Aliens

[Mark Bolton]

Plus, not everyone getting along could be a good thing, as it motivates people to leave and settle new places.

When your orbiting the sun, in a glorified rotating soup can (battle start galactica for a fictional point of reference) there is NO resources or capacities available to allow dissatisfied factions to "leave" or "settle new places". At that point your living in a fixed existence. The mere presence of angst and discontent creates elevated heart rates and blood pressures that consume more resources than the tincan can produce. The rational conclusion to this would be individual groups or pods of individuals would remain contained so that if they "went kooky" they could be isolated, and sedated, or worst case scenario jettisoned, to preserve the remainder.

I agree that to an extent in our current climate not getting along spawns growth and innovation. We still have room to spread out. When we are all orbiting the sun in tin can's things would be far different. Given the scope of how big these cans were you could see a tribunal very quickly deciding if you were an asset or liability to "the can" and if liability was the result, being jettisoned may be expeditious.

[Bob Bouis]

It's not just a tin can, though. It's being bombarded 24/7 with an immense amount of free energy from the sun, and it's accompanied by an army of (friendly) robots and automated factories and the like. It just sits there while they do the work. If it takes a hundred years or a thousand years to build a new habitat, well, what else are you going to do?

[Carlos Alvarez]

When your orbiting the sun, in a glorified rotating soup can (battle start galactica for a fictional point of reference) there is NO resources or capacities available to allow dissatisfied factions to "leave" or "settle new places". At that point your living in a fixed existence. The mere presence of angst and discontent creates elevated heart rates and blood pressures that consume more resources than the tincan can produce. The rational conclusion to this would be individual groups or pods of individuals would remain contained so that if they "went kooky" they could be isolated, and sedated, or worst case scenario jettisoned, to preserve the remainder.

I agree that to an extent in our current climate not getting along spawns growth and innovation. We still have room to spread out. When we are all orbiting the sun in tin can's things would be far different. Given the scope of how big these cans were you could see a tribunal very quickly deciding if you were an asset or liability to "the can" and if liability was the result, being jettisoned may be expeditious.

But you are still working under the premise of today's limitations, issues foibles, and attitudes. We can't predict how humans will behave in that environment. Also, which humans? Do we do exclusionary psychological testing to prevent having problem people there? Or maybe call one ship Australia and send all the psychopaths there? How would humans behave differently if there were no disease and unlimited resources?

[Kevin Beitz]

Do I think they are out there...? Oh yea....

Antikythera mechanism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism

To much proof in ancient history of things found for me not to believe.

Are the avoiding use...? I think so. Why would they want anything to do with

Hostile Humans...

[Mark Bolton]

But you are still working under the premise of today's limitations, issues foibles, and attitudes. We can't predict how humans will behave in that environment. Also, which humans? Do we do exclusionary psychological testing to prevent having problem people there? Or maybe call one ship Australia and send all the psychopaths there? How would humans behave differently if there were no disease and unlimited resources?

This was my point earlier that there would seem to need to be an event, or series of events, that humbled the masses to a point where they FINALLY realized that they all MUST get along and that actually when we all move as a team we get a lot more done. Its a delusional, romantic, notion that it could ever happen. Hence the battlestar glactica reference. The notion of loading the entire population into a confined space and not needing more police than population, and having the resources to deal with and house the malcontents would seem futile.

It would seem your motivation would be to populate the escape vessel with the most benign and diplomatic of individuals (NASA is doing this for the past 30 years, if you have a nutty bone in your body,... your not getting in the space station). Then at that point you would have to monitor "the population" diligently. If any one individual starts going off into left field they will need to either be isolated, or... eliminated.. to preserve resources.

[Carlos Alvarez]

I do have a list of people I'd like to shoot into the sun, and we'll be close...

[Thomas L Carpenter]

It seems to me that life, be it bacteria or otherwise, is very likely. Does it fly around in spaceships and conquer the universe. Who knows, but this is a fun thread.

[Greg Peterson]

Who knows if we are even capable of comprehending the true, full nature of what we call the universe?

I suspect things are far more complex, bigger and stranger than we can even imagine.

[William Adams]

For the difficulties of a closed environment look up the problems which Biosphere 2 had, or consider the frequency with which we send supplies up to, and take trash away from, the I.S.S.

There was a recent book, _Cradle to Grave_ which posited the technologies necessary for the population of a city to exist with no affect on the surrounding area --- China was supposed to build a city following those principles, but don't know that it ever happened.

The Antikythera mechanism is neat, but folks being aware of and able to calculate astronomical phenomenon doesn't indicate contact with aliens. Our ancestors were just as smart as we are, they just didn't have the benefit of the accumulated knowledge we have (standing on the shoulders of giants as Sir Isaac Newton noted), and in a lot of instances such as this, their knowledge was lost (Library of Alexandria and all that).

Some sobering numbers:

- we're currently burning 10 calories of petro-chemical energy to get 1 calorie of food energy to the table
- we're going through 2.5 earths worth of resources by dipping into non-renewable resources
- potassium / phosphorous are the limiting factor for life on earth and China just quit exporting one of them

[Doug McKay]

My crazy theory is that we as a civilization make it another million years, and we figure out the Time/space/inter dimension stuff. The "Aliens" we see are just US from the future coming back to observe their past....

[John K Jordan]

My crazy theory is that we as a civilization make it another million years, and we figure out the Time/space/inter dimension stuff. The "Aliens" we see are just US from the future coming back to observe their past....

You either read, write, or perhaps should write science fiction. Time travel makes for some fascinating conundrums, especially if done well.

JKJ

[Cary Falk]

IMG_8154.jpg

I think I have a better chance of seeing Bigfoot than an Alien.

[Chase Mueller]

IMG_8154.jpg

I think I have a better chance of seeing Bigfoot than an Alien.

I mean, I'm up for a Bigfoot thread

[Nicholas Lawrence]

Completely alone (no other intelligent life anywhere in entire history of the universe), or alone for all practical purposes?

If you take the 50-60 closest stars, that takes you out about 15 light years. So far I don’t think anyone has found anything in those closest stars that looks like it could support life.

The fastest any spacecraft has gone to date is something like 50-60km/s (speed of light is about 300,000 km/s). To get to the nearest star at that speed we would be looking at about 80,000 years. If we upped our speed 100 times we would still be looking at 800 years. Even at 20% of the speed of light it would take 20 years to get to the nearest (probably uninhabitable) star.

The center of the galaxy somebody mentioned is about 24,000 lightyears away. At 20% light speed that is a 120,000 year trip (one way). The nearest galaxy (Andromeda) is 2.5 million light years away (12.5 million years at 20% light speed).

[Chase Mueller]

Really preference for debate on that, I think the biggest argument is between completely alone or not though.

Personally, I think we just don't have the tech yet, so it doesn't seem feasible. To avoid diving into government and corporational conspiracies, I won't go into too much detail, but it was either Edison or Tesla that had some groundbreaking theory of tapping into the "nothingness" that surrounds us, claiming there was a new, infinite energy we could obtain. All the research was destroyed. Interesting/fun thing to read/watch/