The Area 51 thing was a massive wet fart, but it got me nostalgic for the old days where it wasn't all about chemtrails, Jews being behind 9/11, and flat-earth nonsense. Back then it was believable, grounded stuff like flying saucers and men in black. So let's talk about aliens.
Do you believe in aliens? Do you believe we are visited by aliens? Have you ever seen or encountered any aliens? Does the government know about aliens but cover it up? Did aliens visit and influence our ancestors in the past? Are aliens friendly, benign, or threatening?
Aliens are a very compelling subject. Why is the classic description of a grey so fundamentally creepy? Why have aliens and the things that surround them, UFOs, men in black, become such an ingrained part of modern folklore? Why have they fallen into the background in modern times, to be replaced with anti-intellectual/anti-science conspiracy theories for home schooling bible-bashing wierdos? Is this paradigm shift representative of the cultural era we have moved into?
I'll get the boring perspective out of the way: statistically speaking, other forms of life must exist, just in terms of raw numbers and the sheer scale of the universe. No, I don't believe we have been visited or contacted by these. "Ancient aliens" narratives remind me of theology, in the sense that we explain things with a powerful external force rather than make sense the complex reality.
I also disagree with your idea that beliefs about flying saucers or men in black were somehow better, or that older /boo/-type theories were generally more sensible in the past.
To take things meta-/boo/, I do genuinely think that a lot of what are called "conspiracy theories" are encouraged by military and security agencies to distract from issues which pose a genuine threat, or expose real agendas. I wish I could find it, but I'm sure I've read somewhere that the FBI encouraged rampant speculation about the JFK assassination and UFOs in the 1960s to draw attention away from Cointelpro -- a true conspiracy involving propaganda and outright murder of U.S. citizens.
It may be tempting to believe that there are grand and surprising truths being hidden somewhere, but the primary concern of "intelligence" agencies is the preservation of power. One way of doing that is to encourage outlandish and cultish behaviours -- even better if they're presented as forbidden knowledge only the privileged few or the super smart have access to. The U.S. has always had a deeply fearful and indoctrinated culture, going right back to the days of the Committee on Public Information and the Red Scare, and given that they largely dominate communication technologies (including the internet), we're exposed to those same traits. Real conspiracies do certainly exist, but they're so mundane that no one talks about them -- a high level meeting at BP or ExxonMobil is largely off-limits to the public and has world-changing implications, but we don't call that conspiracy.
Anyway, if you put aside all the /boo/ nonsense, there have been serious scientists debating the existence of aliens based on the evidence that we have. One of the most famous and informative debates was between Carl Sagan and Ernst Mayr. Sagan argued there must be intelligent aliens judging by the size of the universe, Mayr was a biologist who argued that we should look at the life we know -- and their tendency to die out before reaching the intelligence necessary to communicate across planets.
I used to be properly terrified of aliens without even thinking they were real/on Earth. If I caught some daft UFO investigation show on Channel 4 before bed, I genuinely wouldn't be able to sleep. That seems to have gone away these days, but if ET comes round my endz he's gonna' get merked up.
That's largely down to the aesthetic of how it's presented, I think, which takes on that silly /boo/ tone. It's the grainy amateur footage, giving the impression it's genuinely something outside the realm of human knowledge and control accidentally caught by random recording -- something horror films exploit all the time.
>>4835 No, you're making assumptions about me that are wrong and I hate that. Frankly, you're so busy assuming so you should have been able to figure that out.
I think aliens are frightening because once aliens exist and/or are on Earth then we're no longer the dominant species. Intellectually speaking, anything that can make its way here in due order is probably far smarter than ourselves. Alien contact would completely alter humanity's place in the universe and these aliens aren't going to be like my old pals Garus and Tali or sexy, sexy Lwaxana Troi, we've got no idea what they're going to be like. They might be alright, but something totally alien and so advanced as to be hopping from solar system to solar system could have motives and machinations completely beyond our understanding. What if they take all the tortoises? Or try to greet us by bombarding the planet with gamma radiation? What if they just sailed on by and ignored us? This shit's scary. Signs flipped my lid as a kiddy, but the aliens in that are basically dumb animals, we have machine guns and Brimstone missiles to deal with that sort of thing. But what kind of firearm do you use against the species that leaves an untranslatable message before hurling itself into the Sun? There isn't any weapons system that can kill cripping existential distress.
I did say something "genuinely outside our understanding or control", but point taken.
I can say for myself it's largely the presentation of those documentaries, with their eerie music and such, that makes the prospect of meeting alien life seem scary.
The truth is more along the lines of what you describe. We would have absolutely no idea what to expect, and nothing to compare it to in our history. Some people look at the meeting of different cultures during the European conquests, but even that's humans meeting humans on the planet earth.
It's interesting that all our science fiction seems to focus on face to face meetings with alien life. I could have this totally wrong, but it seems more likely that there'd be extremely distant communications, first.
>>4836 >what kind of firearm do you use against the species that leaves an untranslatable message before hurling itself into the Sun?
You probably don't need to as it just hurled itself into a sun
>>4832 >I wish I could find it, but I'm sure I've read somewhere that the FBI encouraged rampant speculation about the JFK assassination and UFOs in the 1960s to draw attention away from Cointelpro -- a true conspiracy involving propaganda and outright murder of U.S. citizens.
My understanding is that the JFK conspiracy was fanned by the KGB and UFOs were a cover for the B2 programme.
>>4833 I used to be the same but then memes happened so I'd probably just laugh at an alien these days.
>>4836 If you apply some logic then you can easily enough work out how they'd behave. Interstellar aliens would have to be curious and pro-social to even get to our level and they wouldn't be some sinister uniform civilisation but lots of divergent personalities with mundane objectives.
I think the fear is explainable in just how they represent a hostile tribe. Hence their almost synonymous identity in our imagination with demons.
>and they wouldn't be some sinister uniform civilisation but lots of divergent personalities with mundane objectives.
I don't know about that. I know it's a very Sci-Fi thing to say, but they could all share a consciousness or be the last surviving community on a planet that worships a cult like figure obsessed with blue planets or anything really. You're probably right that they need to be curious and social, but even then, I don't think it's impossible to end up with some sort of intelligent fungus with legs that just wants to eat every tree they can find.
Fermi's paradox ensures that there are others out there but first the distances could be too big, especially if there is no warp drive and everyone is limited to lightspeed.
Second, the universe is not Sid Meier's Civilization, not everyone spawned at the same time. Human civilization started 20.000 years ago, but we started acting as civilized, technological people only in the last 150 years. There is a good chance that if we met the Aliens they would be as incomprehensible to us as a network engineer with a bionic hand would be incomprehensible to an ancient Egyptian farmer.
>Do you believe in aliens?
Yes. Because of the vastness of the Universe.
>Do you believe we are visited by aliens?
No evidence.
>Have you ever seen or encountered any aliens?
No.
>Does the government know about aliens but cover it up?
No evidence.
>Did aliens visit and influence our ancestors in the past? Are aliens friendly, benign, or threatening?
If we were visited by intelligent life, I think they would harvest the resources of our planet and subjugate us. Much like in the past when humans with superior technology met those who were primitive (see the new world).
I've never really spoken about this to anyone before, I'm not 100% saying it was an alien or anything but I think this is the right place to tell this story.
In 2013 I fucked up a quite important exam and needed to get away for a few days. A mate of mine was going down to Cornwall camping with some hippie friends of his and I agreed to tag along. There was a big permanent Ghegnis Khan style tent at the campsite with a stove in it etc and we basically would just sit up all night in there drinking and chatting or (when it wasn't raining) we would do like a fire outside.
On the last night before we went home we ran out of firewood and so I went over to the next campsite over to borrow some wood. We'd spoken to the people who were staying there quite a bit and knew they wouldn't mind. There were these long holes in the ground between the campsites and it was really dark so I can't really say for sure but Worf was there.
I'd be interested if anyone has any good reading material to recommend on such "meta-/boo/ subjects as you mentioned.
I love reading about this sort of stuff even from a sceptical point of view. Just the history of it all and the real-life behind the scenes stuff we've since learned about, and of course that grain of hopefulness you'll find something genuinely unexplainable.
They exist but the distances between us and them are so great that unless they've cracked warp/hyperspace/inertialess drives we'll probably never encounter them.
And if they do have the means to get here then we'd be insignificant to them unless we just happened to be the 1st alien race they come across. Even then, they may have some means to monitor us without us knowing or choose to leave us alone until we've cracked FTL.
I was once awoken by this low humming sound and bright lights. Decided to investigate and as I went through my kitchen to the back door I saw this midget thing with big eyes and an egg shaped head in front of my freezer. It was holding a bag of petis pois and with long slender fingers from it's other hand I could see it pushing some sort of appendage into the bag of frozen veg. I was shitting myself at this point, suddenly some force froze me solid and I couldn't move. The thing in front of my freezer spun round and looked deep into my eyes with a piercing stare. I was totally shitting myself. Then the thing sent some kind of telepathic message, it spoke without moving it's mouth.
I come in peas, it said.
Anyone seen all this fuss on the conspiracy communities about UAV and various military figures 'admitting' that they're certain these craft are not within the bounds of human capability? I've not really delved into it as I'm not sure if I'll become a nutter, or if this is just the normal noise.
>>5290 This. The problem is that there are unlikely explanations and then there are intergalactic space-laplanders coming for our Earth bennies. That an entire US carrier group can regularly detect mysterious object in the Atlantic is, well, there are stranger things that have happened in wartime.
Obviously there's also a conclusion that the US military has made that it could be craft being tested by the evil Chinese-Russian lizardmen but that's just budget stuff.
I recently read a paper on the possibility of fungal life on Mars, based on photographs from orbiters showing fields of white spheres which wax and wane with the days and season on the planet. It was very interesting, and something I definitely think warrants driving a rover towards to inspect. Since I read it, ResearchGate has been suggesting other papers like it, mostly by the same group of authors, the most recent being an open letter signed by 70 or so academics that strongly believe there is fungal life on Mars.
>>5295 That's certainly interesting and worth a poke - what's the scale on that photo?
I'm unable to make the jump from life on mars -> life all over the place. Far too easy to propose ways for a bit of life to get punted from one planet to another. Life on Mars would be interesting, but doesn't resolve the other (but unimportant, I guess) 'are we alone but out of contact' question.
>>5296 >Far too easy to propose ways for a bit of life to get punted from one planet to another.
Given that if fungal or microbial life can survive the trip from here to there (or t'other way), it can survive the conditions needed to travel interstellar distances too and that would be strong evidence in support of panspermia which frankly would be no less radically amazing to prove than if they turn out to have come about independently. Whichever billionaire dickhead gets there first will have to ship some back for gene-sequencing.
>>5296 The author doesn't provide the scale, which is extremely frustrating. The individual spheres are 3-8 mm in size, going from another figure in that same paper.
The remainder of Rhawn's ResearchGate profile is articles on things like "the quantum physics of God" and other such twaddle, but at least on the Martian front he appears to have surrounded himself with real scientists who can provide hard data. The most recent paper in that project is where I got the "sequential images" - I'd personally say that any process on Mars which has a timescale of a few solar days is worth us investigating, whether it's space mushrooms or something else, given the current zeitgeist around Martian research is around whether or not things actually still happen there.
My only other inkling is that these could be chunks of carbonate matter which are being brought to the surface via granular convection, and polished spherical as a byproduct of that same process. But then the presence of carbonates on Mars would also raise questions about life there, given here on Earth they're largely produced biologically.
In any case, the current rover isn't really well equipped to do any decent measurements on these samples. It has a rudimentary X-ray probe, but it's configured towards doing spectroscopies on iron. I can't understand why they haven't sent a Raman spectrometer to Mars yet, as it would be very easy to design and would provide ample information on the surface minerals, and instant answers on things like "is this a mushroom or a mushroom-shaped rock?"
>>5303 >But then the presence of carbonates on Mars would also raise questions about life there, given here on Earth they're largely produced biologically.
>>5303 Wasn't there a Raman Spectrometer on Beagle II ?
<rummage>
Ah, not quite. Blast it with piss^WGamma. Should be able to spot the difference between win-blown rock, CO2 globs and magic mars mushrooms.
The Mössbauer Spectrometer
This would investigate the mineral composition of rocks by irradiating exposed rock surfaces and soil with g-rays emitted by a isotopic source (cobalt-57), and then measuring the spectrum of the g-rays reflected back. In particular, the nature of iron minerals in the pristine interior and weathered surface of rocks would have been compared to determine the oxidising nature of the present atmosphere.
"Martian Fungus" is all I need to hear to have the plot of a sci-fi horror movie fully mapped out.
The first manned mission to Mars is going to be a disaster. The one we send afterwards to investigate is going to be even worse, it's all so tiresomely predictable, but we'll walk right into it.