the very least, we can say that their method of satiation of their need for the essential nutrients is fairly simple and requires little thought. The predators are not ultra-efficient either, and so the herbivores have the luxury of not evolving their brains. It will therefore be up to carnivores or omnivores to give rise to sentient species, unless of course, even they do not receive any pressures to evolve due to the generally balmy environment. But that is not likely, as the environment always changes. They will face pressure, and natural selection will leave only the smartest. It will not be the herbivores advancing, due to their complacent and undemanding lives.

And so the planet will have a single species evolve to sentience that is, suppose, carnivorous - since they have the most pressure exerted on them. However, this influence is in turn counteracted by the fact that carnivores focus too much on raw power, which in turn lowers the odds of sentient carnivores very significantly - - in our world, it left no space for a brain due to the large jaw muscles - the same problem herbivores face as well, but then again, herbivores are mostly hopeless on planets of our type. Yep, evolution is all about checks and balances, which ensure optimal configuration based on the environment.


NOTE: It is unlikely that two species will rise to sentience, since the probabilities of external pressures and all other factors create a small chance of sentience at a single time, and thus by the time next 'opportunity' for the advancement to sentience arises (this is speaking very roughly, in terms of science), the environment is already dominated by the species first to reach self-awareness. Anyhow, no time to explain this specific point much longer, I have to move on.

That carnivorous species will continue to advance and begin the first tribal societies. They are naturally aggressive, and so they continue this as they reach newer and newer milestones. By the time they have weapons of mass destruction, they will inevitably go to great wars as their natural aggressiveness influences their collective psyche. Unfortunately, they are unlikely to survive to the stage where they will have time to go to other star systems due to the likelihood of wrecking the planet before the colonisation of other systems (which they will not have time for with all the wars).

Such aggressive species will either all die or slowly change their collective psyche to a more benign, pacifistic one. It will be immensely difficult, but even now the process of natural selection will be weeding out the aggressive individuals (die from a violent death in a conflict of some sort or scale). Perhaps this, coupled with the unimaginable horrors of massive devastation suffered by global use of WMDs will lead to generally more peaceful philosophies. Then, the old generation will influence the newer, as it inevitably does, whether on purpose or accidentally. And so, the changed species may rise to the galactic stage, but they will only rise if they are pacifistic.

As usual, exceptions in the final stages will occur, but they will be few, statistically speaking. It is more likely that only the pacifistic species advance to the galactic stage. A different starting environment can influence the herbivorous species to rise to sentience, and that will make the species innately pacifistic. As so many opportunities lay to wreck one's own planet, it is possible that mainly the green/hippy sentient species 'in tune' with nature will survive on other planets. Who knows?

Even today, as flawed as we are, a very large portion of scientists dealing with anything in the outer space are saying that we should not terraform anything, even if there are no indigenous life-forms. So much talk of complete preservation, and with everyone setting different criteria - with some saying that any sort of planet should be left untouched, and other insisting on not touching anything with complex non-microscopic organisms, and so on... Such views may seem radical, at least today. However, the views are radical among us, the common folk - meanwhile, the scientists such as xenobiologists, astrophysicists, astronomers, space-travel engineers view such stringent preservation much more favourably.

The aforementioned viewpoint can easily increase with time. What other motivations for expansion exist? Populations pressures? But even as we speak, birthrates in all wealthy countries are falling. US is staying in the positive only because of immigration, and if not for the higher birthrates among Blacks and Latinos, even immigration will not sustain US. Without population pressures, and with mounting consensus against 'space imperialism' and 'eco-trashing', we could very well end up not moving anywhere. Societal view change drastically through time, after all. Additionally, natural selection on personal and planetary scales ensures that only the sentient species which best get along with the environment and with each other are the ones to survive.









All of this is a thought experiment, and it is in no way accurate, as the variables are endless, but the general spirit is nevertheless correct IMO - sentient species differ, or at least they differ in the beginning, and either die-off or survive, but much changed. Anyhow, the purpose of this is to open-up people's minds if they have the patience to read this. I do not have any more time to address any of your other points, gaelic cowboy.Once again, natural selection ensures that only the patient will become knowledgeable

[Centurion1]

We no longer strut around land-hungry, or at least not as a society - the leaders may have other views. But eventually we will change. Human personality will change. Just as we think of racism, for instance, as a bad thing nowadays, and so we will have negative views on some of the other currently acceptable things... A society so advanced as to travel through space will be advanced enough to have more lofty and benign social views - such is the trend, normally speaking.

Speak for yourself. I currently have my eyes on Canada but Mexico is coming up, when i'm elected Dictator for Life.

Enough of my Cesarean aspirations. Who is to say that these hypothetical aliens would share any facet of (not sure what word to use..... Sentience and culture?) Based upon their environments and other outside factors, even their own physiology could completely distort their relationship with humanity no matter their technological advancements. I think a good book to be read on divergent evolution and the like could be Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond, true i haven't read it since like 6th or 7 grade and it has nothing to directly do with alien sentinences i believe it explains divergence of people. Imagine the differences that could occur with absolutely no contact and similar point of origin. At any one point in our evolution we could have taken so many different paths along our development.

[Centurion1]

Edit: oops double post my apologies.

[Myrddraal]

The question at the core of this is: is the number of planets in the universe infinite? Whether we can draw any conclusions depends on the answer to this question. It seems there's a few theories going both ways. The theories describing unbounded but finite universes are compelling.

[Centurion1]

The question at the core of this is: is the number of planets in the universe infinite? Whether we can draw any conclusions depends on the answer to this question. It seems there's a few theories going both ways. The theories describing unbounded but finite universes are compelling.

its a very hard idea to even consider. i mean how would the universe just end. And if it is at what point do planets and other physical objects just stop