Don't Talk to Aliens

[PHANTASM]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/space/article7107207.ece

[SjaaKTreKHaaK]

[Connection]

LOL hawking must have just finished reading the Ringworld books..

[SEXY HUGZ]

I watched the discovery's into the universe with hawking (time Travel) + (Aliens). The way people view him and the way scientist make him out to be is that he is Vary brilliant and knows a lot about the universe than anybody else. Now that being said i believe that people take his thoughts and sometimes try to apply them as fact. But, In reality his thoughts are hypothesis and are from his own opinion. An average person could say that Aliens can read other creatures brain waves because they lack vocal expression or that their brains are made up of other compounds then that what makes up our brains also know as Gray Matter. I also believe that their could be more than 100 billion galaxies. My statement would not hold any affect to the scientific world because i lack college education in such areas as to hawking who has those credentials. is he wrong? I cant say for sure because of all the possible factors. So, I take what he says with interest but with limitations to the fact that he doesn't really know anything factual about aliens or time travel.

Edited May 2, 2010 by SEXY HUGZ

[Desu]

i read that off of Yahoo and it was funny in a way.

first of all, How do we know aliens are more intelligent than us?

I am sure if aliens do exist, some are smarter but most of them will be microorganisms.

 

 

 

also, contact with aliens results in them taking our resources.

for real? why the f*** would they come all the way down here when they can do that somewhere else

we know that there are no intelligent life near us, so we rly have nothing to worry bout

 

EXCEPT 2012

[PHANTASM]

i read that off of Yahoo and it was funny in a way.

first of all, How do we know aliens are more intelligent than us?

I am sure if aliens do exist, some are smarter but most of them will be microorganisms.

 

 

 

also, contact with aliens results in them taking our resources.

for real? why the f*** would they come all the way down here when they can do that somewhere else

we know that there are no intelligent life near us, so we rly have nothing to worry bout

 

EXCEPT 2012

 

 

Mr. Hawkins' point is that there are so many planets out there, trillions and trillions, that there are bound to be some "bad guys" somewhere. It is possible that they could detect our signals, come to earth, and destroy/enslave/colonize us. He is saying that humans have done this many times to each other whenever one group of people found someone with less technology. It is possible that we could inadvertently get the attention of some species like us, only far more advanced. This would basically be the end of our world as we know it.

 

We have been beaming out television and radio signals for almost a hundred years, and there are programs seeking funding that would blast out incredibly powerful radio signals at nearby stars in hopes of getting a response from some friendly aliens. This is very controversial in the UFO community right now.

 

A common parallel is the destruction of the American Indians from the Spanish and English invasions. 97% of the original inhabitants of North and South America died within a few decades of the discovery of the Americas (read the book 1491 if you don't believe me). The destruction was total. Disease, forced conversion, guns, slavery, torture and displacement ruined their culture for the few millions who survived the first encounter with Europeans.

 

Another situation to contemplate is the experience of the last Australian Aborigine tribes that were discovered in the central deserts in the 1960s. They were Stone-Age people encountering people with cars, airplanes, guns, hospitals, telephones, electricity, alcohol, television, money, rock music, etc etc. They were rounded up by helicopter and placed in camps "for their own good", and their culture completely collapsed within a few years. The experience of being abducted by people twenty thousand years more advanced than them shattered their society. Now they are alcoholics, unemployable, living off the state, and completely under the control of the Australian government. This is what happens even with a relatively good-intentioned encounter between two societies with vast differences in technology.

 

So, even if we encounter "good aliens" who do not want to do us harm, the experience of having a cultural exchange with advanced creatures could completely destroy our global society. "Bad aliens" could wipe us out with weapons we cannot imagine and take our planet for themselves.

[Post(?)Organic]

OMGZ IMMA GO MEET SOME ALIENSS

[SEXY HUGZ]

Aliens also could carry Illnesses deadlier to us for example like chicken pox. you catch chicken pox when your an adult you are more likely to die then when you catch it as a child. that potent of an illness could wipe us all out in a heart beat. but you don't hear or read anything from hawking about disease aliens could have or carry.

Edited May 3, 2010 by SEXY HUGZ

[TwoCrows]

Mr. Hawkins' point is that there are so many planets out there, trillions and trillions, that there are bound to be some "bad guys" somewhere. It is possible that they could detect our signals, come to earth, and destroy/enslave/colonize us. He is saying that humans have done this many times to each other whenever one group of people found someone with less technology. It is possible that we could inadvertently get the attention of some species like us, only far more advanced. This would basically be the end of our world as we know it.

 

We have been beaming out television and radio signals for almost a hundred years, and there are programs seeking funding that would blast out incredibly powerful radio signals at nearby stars in hopes of getting a response from some friendly aliens. This is very controversial in the UFO community right now.

 

A common parallel is the destruction of the American Indians from the Spanish and English invasions. 97% of the original inhabitants of North and South America died within a few decades of the discovery of the Americas (read the book 1491 if you don't believe me). The destruction was total. Disease, forced conversion, guns, slavery, torture and displacement ruined their culture for the few millions who survived the first encounter with Europeans.

 

Another situation to contemplate is the experience of the last Australian Aborigine tribes that were discovered in the central deserts in the 1960s. They were Stone-Age people encountering people with cars, airplanes, guns, hospitals, telephones, electricity, alcohol, television, money, rock music, etc etc. They were rounded up by helicopter and placed in camps "for their own good", and their culture completely collapsed within a few years. The experience of being abducted by people twenty thousand years more advanced than them shattered their society. Now they are alcoholics, unemployable, living off the state, and completely under the control of the Australian government. This is what happens even with a relatively good-intentioned encounter between two societies with vast differences in technology.

 

So, even if we encounter "good aliens" who do not want to do us harm, the experience of having a cultural exchange with advanced creatures could completely destroy our global society. "Bad aliens" could wipe us out with weapons we cannot imagine and take our planet for themselves.

 

Well said, I would also add that even in our extremely brief period of being able to perceive past even our own earth-bound geographic regions, we have always started with the assumption that what we can see is the total truth and nothing else exists.

 

For how long did we as a race believe the earth was the center of everything, that there were only 9 planets in all of creation (and for a time only 2-3 that they could see). We looked up, saw a bunch of twinkly lights and figured they were just pretty dots with nothing more to them.

 

We thought we knew where our solar system ended, we thought this galaxy was all there was, we thought we knew where space "ended" (wall of galaxies), heh, we even thought that space was infinite and was always expanding; We now "think" it might actually be contracting already.

 

As improbable as we are, and for all of our mighty achievements,we are such a tiny speck on the cosmic scale that the best answer we as a species can make about the rest of whats out there, is we really are totally blind to 99.9999% of what exists.

 

We see big balls of matter, clustering around stars, out as far as our technology allows us at the time. We see false-color images of gas clouds so big, it would take millions of years to go from one end to the other. We "look" for things along the spectrum of light we are used to seeing and "listen" on radio frequencies we understand.

 

This would be like a guy on a sea-shore, with big cone to his ear, listening for someone yelling, when all around him this invisible spectrum of energy is being used for communications.

 

Can you imagine....Columbus is just now getting within sight of the "new world" and several thousand feet over his head in a cloud bank is a communications ship, talking to its forward base by tachyon tight beam transmission. He would have no clue.

 

We can't even explore our own oceans and we as a species think we have space sorted out and nothing is out there, because we can't hear it or see it using our current ideas about communications.

 

From a practical standpoint, I absolutely agree that contact, no matter how "good" it may seem at first, will have catastrophic consequences.

 

Take a super simple example. Lets say "they" have wonderous medical technology. They decide to donate it, and help us out by flying down a bunch of hyper hospitals and care centers. They have hyper advanced nano-medicine making almost all "drugs" un-necessary and obsolete.

 

Something so wonderful and generous, ends up putting tens of thousands of doctors, nurses, etc out of work. It basically halts the huge evil drug industry in its tracks and that causes a cascade failure of economies. Hundreds of thousands of jobs are lost, trillions of dollars (including taxes) are lost, shipping companies are impacted(they have to get those drugs to places), all the support organizations that feed that one industry suffer massive losses, many of which can't re-tool fast enough to do soemthing else and on and on.

 

The huge up-surge in people living longer so much easier causes an impossible strain on food production and water resources. But wait! "They" have a fix for that too! A quick growing fungus/plant that is hybridized with their technology that is so nutritionally superior that it can supplement large portions of our diet. The "smart" farmers switch to this new crop (they do this now due to Gov't subsidies, it does happen), the rest who can't adapt go bankrupt.

 

When you introduce massive changes to any system, it is very easy to throw it off balance and cause it to fail, even if those changes are on the surface, "good".

[PHANTASM]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UhQVT2dHXw&feature=player_embedded#!

[Connection]

in ringworld and a number of other sci-fi books there are old, advanced and powerful civilizations who ( much like the US ) see their role as 'policing' the galaxy. A race that is able to leave their planet and become star-faring is generally agreed to have come to a point where they are able to live at peace with themselves ( else how could they possibly control the resources of an entire planet, which is probably necessary in order to develop and build interstellar ships? ).

the running theme is that when this type of civilization encounters us, they see our history and our attitude and consider us a threat to other less developed races, and a threat to the whole galaxy if we are allowed to develop certain potentially enormously destructive technologies.

we have a history of blowing ourselves up and destroying resources and lives for not very good reasons ( what could be a good reason, anyway?) -- what could happen if we spread out across the stars? potentially some very bad stuff, destruction of planets and genocide etc.

so there is an interstellar duty on the part of advanced civilizations to cull the warlike, unreasonable earthlings, before we grow up and start smashing our neighbors. this is pretty much the same argument the US used to attack iraq and before long, iran: "they have a history of violence, and may be developing very powerful weapons. therefore we must destroy them before they become more dangerous"

 

i don't know if hawkings mentions this argument, but it's been a popular theme in sci-fi for the last decade and it's a sound argument. that's why i said he's probably just read ringworld.

 

problem is, there's no use in trying to avoid contact. if a race is capable of coming here, they are certainly capable of discovering us without our putting out a welcome mat.

[MadHatter]

Is there currently an official policy on Aliens - as in what would we do if they started contacting us? Is the idea still just beaming out lots of information about us? Becasue, if it is and Stephen Hawking is right, I'm not entirely sure telling potential enemies all about us is a very sensible idea...

[SL!VER]

but i talk to them all the time its called people from outside my country

[PHANTASM]

Is there currently an official policy on Aliens - as in what would we do if they started contacting us? Is the idea still just beaming out lots of information about us? Becasue, if it is and Stephen Hawking is right, I'm not entirely sure telling potential enemies all about us is a very sensible idea...

 

There are official policies out there, google it and you will find hundreds of weird sites full of conspiracies. Most of them are BS of course, but make for very interesting reading. Now officially, the RAND corporation was paid to do a study for the US government regarding what should be our policy towards any "possible" contact with extraterrestrials. Their study noted that any contact would be extremely traumatic to our culture and could lead to the extinction of the human race. They concluded that the government should keep any information about extraterrestrials an absolute secret from the American people, while increasing our ability to defend ourselves against them. This RAND document became the de facto (if not official) policy of the USAF and NASA. Obviously the government can't say they have a formal policy on how to deal with something that they have a policy to pretend doesn't exist.

 

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/ciencia_flyingobjects04.htm

 

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread299657/pg1

 

http://www.rand.org/pubs/drafts/DRU1571/

 

http://theheavystuff.com/?cat=264

[MadHatter]

Ah I see good to know that governments are hiding stuff from us