ufos and aliens. do you believe?

[kakihara]

ok, i thought about this one after i posted the ghost thread. this should cover everything, monsters, supernatural and aliens. i considered posting one about god, but that always turns into a religious argument, so ill leave it alone. though, bible-thumpers often get really defensive and even offended when aliens come up in a conversation. anyway, i believe in aliens. im not hardcore about with alluminum foil on my head but i think there would have to be another civilization out there. we cantbe  the only "inteligent" race in the whole universe. if we were, man, what a waste. you cant argue with all of the video evidence out there, thats a fact. theyve probably been here all along. theyre far more advanced than anything we can even attempt to comprehend. they could control us pretty easily. seriously, were pretty primitive when you think about it, were just talking monkeys that figured out how to split atoms. opinions?

[indianasmith]

I neither believe or disbelieve in aliens.  I simply remain to be convinced either way.  It certainly does not affect my faith.  I'd like to believe in alien races, but I also know how complicated the dynamics that combined to make earth suitable for life are, and thus how remote the possibility of alien life really is.

[ghouck]

Here's my line of thought: With the infinite vastness of space, there has to be other forms of intelligent life, future, past, and/or present. I also believe the theory that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. People talk about wormholes, but I do not believe the power needed can be controlled enough for it to be useful or even safe. When people think about aliens and other life, they always approach it with a point of view of hope. I do not. Just like a family of fleas on a dog in Toledo will never meet the fleas on a cat in Taiwan, I don't think we'll meet them. There are too many things that have to happen that we have no way of controlling. Huge distances have to be spanned at a finite speed, requiring huge amounts of energy and resources, with countless unforeseeable problems to make it fail. People often feel with infinite time everything it is possible for man to figure out. I don't believe that for several reasons, the first of which is that I don't believe our time is infinite, and we are doing quite a bit to not only prove that, but also to make that happen. Second, impossible means impossible, and some things are just that. We as humans have problems making something last 40 years, do people really believe we can make something that lasts the hundreds of centuries needed to make the voyage in such a hostile environment as space, while harboring things as delicate as life and what is needed to support it? I just don't see it. I've heard people refer to cars and planes in this same discussion, but they both need tons of maintenance on a regular basis, maintenance that can't be performed while under way. Even if we DID somehow get to the nearest solar system, there's still a near certain chance there's no life in it, even in the one in who-knows-what odds that there either was or will be.

The only way I see us meeting is by totally random chance. Just the same a a person from Toledo can take their dog on vacation with them to Taiwan, I think the only way we meet is from the random chance of some wormhole-type scenario that is totally without control.

Believe me, I'd love to be proven wrong, but I just don't think it's gonna happen.

[indianasmith]

Good points all, GHouck! But let me point out one thing . . .

while it is true modern man seemingly cannot make anything last for more than 40 years, the Romans made roads that are still usable 2100 years later - and the Egyptians' pyramids are still standing, virtually untouched by time, 4500 years after they were completed.  This summer I found a 12,000 year old Clovis point that was undamaged.  I guess what I am saying is that human artifacts CAN last, if they are made with sufficient care, of the right materials.  Now, whether any high-tech device can last the length of time it would take to make a voyage in deep space . . . . .


who knows?  But I doubt there are any other civilizations out there waiting to be found.

[ghouck]

Exactly my point though: A spearhead: 12000 years. Simple roads: 2100 years. Cars: 40 years. Space Shuttles: 25 years. How short is the lifespan of something of intergalactic complexity going to be. Notice the more pieces it has, the shorter it's lifespan (generally).

[WingedSerpent]

I certainly believe in life on other planets.  Whether or not it's advanced enough to travel here to Earth is the real question.     

[ER]

For three years when I was growing up we lived not far from an international airport and in the evenings we'd sit out on the deck in the warm months and watch airplanes come in to land on the horizon, maybe ten miles off. We got so good at ID-ing aircraft that we knew the various models and flight paths and even knew Air National Guard jets on training flights. (As I recall those were F111s.)

But there were also from time to time strange lights in the sky. Lights that used to seem to zoom away and blink out at several times the speed of even the fastest jets. We'd watch lights stay stationary for minutes, hovering, changing colors, and then they'd move in fast horizontal changes in position. One second the light would be to the left and in the blink of an eye the same light would be far across the horizon in the other direction. We saw lights and presumably the craft behind them doing things that apparently defied physics and the abilities of all known aircraft. We saw these lights so often...maybe once a week for years, it got to be no big deal, we'd just watch the freakish show as they'd spin and dip and streak across the sky and stop on a dime. The neighbors knew about them. Friends would come over and watch them. Nobody made a big deal of it. We called them UFOs and for lack of a better term I guess that was a good name.

I don't know if that qualifies as seeing aliens but I have no idea how aircraft could fly so fast and do everything they did. Maybe they were time travelers? Ha.

[Joe the Destroyer]

I believe in life in space, especially with the microbes they found, but I don't believe in sophisticated life in space.  That is not to say that I don't think it's possible, I just haven't seen any evidence of it yet.

[Ash]

Exactly my point though: A spearhead: 12000 years. Simple roads: 2100 years. Cars: 40 years. Space Shuttles: 25 years. How short is the lifespan of something of intergalactic complexity going to be. Notice the more pieces it has, the shorter it's lifespan (generally).

Agreed.

I believe in the possibility of life on other planets.
The universe is just too vast for there not to be other life elsewhere.

If the human race ever makes contact with an alien civilization, it will be faaaaaar into the future (hundreds of years) when the technology is advanced enough, or, they will contact us.

[meQal]

I am not sure if intelligent life exist or not. Not in space but on our own planet. Humans do have a tendency to do some of the dumbest things possible at times. 
Seriously on the subject at hand, it is possible that intelligent life exists but I seriously doubt if discovered we would ever be able to communicate with them, let alone understand their behavior. Just look at how much we still don't understand about the behavior of the many species we share this planet with now. Now add in developing on a completely alien world with unknown factors involved in their evolution, physical, social, and psychological development, you get beings which we would have no common point of reference to relate with. Also consider that they may not even develop organs we possess like vocal cords or ears. They might communicate completely by sign language, body language or visual cues. All we have to do is look to our own world where we don't all speak the same language or have similar cultures. That indicates how difficult even basic communication would be if we were to make contact with an intelligent life form on another planet.
I suspect that if any aliens are visiting us, they either considered us dangerous creatures or view us as little more than lab rats, perhaps both. We do have a tendency towards violence and conquest in our nature. Sure we strive to over come those urges but our own history as a species tends to show it all to well. If aliens are visiting us, I suspect this is why they have not attempted contact with humans on a wide scale basis. Odds are we would just try to kill them and cut them up to see what makes them work.

[Jack]

Given the size of the universe, it wouldn't surprise me if there were thousands of intelligent civilizations out there.  But you can't travel faster than the speed of light, so I don't think they've visited us.  If you wanted to travel 50,000 light years, you'd need to send an entire breeding population along, about 1,000 people assuming they're like us, if you wanted anyone other than inbred morons to be left when you arrived at your destination.  And the ship would have to be big enough to grow food for all those people.

[3mnkids]

I believe.   

[The Burgomaster]

I believe intelligent life exists on other planets.  Damn . . . the universe is too big to have only one plant with intelligent life on it.  However, I believe the chances that intelligent beings from other planets have visited earth are pretty slim.  With so many planets and so many miles between them, the odds that others could even find us are astronomically (no pun intended) low.

[schmendrik]

What ghouck said. I believe there's life out there, probably intelligent life. I don't believe they're here or they've ever been here, or that anyone has ever even gotten a signal from them.

But I don't rule out the possibility that we'll exchange signals some day if we send probes to other star systems.

[Trevor]

Let's just say that I want to believe. :-)

In 1975, a UFO was reported to have landed on the cricket field at Riverside Primary School, Gwelo, Rhodesia and took off shortly thereafter.

The entire school saw the marks on the field, including yours truly who was eight at the time.