Do you believe there are Extraterrestrial beings ?

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I have no doubt there are millions (maybe even billions or heck, even trillions) of other planets with intelligent life on them just based on common sense and numbers. Even arch-skeptic James Randi admitted on a local radio show there is "certainly" life on other planets. As for whether they have visited, I always fall back on my favorite Calvin and Hobbes quote:
"The surest sign intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has not attempted to contact us"

I don't believe they are "incapable" of visiting. Just look how far our technology has advanced in 100 years. Imagine how much it could advance in 100 million years? It would literally blow our minds!

Assuming the existence of life, and intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, they would still be subject to the same physical laws and limitations that we are here. So while it is easy to imagine they have amazing abilities its not so easy to come up with ways that that they could actually do it. So I believe that although there probably are intelligent forms, that many if not most would be stuck like us, in their small patch of universe. They would age and need environments and long trips would be just as unfeasible to them as us. You can say they might have Star Trek-like Warp drives and such, but that is still the unfounded fiction part of Sci-Fi. One can say they might have anything... and they still have to come up with the Dilithium Crystals.

Another impediment would be timing. Things generally have life cycles. Plants, People, Solar Systems, all do, as do civilizations. Humankind's time on earth, relatively speaking has been very short. Anatomically modern people are something like 75,000 years old I think. Our civilization is very young, only a few thousand years. And in the time frame of the universe it is as the briefest flicker. To meet or be visited by ETs we would both have to be in our civilized periods simultaneously.

It might be compared to two people having 1 second of their life picked at random in which to meet. What are the chances they would be the same second?

[quote="Toy_Soldier"]Assuming the existence of life, and intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, they would still be subject to the same physical laws and limitations that we are here.

Perhaps not. That rests on the assumption that all the other universes (many) are subject to the same laws as this universe. Just as conditions on other planets in this universe are different from this one, diversity is far more probable throughout the multiverse than sameness.

And until we figure out precisely what dark matter and dark energy is with certainty, visit other universes ourselves, "all bets are off" about the physical laws, limitations or possibilities in other universes. On the other hand, maybe they are the same. But no-one can prove that; and it is extremely unlikely.

Arthur C. Clarke said "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Gosh... I think the chance of human beings still being around 100 million years from now is extremely remote. Look at the air and water! Look at our wars and the weapons we invent. Look at how most religions want people to remain ignorant and their adherents to remain under the thumb of the religion's leaders.

Plus, there are many animal species that were around, or are still around that HAVE lived for a hundred million years or more, but they never got "intelligent." They didn't come up with WORDS, that they passed on from one generation to the next, generation after generation... a growing vocabulary that eventually explodes into technology. Pterodactyls were around for 160 million years or so. Sharks... horseshoe crabs... they aren't on the www yet, although they have been around for ages and ages.

Last edited by tall-p on 01 Oct 2014, 7:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.

the common element is [relatively] high intelligence leading to technology which amplifies all the negatives as a nasty side effect of amplifying positives. we will kill ourselves with our inadequately thought-out technology. IMHO humanity is not wise or intelligent enough to manage its own affairs for much longer.

Yes... I agree. Nothing makes me think that we will learn to be peaceful and kind and gentle on ALL of the beings we have. Criminey, there is a report out this week that says 50% of all animals have died over the last 40 years. Imagine? And the rain forests, the Aral sea... gone. Poof!

as my late dad woulda said, humanity won't amount to much more than a popcorn fart in the wind.

I do believe, but not in your galaxy.

but maybe in mine

'A popcorn fart in the wind...'

But @B19, I wasn't aware that there were other universes. At least I have only heard that before as pure speculation. But granted, not everything is known and probably much that will never be known, by us.

One other thing that makes me feel we have not been visited by ETs is that they have not formally contacted us, publically. I find it hard to imagine coming all this way, perhaps a once in a lifetime, or many lifetime's journey and not doing so. I really don't buy them being satisfied abducting some moonshine drinker overnight.

'The universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful
waste of space.'

One of my favourite lines from one of my favourite movies!

my fave scene is the vega sequence. that one made me think they were trying to hint that maybe there is a bit of the divine in ET.

Assuming they are evolved millions of years ahead of earth bound Homo Sapiens then even space/time is literally no limit. Inter-dimensional travel could mean they can materialise and dematerialise in our dimension anytime they like.

It is almost certain that there are extraterrestrial places with structures that grow, reproduce, and are functional in their immediate environment.

Given our knowledge about the scale of the known universe, any other assumption about the probability of extraterrestrial life is a symptom of delusional human exceptionalism.

I wonder why in this context the discussion so often gravitates to towards "intelligent" life. As if humans are in any position to universally define a concept like "intelligence" in a way that would be understood by other forms of life in a similar way.

You can skip the rest of this post. Only read if you share my frustration with attempts to apply an anthropocentric definition of intelligence to the entire universe. I offer an alternative definition with no claim of universal applicability ? one that at least seems to be useful for life on this planet.

The dictionary definition of intelligence

The ability to acquire knowledge and to put into operation or practical use

is typically human. It attempts to define a concept without providing any description of context. Compare this to the definition of say a table, which includes an explanation that the flat surface can be used for the purpose of eating, writing, working, or playing games.

The definition of intelligence is comparable to a definition of a table as a flat surface that is attached to one or more legs that extend in a direction that is perpendicular to the surface. No clue about use by humans, and no mention that only primates are capable of making effective use of a table. According to this definition, I could build a table with a surface area of 1cm2 or one with legs that are 5m long, and I would wonder why no one recognises it as a useful table.

The incomplete or sloppy definition of intelligence becomes problematic when it is used to to attempt to explain behaviour of an agent or a system or agents. In this context human researchers (including scientists, who should really know better if they applied the scientific method) tend to make a huge leap of faith/speculation, and interpret "putting into operation" in a way that seems convenient or plausible in the context of their investigation. Furthermore what seems convenient or plausible is strongly influenced by the culture and ideological beliefs of the researcher.

The notion of an agent only makes sense in the context of a system that encompasses the agent and other agents. Biological processes can not be understood without a notion of system. On this planet the atomic units of survival over many generations are genes, and as biologists are discovering, genes flow not only within species but also across species, and the boundary between species is not black and white.

With the standard definition of intelligence above, genes must be considered intelligent, as in the appropriate context they are capable of creating copies of themselves. How then does one quantify intelligence of a gene? By counting the number of copies that have been produced?

If the notion of intelligence is intended to be of any use at the scale of multi-celled life forms and at the scale of ecosystems of living agents, then the dictionary definition is inadequate.

A definition of intelligence that helps to simplify explanations of behaviour in biological systems must at the minimum consider time scales that span multiple generations, so that the survival rates of genes and species can be assessed. A particular behaviour of a system can then be assessed to be intelligent over n generations, and to be unintelligent over m generations.

Current human behaviour can then scientifically be described as intelligent over 1 generation and unintelligent over 2 and more generations. Bacteria behave way more intelligently, they have nothing to worry about.

Since biological ecosystems exist at a multitude of different scales, before intelligence can be measured, it must also be defined in terms of the level of scale to which it is observed. As illustrated above, life is extremely intelligent at the level of bacteria and microscopic life forms. Roughly speaking, intelligence seems to be inversely related to size of the agents that perform a particular behaviour. To date humans seem to be bent on proving this point.

A tentative definition of a resilient biological system:

A biological system is resilient over n generations at a ratio r over a population p, if at all levels of scale, from the smallest scale to the largest scale, r/p agents of the system still have living decedents after n generations.

This notion of resilience is more explicit and more precise than the classical definition of intelligence, and it leaves less room for ideology to creep into the interpretation.

Resilience is a property of a system rather than a property of an individual agent. Armed with a scientifically useful definition of resilience, it becomes possible to redefine intelligence as a property of an agent within a system:

The ability to acquire knowledge and to put it into operation to maintain a resilient system

If this definition were applied consistently in the context of artificial intelligence, then concerns about the effects of artificial intelligence such as http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephen-h ... 74265.html would become obsolete. It is only when competitive economic dogma and simplistic social darwinism are elevated to "intelligence" that the effects of intelligence become threatening to the agents designing "intelligent" systems. According to the classical half-baked definition of intelligence, the number of intelligent systems is of course exploding. It is fairly easy to see which agents currently have an interest in building such indoctrinated "intelligent" systems.

Ok, you convinced me. I did some quick research and have narrowed the search area to locations with the highest density of Dunkin Donuts. I can't think of any other plausible reason for coming to earth. Well... perhaps we should also stake out Pizza places, assuming we have the assets.



This seems especially suspicious. Fleets of extraterrestrial spaceships may have been coming to earth for years, cleverly disguised as cop cars! This alien may have fallen asleep at the controls.

We will of course need a bureaucracy. A big fat one. We can call it Homeworld Security.