I don’t think so, but I’m pretty sure we should build a big wall just in case they try. A big, beautiful wall. With a door in it. Or something like that.
@PlacidPenguin@ponagathos Then to me all that exists is Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, Minnesota, Wyoming, Colorado, and North and South Dakota. Maybe those are the same places as you mentioned and I only know them by a different name.
@JoetatoChip@PlacidPenguin@ponagathos Hmm 6 countries besides the USA, and 48 states. Oh - and some flyover states and countries. Unless, of course, those were movies out of my airplane window. LOL
Actually someone high in NASA to whom I am related to by a cousin’s husband says that if there was any evidence of aliens they NASA would parade that evidence up and down the (Washington) mall because it would be the biggest budget bonanza ever.
@PlacidPenguin Well that guy who was going to launch himself in his home made rocket hasn’t done so yet to prove that theory to the contrary (eg round is fake). Just sayin’. And, if the earth is flat, are there giant gutters and a big pump to put all that water, boats and live things that fall off the edge, back into the ocean?
/image sailing off the edge of the earth
@Kidsandliz@PlacidPenguin, Be it known to all in The Realm, I have been vindicated. Indisputable evidence, as referenced by one @narfcake and provided by the interwebs may be viewed above.
Just as we all know the earth is flat, the moon landing was faked, we can count on everything on the interwebs as fact.
I could draw a map of fictional places and call it real, or take plastic houses and houses and make them look like a town.
The Chronicles of Narnia and all 6 books of LotR (excluding The Hobbit) are considered works of fiction, yet they have maps. Does that mean Narnia and Middle Earth are real?
@narfcake@PlacidPenguin@ruouttaurmind Of course the moon landing was faked. I have it on good authority of when my daughter had been in the USA about 6 months that there isn’t a ladder tall enough to reach the moon. I mean seriously. That’s certainly true about ladders so it must follow that it’s true about the moon. Right?
On a slightly different note the astronaut home videos of the moon landing DVD is wonderful. The DVD is called “For all mankind”. Bought it to try to show that the moon landing was real and how they got there to my kid (at the time her pronouncement was “that’s just hollywood” which came from my attempt to get her to understand that just because real people are in it - thus a video vs cartoon (and didn’t even get into the fact that real facts can be presented in cartoon format) that doesn’t mean the video story is true.
Interstellar travel is pretty much impossible, let alone intergalactic. If we ever make contact with another species from another planet, it will be by some kind of radio wave or frequency. We won’t be visiting them or vice versa.
@Fuzzalini Yeah, I was going to say, "Don’t you mean interstellar? Although, properly dedicated, we could spread to the closest star systems within a few centuries, then across the galaxy within a couple of Million years.
@Fuzzalini - I’m not quite sure I understand you here - do you mean that the length of time an intergalactic/stellar voyage would take would be too long for the patience of intelligent lifeforms? You’re not saying the Voyager space program is a hoax, eh? Because as this article points out, all a human probe has to do is crash on an alien planet, and voila - our bacteria are the alien invaders:
Nah. Who would go to all the effort to travel intergalactically, happen to detect us, decide to divert their course to visit Earth, and then use their supremely powerful stealth technology to poke around undetected. It’s a lot easier to believe that didn’t happen.
Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence, but absence of evidence is a good reason to not believe in something in the first place.
@InnocuousFarmer - I am shall we say skeptical about alien visitation. But to phrase your question another way, if WE detected what we thought was a habitable planet, why would WE want to investigate it, using technology that would not impact the local ecosystem?
@aetris The problem is in your very heavily loaded premise, materialized out of nowhere. It amounts to “Assume there are aliens who just want to check out other conscious beings but also don’t want to let the other beings know they exist and also have several pieces of impossibly advanced technology that conflict with all of physics as we understand it and also happen to have noticed Earth.”
Sure, at that point, bust out the Probulator 3000. Why not.
@InnocuousFarmer - What’s the “heavily loaded premise”, that WE conduct space exploration? All you really have to materialize out of nowhere is that intelligent aliens have existed, and it’s a pretty basic progression from technological development to space exploration. The only real question is whether or not it’s possible to develop probes capable of surviving an interstellar voyage. We already have automated systems capable of responding to climactic conditions. I don’t see it as much of a step to a deep space probe that investigates planets with atmospheres. In fact I’d be VERY surprised if we weren’t doing that ourselves in the next 100 years!
@aetris I don’t think we’re ever going to conduct space exploration ourselves. Maybe we send out the odd probe that manages to leave the solar system. Maybe some day we even send out some absurdly powerful AI on some absurdly powerful spaceship in some direction, with instructions to try to return in however many centuries, but, even then, that’s a far cry from actually finding a planet that is not only habitable but has animals on it, and evading detection while interacting with those animals. I’d be stunned if we even aspire to that 100 years from now.
@InnocuousFarmer - I don’t think humans will be travelling across space in suspended animation or via wormhole or whatever in 100 years, but I’m sure we’ll have an increasingly sophisticated picture of distant solar systems, and I don’t think it’s going out on a limb to predict that we’ll send probes to get more information, atmospheres or not. It may be optimistic to think we’ll be able to remotely determine the possible habitability of distant planets within that time frame; I think we will, but what do I know? I feel pretty confident that we will eventually, and will want to investigate.
Evading detection while researching wildlife is something we already do on THIS planet, and I would think if we ever were in a position to research life on another planet we’d be even more careful to do so, and take even more extreme measures to avoid cross-contamination. None of that seems to me to require “impossibly advanced technology that conflict with all of physics as we understand it.”
Obviously there’s a big gap between sending robot probes to report on atmospheric conditions from space, and making surreptitious landfalls to spy on advanced civilizations. What can I say, I think it all falls within the realm of possibility!
@aetris Getting sizable chunks of mass up to relativistic speeds, and then slowing them back down, and then speeding them up, and then slowing them down again – that’s the tricky part that I think isn’t going to happen / didn’t happen.
That aside, I was talking about aliens visiting Earth, as ghostlike researchers. For that to be happening, they’d have had to detect us initially. We’ve only been emitting interesting radiation for, what, a couple centuries? So you’d have to figure there are highly advanced aliens within a couple hundred lightyears of us, who evolved faster than us, who have beaten relativity somehow, travel-wise, and just recently detected us and sent something out in our direction…
But maybe they’re already practically Star Trek, themselves, and sent out probes blanketing the galaxy millennia ahead of time. You’d think there’d be some sign of that. Then again, we’ve established that they’ve got awesome stealth powers. Now we’re only left with the original problem of having no reason to expect them to exist in the first place.
@InnocuousFarmer - I think that’s a very heavily loaded premise, materialized out of nowhere. -)
Honestly I’m having a hard time with all this - you keep introducing this off the wall stuff that’s completely unrelated to anything I’m talking about. The Voyager probes don’t move at relativistic speeds - where did that come from?
In 2014 NASA announced the discovery of 715 exoplanets orbiting 305 stars, identified by the Kepler Space Telescope. We can already determine different kinds of star-systems. So, taking a very conservative step 15 minutes into the future, maybe someone identifies a Sun-type star with planets at an Earth-type distance, and shoots off a probe. Yes, it will take a long LOOOOONG time to get there, and its signals will take a long LOOONG time to come back.
So, a more advanced Voyager-style exploratory probe is on its way. It’s been equipped with a landing module to drop a rover on the planet and scope around a little. In order to get a real picture of the behaviour of the local fauna, the rover gets disguised.
Now we’re 15 minutes into the future, but I don’t think it a huge big deal to give the probe AND the module AND the rover with some advanced AI, maybe 3D printing capability to disguise itself more precisely.
I could go on and on, but I’m getting WAY too involved with this. The point is, none of this really demands any imagination. It’s discounting it that requires imagination, as far as I can tell.
@aetris Yeah, I’m pretty much done, too. Maybe you’re talking more about about us sending Voyager N some ways out beyond our solar system, while I’m talking more about the poll question.
@InnocuousFarmer - My point is, that, although I don’t believe there’s any real evidence for it, it’s not implausible that there could be a spacefaring alien civilization that would send probes to investigate other planets - because that’s exactly what WE do!
@aetris@InnocuousFarmer I’m gonna be honest here, it’s harder to not interfere than you’d think. So many times, there is the temptation to do something, to alter some small variable and subtly steer a civilization towards a brighter future, but doing so would make the entire study lose its validity, in which case the interference might as well have been there from the start.
@ELUNO Well if that is the case, and they appear to be dangerous, we can give the lot of them tickets to a clogging dance and tell them they are invited up on the stage. Or to a campfire where people know how to cook spiders. Or introduce them to lizards and frogs. No problem.
Sure, it’s a big universe why not? I just hope we get space travel before Supreme Commander Zorg from Targon Prime comes and enslaves us… or something like that.
All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint…
I think there’s massive evidence that meh.com is entirely run by aliens, so yes - they have arrived here. Visited? How long a time constitutes a “visit” and at what point do visitors become “residents”? Or is the mehship only here on a prolonged visit, and we will wake up some midnight to find that it has vanished, or been shot down by a stray Tesla Roadster launched by SpaceX?
@rockblossom Not only that in their new prison headquarters, they plan to have fake ceiling lights that resemble the sky. I wonder if that place is really a hidden rocket launching site. Probably each time we click on a meh button they suck a bit more of our free will out of us in a cruel marketing experiment so that they can then have mind control over us and get rich and so then be able to get enough fuel to go back to whence they came…
My alien theory is that it’s likely there’s life elsewhere and if they’re sufficiently advanced to travel around in space they would have the ability to see all the radio and tv we blast out in every direction and decided they really ought to avoid earth. Very likely that earth is the butt of a running joke among various aliens.
“Mr. President, the Alien Overlords have landed, and crashed a family reunion in South Louisiana. Initial reports indicate that The Conquerors of Ten Thousand Worlds made, and I quote “A damn fine jambalaya!””
If there are aliens (there probably are) and if they visit us (they probably won’t), I hope they don’t take all our dogs. Dogs are the best thing we have on Earth, and without dogs, we’d be a super sad bunch of critters.
Sometimes I think that’s the only explanation…
I don’t think so, but I’m pretty sure we should build a big wall just in case they try. A big, beautiful wall. With a door in it. Or something like that.
No. I have not met any aliens, time travelers, vampires, werewolves, witches, zombies or North Koreans, therefore, none of them exist.
@ponagathos
By extension, the only places which exist are Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Canada, and Rhode Island.
I’ve never been anywhere else, so I have no evidence that there is more to the world than the I gave.
All I have is people who claim to be from places other than what I mentioned, and they have no way of convincing me that they are not liars.
@PlacidPenguin from a deeply philosophical perspective, for that comment, you get a big star.
@PlacidPenguin @ponagathos Then to me all that exists is Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, Minnesota, Wyoming, Colorado, and North and South Dakota. Maybe those are the same places as you mentioned and I only know them by a different name.
@JoetatoChip @PlacidPenguin @ponagathos Hmm 6 countries besides the USA, and 48 states. Oh - and some flyover states and countries. Unless, of course, those were movies out of my airplane window. LOL
Actually someone high in NASA to whom I am related to by a cousin’s husband says that if there was any evidence of aliens they NASA would parade that evidence up and down the (Washington) mall because it would be the biggest budget bonanza ever.
@PlacidPenguin
Herein lies the fatal flaw in your theory: How can there be a New York unless somewhere there is an Old York? New Jersey without Old Jersey?
And by extension, Connecticut, Canada and Rhode Island couldn’t possibly exist without Disconnecticut, Bottleada, and Rhode Peninsula.
Pennsylvania without Eraservania? Washington without Dryington? Utah but no Metah? Missouri without Hitsouri? I think not!
And Texas without… well, I think this explains where the aliens landed, but that’s a altogether different theory.
@ruouttaurmind
If I called a town New Fleminburgerville, does that mean that there’s a place called Fleminburgerville?
@ruouttaurmind
/image New Jersey
/image Old Jersey
/image New York
/image Old York
/image New New York
@Kidsandliz
And I suppose you also believe that the Earth is (mostly) round.
@PlacidPenguin Well that guy who was going to launch himself in his home made rocket hasn’t done so yet to prove that theory to the contrary (eg round is fake). Just sayin’. And, if the earth is flat, are there giant gutters and a big pump to put all that water, boats and live things that fall off the edge, back into the ocean?
/image sailing off the edge of the earth
@Kidsandliz @PlacidPenguin, Be it known to all in The Realm, I have been vindicated. Indisputable evidence, as referenced by one @narfcake and provided by the interwebs may be viewed above.
Just as we all know the earth is flat, the moon landing was faked, we can count on everything on the interwebs as fact.
/giphy winning!
@Kidsandliz @narfcake @ruouttaurmind
I could draw a map of fictional places and call it real, or take plastic houses and houses and make them look like a town.
The Chronicles of Narnia and all 6 books of LotR (excluding The Hobbit) are considered works of fiction, yet they have maps. Does that mean Narnia and Middle Earth are real?
@Kidsandliz Let me consult the interwebs…
Yes. Here’s a map of Middle earth located on the interwebs, so this is conclusive evidence that Middle Earth is, indeed, real.
Applying this test to Narnia, we learn it is also real:
@ruouttaurmind
Take me there then.
@PlacidPenguin Unfortunately my Garmin only covers the continental US, so we’ll have to stop at a gas station to ask directions.
@narfcake @PlacidPenguin @ruouttaurmind Of course the moon landing was faked. I have it on good authority of when my daughter had been in the USA about 6 months that there isn’t a ladder tall enough to reach the moon. I mean seriously. That’s certainly true about ladders so it must follow that it’s true about the moon. Right?
On a slightly different note the astronaut home videos of the moon landing DVD is wonderful. The DVD is called “For all mankind”. Bought it to try to show that the moon landing was real and how they got there to my kid (at the time her pronouncement was “that’s just hollywood” which came from my attempt to get her to understand that just because real people are in it - thus a video vs cartoon (and didn’t even get into the fact that real facts can be presented in cartoon format) that doesn’t mean the video story is true.
@PlacidPenguin According to the shirt.woot rejectionator, the USA isn’t real.
https://shirt.woot.com/derby/entry/57446/not-in-kansas-anymore
@Kidsandliz “Kid logic” is always such a glorious thing! Some of the stuff they come up with is just pure awesomeness.
Narnia, Italy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narni
@narfcake
Wrong Narnia.
Still waiting for evidence of a place called Fleminburgerville.
@PlacidPenguin You don’t believe I live in Oz? So disappointed.
@Barney
Based on the first book in the the land of Oz series, Oz is merely a state of mind.
Alternatively;
Do I believe that you believe that you live in Oz? I believe so.
@PlacidPenguin
@ruouttaurmind That is so true.
@PlacidPenguin
Big Liar here.
/image Texas map 3
@Kidsandliz @PlacidPenguin re:flat earth - just ask the clerks of the crimson permanent assurance
This is the internet, reasonableness is not even remotely required.
/giphy Hi!
There’s no option for “No, because we aren’t yet slaves to our alien overlords.”
@meshneiarin Disagree. Most people refer to them, though, as “fur babies.”
/image Zim
/image Gir
@narfcake
@narfcake @PlacidPenguin
If I were to happen to have a bright enough flashlight for them to see it, I’m certain they would come right on over to visit.
/giphy Brak
Had beings with the ability to visit this planet actually done so, there is no way they’d ever let us forget.
Interstellar travel is pretty much impossible, let alone intergalactic. If we ever make contact with another species from another planet, it will be by some kind of radio wave or frequency. We won’t be visiting them or vice versa.
@Fuzzalini Yeah, I was going to say, "Don’t you mean interstellar? Although, properly dedicated, we could spread to the closest star systems within a few centuries, then across the galaxy within a couple of Million years.
@Fuzzalini - I’m not quite sure I understand you here - do you mean that the length of time an intergalactic/stellar voyage would take would be too long for the patience of intelligent lifeforms? You’re not saying the Voyager space program is a hoax, eh? Because as this article points out, all a human probe has to do is crash on an alien planet, and voila - our bacteria are the alien invaders:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/life-on-mars-78138144/
WE are the aliens. Our microscopic ancestors just happen to run into this place and we’ve been here ever since.
@Tin_Foil So what you’re saying is… Your people are descended from limbless space slugs.
/giphy spore
I want to believe 🛸
@woodhouse
Has anyone watch the show on his Discovery or the History Channel called Ancient aliens? SOOO DUMB!
@ragingredd
@ragingredd
Nah. Who would go to all the effort to travel intergalactically, happen to detect us, decide to divert their course to visit Earth, and then use their supremely powerful stealth technology to poke around undetected. It’s a lot easier to believe that didn’t happen.
Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence, but absence of evidence is a good reason to not believe in something in the first place.
@InnocuousFarmer - I am shall we say skeptical about alien visitation. But to phrase your question another way, if WE detected what we thought was a habitable planet, why would WE want to investigate it, using technology that would not impact the local ecosystem?
@aetris The problem is in your very heavily loaded premise, materialized out of nowhere. It amounts to “Assume there are aliens who just want to check out other conscious beings but also don’t want to let the other beings know they exist and also have several pieces of impossibly advanced technology that conflict with all of physics as we understand it and also happen to have noticed Earth.”
Sure, at that point, bust out the Probulator 3000. Why not.
@InnocuousFarmer - What’s the “heavily loaded premise”, that WE conduct space exploration? All you really have to materialize out of nowhere is that intelligent aliens have existed, and it’s a pretty basic progression from technological development to space exploration. The only real question is whether or not it’s possible to develop probes capable of surviving an interstellar voyage. We already have automated systems capable of responding to climactic conditions. I don’t see it as much of a step to a deep space probe that investigates planets with atmospheres. In fact I’d be VERY surprised if we weren’t doing that ourselves in the next 100 years!
@aetris I don’t think we’re ever going to conduct space exploration ourselves. Maybe we send out the odd probe that manages to leave the solar system. Maybe some day we even send out some absurdly powerful AI on some absurdly powerful spaceship in some direction, with instructions to try to return in however many centuries, but, even then, that’s a far cry from actually finding a planet that is not only habitable but has animals on it, and evading detection while interacting with those animals. I’d be stunned if we even aspire to that 100 years from now.
@InnocuousFarmer - I don’t think humans will be travelling across space in suspended animation or via wormhole or whatever in 100 years, but I’m sure we’ll have an increasingly sophisticated picture of distant solar systems, and I don’t think it’s going out on a limb to predict that we’ll send probes to get more information, atmospheres or not. It may be optimistic to think we’ll be able to remotely determine the possible habitability of distant planets within that time frame; I think we will, but what do I know? I feel pretty confident that we will eventually, and will want to investigate.
Evading detection while researching wildlife is something we already do on THIS planet, and I would think if we ever were in a position to research life on another planet we’d be even more careful to do so, and take even more extreme measures to avoid cross-contamination. None of that seems to me to require “impossibly advanced technology that conflict with all of physics as we understand it.”
Obviously there’s a big gap between sending robot probes to report on atmospheric conditions from space, and making surreptitious landfalls to spy on advanced civilizations. What can I say, I think it all falls within the realm of possibility!
@aetris Getting sizable chunks of mass up to relativistic speeds, and then slowing them back down, and then speeding them up, and then slowing them down again – that’s the tricky part that I think isn’t going to happen / didn’t happen.
That aside, I was talking about aliens visiting Earth, as ghostlike researchers. For that to be happening, they’d have had to detect us initially. We’ve only been emitting interesting radiation for, what, a couple centuries? So you’d have to figure there are highly advanced aliens within a couple hundred lightyears of us, who evolved faster than us, who have beaten relativity somehow, travel-wise, and just recently detected us and sent something out in our direction…
But maybe they’re already practically Star Trek, themselves, and sent out probes blanketing the galaxy millennia ahead of time. You’d think there’d be some sign of that. Then again, we’ve established that they’ve got awesome stealth powers. Now we’re only left with the original problem of having no reason to expect them to exist in the first place.
@InnocuousFarmer - I think that’s a very heavily loaded premise, materialized out of nowhere.
-)
Honestly I’m having a hard time with all this - you keep introducing this off the wall stuff that’s completely unrelated to anything I’m talking about. The Voyager probes don’t move at relativistic speeds - where did that come from?
In 2014 NASA announced the discovery of 715 exoplanets orbiting 305 stars, identified by the Kepler Space Telescope. We can already determine different kinds of star-systems. So, taking a very conservative step 15 minutes into the future, maybe someone identifies a Sun-type star with planets at an Earth-type distance, and shoots off a probe. Yes, it will take a long LOOOOONG time to get there, and its signals will take a long LOOONG time to come back.
So, a more advanced Voyager-style exploratory probe is on its way. It’s been equipped with a landing module to drop a rover on the planet and scope around a little. In order to get a real picture of the behaviour of the local fauna, the rover gets disguised.
Now we’re 15 minutes into the future, but I don’t think it a huge big deal to give the probe AND the module AND the rover with some advanced AI, maybe 3D printing capability to disguise itself more precisely.
I could go on and on, but I’m getting WAY too involved with this. The point is, none of this really demands any imagination. It’s discounting it that requires imagination, as far as I can tell.
@aetris Yeah, I’m pretty much done, too. Maybe you’re talking more about about us sending Voyager N some ways out beyond our solar system, while I’m talking more about the poll question.
@InnocuousFarmer - My point is, that, although I don’t believe there’s any real evidence for it, it’s not implausible that there could be a spacefaring alien civilization that would send probes to investigate other planets - because that’s exactly what WE do!
@aetris @InnocuousFarmer I’m gonna be honest here, it’s harder to not interfere than you’d think. So many times, there is the temptation to do something, to alter some small variable and subtly steer a civilization towards a brighter future, but doing so would make the entire study lose its validity, in which case the interference might as well have been there from the start.
As nasty as the flu bug is this year, I can’t help but think that we are some teenage alien’s high school science experiment.
What if… Spiders are aliens???
@ELUNO Well if that is the case, and they appear to be dangerous, we can give the lot of them tickets to a clogging dance and tell them they are invited up on the stage. Or to a campfire where people know how to cook spiders. Or introduce them to lizards and frogs. No problem.
@Kidsandliz Noooooooooo
Sure, it’s a big universe why not? I just hope we get space travel before Supreme Commander Zorg from Targon Prime comes and enslaves us… or something like that.
@Targaryen everyone knows it’s lrrr of omicron persei 8
@aetris So long and thanks for all the fish!
KuoH
@Targaryen @unksol is ndnd with him this time?
No
Only the flat side.
I think there’s massive evidence that meh.com is entirely run by aliens, so yes - they have arrived here. Visited? How long a time constitutes a “visit” and at what point do visitors become “residents”? Or is the mehship only here on a prolonged visit, and we will wake up some midnight to find that it has vanished, or been shot down by a stray Tesla Roadster launched by SpaceX?
@rockblossom Not only that in their new
prisonheadquarters, they plan to have fake ceiling lights that resemble the sky. I wonder if that place is really a hidden rocket launching site. Probably each time we click on a meh button they suck a bit more of our free will out of us in a cruel marketing experiment so that they can then have mind control over us and get rich and so then be able to get enough fuel to go back to whence they came…My alien theory is that it’s likely there’s life elsewhere and if they’re sufficiently advanced to travel around in space they would have the ability to see all the radio and tv we blast out in every direction and decided they really ought to avoid earth. Very likely that earth is the butt of a running joke among various aliens.
“Mr. President, the Alien Overlords have landed, and crashed a family reunion in South Louisiana. Initial reports indicate that The Conquerors of Ten Thousand Worlds made, and I quote “A damn fine jambalaya!””
@ThomasF
Can’t see this on mobile.
That’s why Trump has such a hardon for a wall to keep the aliens out.
If there are aliens (there probably are) and if they visit us (they probably won’t), I hope they don’t take all our dogs. Dogs are the best thing we have on Earth, and without dogs, we’d be a super sad bunch of critters.