There you go. That's a pretty good reason to avoid communication with us (we're dangerous savages to them). I suppose we might still be interesting to them to study primitive civilizations, but at a safe distance or in disguise posing as one of us in our midst...

Some of my best friends are human.

darn

Are you sure?

They probably considered visiting Earth, sent a probe, looked at the data and said...Nahhhhh!

Oh yes, we're so important those aliens would have definitely sought us out! lol

First of all, this is a very arrogant assumption that we're so special that somebody would make a special effort just to find us. For all we know, we're one of trillions of planets of low level civilizations.

Secondly, they're already here!, as thousands of reports have already suggested. But we're nothing more than biological specimens to them!

I'd like to know when these so called scientists will get out of the middle ages assuming we're so important in the vast universe.........................

Odds are that we are utterly alone. Sure there are millions of stars and potential planets in this galaxy, but half of them would never have developed life because of the radiation at the center of our galaxy. The best bet is out here on the edges, but when you consider the combination of enviroment and the right mutations happening in just the right sequence to develop intelligent life.... Well, it's more likely that we are alone.

Two Aliens in a spaceship orbiting earth:

First Alien: This species has evolved to the point they have created nuclear weapons.

Second Alien: Is this an emerging intelligence?

First Alien: Obviously not. They have the weapons pointed at themselves.

@ hs321

nicely stated

there are many reasons they haven't shone up yet that have not be stated.....

1 they my be so full of RELIGIOUS crap that they wont except the data proving WE are here (it happens all the time)

2 they spend all there time fighting them selves

3 the gravity well of there planet is so high as to make space flight impractical.

4 and this is my favorite ...republicans rule there planet so nothing they do will make any sens to us.

I am glad the author brought up several points.

1) There is nothing special here ( water, gold, all other minerals are found in more abundance in other space bodies )

2) Maybe until we have colonized another planet and explored space a little more we should keep our mouths shut. Why draw attention to ourselves if we have no way of defending the human race. Quit announcing to the universe that we are here waiting--- with no real weapons.

3) We are rather ridiculous creatures ( killing our own, poluting the only planet we currently have, abusing our children------- not sure if we would even make a very good slave race)

I can hear the alien mom's now. "Dont touch those humans. You dont know where they've been." :)

@kallie

on point 2 "Why draw attention to ourselves if we have no way of defending the human race"

sens it is impractical to harvest earth for any thing, we will not have to defend it .and more is to be gained by studying biology from a different planet than the risk it would ensue. it would probobly be advantages for them as well.

you can't just take a primitive civilization and interject it advanced technology,it doesn't work.We might finds signs of them,as our detection equipment gets better and better.In a few hundred years they may at some point, say stay away,if they find us too close for comfort.They may show up if the earth is in need of help,serious help,no one really knows.

This story is very interesting to say the least, I have to ask myself one question is E.T. out there hummm??
When I look at the tremendous vastness of our galaxy an universe, I would be very arrogant to say that life is only on this little planet we call home, so I have to say life is out there in some form or fashion, but it maybe life that we would not understand, even if it were staring us right in the face.
Another question I have to ask (if there is life out there), would they be interested in us??
One thing that comes to my mind is I remember when I was in high school, in science class, looking through a microscope at some bugs on a leaf, I remember how interesting they were and how fascinated I was looking at them, but I could not talk to them or relate to their environment, also they had no clue I was observing them, or did they? or would they even care.
These are very good questions that need to be answered, the only problem is we have not found life anywhere else to observe in the universe, but on our small planet, so all we have to learn from at the moment is how we relate to one another, and how we relate to other life forms on our planet.

Have a good day Tom And Lyn

The people criticizing humanity for warring with itself fail to realize that this is a basic principle of life. Trees compete with each other for food, water, and light. Ants attack each others' colonies to secure the food potential of the area. Lions even kill the cubs of other lions to ensure their seed propagates the next generation.

Comparatively, humans are vastly advanced and civilized simply because we can trade with each other as well as war with each other. Add that multiple cultures (and 'civilizations') can co-exist in a single nation (such as the US) without that nation tearing itself apart and we are a shining jewel of civility on Earth, even as we tear at each other with, compared to our true destructive capability, remarkable restraint.

As to the original article, differnet makes a good point. Add to that the fact that most of the outer star systems are too distant from one another to be high in complex atoms (past helium), and that many stars pass through radiation-rich portions of the galaxy on a regular basis, and the number of star systems we're likely to find life on out there dwindle to a handful of regions. Add to THAT the fact that we don't even know how LIFE ITSELF started on Earth, much less what drove it to human sapience, or how probable either is to recur somewhere else, and the claims of this study are laughably assumptive. E.T. may exist on planets on the other side of the galaxy and barely be older in their civilizations than we are. E.T. may be billions of years old, but if it's gone through a cycle of advance, colonize, destroy homeworld, advance colonies, rinse, repeat, they could have stayed in a region of a few hundred light years for eons, assuming they find colonize-able planets. And if they don't? That alone may be enough to kill the dreams of a galactic empire. Forget the impractical realities of taking 500 years to travel from one colony to another.

ooby dooby!

Right out of Star Trek: First Contact :P

Slugbait,

Thanks finally for an intelligent statement. Why do these so-called scientists assume we're so special in the vast universe???

I think this report should had at least mentioned something about those who "claim" to have been abducted by Aliens. Instead, in typical Skeptical Fashion, this report ignores it.

The Author does know its okay to talk about popular topics even though there is no scientific data to back them up right?

Typical Skeptics.......

Newt, if you really feel that way why don't you try raising the standards to which you live instead of spewing venom on others? Maybe you're the reason they don't want to come here.

East coast,

What do you mean?? You mean my avatar??? Newt Blingrich is the typical ugly human. Awareness of his kind needs to be heightened! HE IS the reason we will be ignored by higher civilizations.... Just statin the facts.....

Look at the mess we have made of this planet! We are going to be alone at least until we prove that we are going to make the Darwinian cut. We will be given the chance for self extinction before anyone would even think of letting us know they are out there. We will not be enabled or encouraged to spread our cancer through the stars. When we have proven we are actually intelligent and can manage to survive beyond the warlike and selfish state we are now in, maybe we will find other intelligent life. They don't want to have to eliminate us because we have become a danger by knowing they are there and wanting to steal their technology. They would likely abhor violence to the point that we would be able to destroy them without them lifting a finger to stop us.

Newt, those in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. But if you want to continue on with your ignorance, so be it. In the end you'll be on the losing side of things.

East coast,

I don't think so. With ideas like that batty Moon Base from Teapublicans like Blingrich, Obama is assured victory and will take a more reasoned approach to these things with an emphasis on the proper things like education and protecting the environment. Our kids come first!!

Then maybe, just maybe, we may be worthy of traveling to higher civilizations or attempting communication with them if they are here or within reach...

Well, if life is really, really rare, then ET would likely be interested in our planet. Even if they aren't interested in humans, surely they'd be interested in lemurs or dogs or.... sump'n.

This study is little more than speculation.

'

I was thinking it's D. But then again, they definitely would have noticed the organic nature of this planet a looong time ago. So maybe a little bit of C too.

"There's a possibility that all nearby civilizations are near or below our own technological level"

That's almost incomprehensible. Eartlings have got to be the lowest form of "intelligent" life in the universe (I use the word "intelligent" loosely). Why would "they" ever want to visit the "shoot-first-ask-quesions-later", radioactive planet Earth? "They" aren't stupid!

Is it really so hard to beleive we're not alone in the universe? It is infinite. Which means there very well could be millions or billions or infinite number of planets out there with life on them. Who's to say life started on every one of those planets at the same time it started on earth? We've really only gotten to the point recently that we can find planets in other galaxies that may sustain life as we know it on earth. Is it impossible to immagine a planet out there somewhere, reached the level of technology we are at today, a million years ago? And with that advanced technology, they are still too far away to find us? Sure, why not?

whitestar..."how can these mathemeticians figure out how long that takes?"

If one assumes the maximum velocity a space craft could attain is the speed light, then you can easily figure out how long it would take to travel a given distance.

If one assumes the maximum velocity a space craft could attain is the speed light, then you can easily figure out how long it would take to travel a given distance

True. What I meant, though, was how long it takes for a civilization to develop the capability of building interstellar spacecraft. We're not there yet.

As for lokay and carlof - I did say 'nearby' - that's very definitely not infinite. There's a distinct possibility that anyone who IS technologically developed enough to travel is far enough away that we're not worth the trip. There is no logical reason to assume that an advanced civilization developed within easy striking distance of Earth.

lol. And why couldn't they have begun 'out this way' too? sheesh.

We're probably on the bad side of the tracks.

Alan, systems closer to the core or galactic arms see much higher levels of cosmic radiation. The most likely probability for life under such conditions is a moon orbiting a gas giant (with the gas giant's MUCH more powerful magnetic field shielding the moon from such radiation), but we don't even know if life is possible under such circumstances. Photosynthetic life would be far more problematic under such circumstances, since a sizable portion of the moon's orbit would be spent in the gas giant's shadow (how much greenery do you see in the south pole in winter?), which means life would likely have to rely on geothermal energy. That requires a particular kind of orbit which is able to regularly compress the moon enough to generate that energy while also not tearing it to shreds with the gravitational shear. Lastly, that kind of system is likely to produce an ice crust covering the seas of the moon, with only the bottoms of the seas liquid. We have no idea if life is even possible under those conditions, much less what kind of life and civilization would develop there.

Leave it to a moron to paste a political bumper sticker on whatever it can be stuck on.

Leave it to a moron to paste a political bumper sticker on whatever it can be stuck on.

Leave it to another moron to ignore the message and see it's truth.

Leave it to 80% of the people posting on the internet to know a hell of a lot less than they think they do.

'like'!

Maybe, maybe not. We'll never be around long enough to find out anyway.

There is definitely intelligent life "out there". Just not here...

Who are you mad at, Larue? Your logic is akin to saying 'But the Sahara Desert is so vast, it's unthinkable that there's not a Taco Bell in it somewhere!"

You can't decide that if there's a 1% chance that intelligent life would arise on a planet, that after scanning 100 candidate planets you would have found life. Probability doesn't work that way.

Who's to say that intelligent life outside of earth has to breath air or drink water or be in a certain temerature range? Who says intelligent life outside earth has to follow the same theories that Einstein wrote?

ERRR jimhawkIII just for your info there is a taco bell in the Sahara. but in premise I do agree. there not to near us given the probability of number of habitual earth like planets.

"They'll have to intercede, before we hurt ourselves"

Like they'd care.

I think the technical term is "disinfect."

The distances are huge, but consider our advances in just the last 100 years, the majority of houses didn't even have electricity until a century ago, the light bulb was a fairly recent invention, and farming was up to half the local economy.

I think that we are in a crucial point where our greed and ability to 'evolve' on a societal level is being tested... If (and its a huge if) we are able to overcome greed and waste and pool our resources on science and research I believe we could probably handle all of the challenges within another 100 to 200 years..

Nanobots and Stem cell like technology could enable us to age far slower and live far stronger and healthier the entire time, this is maybe 50 years away.

Research into ways to travel differently. Chemical propulsion is pretty crude and has taken us about as far as it can go. At first there may be no other way then to build our ships huge and self sustaining and plan on 100 years to get somewhere.

Bionics and mechanical augmentation, its probably not very far off before we will all have increased vision and senses, translators that will enable all of humankind to speak the same language and communicate in a whole new level that we have never before seen. This is probably only 20 years off.

The real thing holding us down is our stupid obsession with greed and wasting our collective energy and resources pissing in the wind. The history of man so far is pretty short, and there are some resources like oil and nuclear products that simply don't get renewed on a time scale we can afford to wait around for. We gotta stop pissing in the wind and put all of our brainpower and resources to work in areas that will matter, not on some guy who didn't do a damn thing in his entire life besides shuffle some digital 1's and 0's and made a billion dollars.

my biggest question is, if these beings are organically based, how do they feed themselves across these huge distances? manage waste? 500 years of food and wast for organics is a lot, especially if its a whole civilization. If its a non-organic civilization, i guess they could power down and just have a few drones to the maintenance while they 'slept.'

even if a civilization is advanced beyond our own a few million years, the logistics of deep space travel are nearly insurmountable. If we want to get out of our own solar system then we need something like FTL travel or something cool like Mass Relays from Mass Effect.

if these beings are organically based, how do they feed themselves across these huge distances? manage waste? 500 years of food and wast for organics is a lot, especially if its a whole civilization.

They probably look at ecosystems, instead of assuming they are the entire ecosystem like we do. There are all kinds of natural ways to break waste down or convert it to usable things, but we tend to ignore them and destroy the ability of nature and those other creatures to do their job. Most likely the only way we will travel anywhere in the next century would be to build a very large ship that had a fully functioning ecosystem on it, meaning most likely several acres with ways to recycle waste, grow new food, and break down the byproducts without poisoning ourselves or the environment. If they are advanced enough, it may be fully possible to get places within a matter of hours or days in which case a lot of those concerns become far simpler to address. There is also the possibility that they are not organic, they may have found a way to move themselves to a machine like body that would handle repairs and upkeep far easier than organic tissue with less waste and less upkeep.

That was my first impression too. If the assumption is that mathematically they would have found is, then shouldn't we have also found them. Or are we simply assuming they have better mathematicians and are further advanced than us (not exactly hard).

Or are we simply assuming they have better mathematicians and are further advanced than us (not exactly hard).

We have only had decent computing power for 50 years, on a universal time scale that is nothing, they are right to assume some civilization with even a couple thousand year head start would be way beyond us technology-wise.

But conversely why is not just as reasonable to assume that we are a couple of thousand years ahead of anything else out there?

Or why would it be so hard to imagine that just as mankind sometimes seems bent on destroying its only current abode, that other civilizations didn't do the exact same thing in progression and extinguished themselves before they discovered life elsewhere in the universe?

Just as the chances that we are the only civilization in the universe are slim, I'd have to think the odds of civilizations overlapping each other timewise are probably pretty minuscule too as the expected lifetime of a species tends to be pretty short in terms of time when compared to the age of the universe.

But conversely why is not just as reasonable to assume that we are a couple of thousand years ahead of anything else out there?

Because in a time span of billions of years that just isn't real likely, and even if we are, we will have the next thousand years (assuming we don't self destruct by then) to find them instead.

Just as the chances that we are the only civilization in the universe are slim, I'd have to think the odds of civilizations overlapping each other timewise are probably pretty minuscule too as the expected lifetime of a species tends to be pretty short in terms of time when compared to the age of the universe.

The expected lifetime of a specifies tends to be pretty short from what we have observed on Earth and only Earth. Its not fair to use just Earth as a measure against the age of the Universe and then use that to determine the possible age of other civilizations.

Julia, but then what makes you think any other planet wouldn't have the same dangers that Earth does: volcanoes, climatic variances (aggravated by a dominant species or natural), etc? After all much of what we take for granted as being hazardous to us, is also precisely what enabled us to exist here. Just as there's no indication that life elsewhere will be just as short as species here, there's no proof species can or do last longer elsewhere. Until we discover or are discovered, there is no correct answer here.

You do realize that the first contact they would be having from us humans would be the Olympic games hosted by Mr Adof Hitler?

Why would anyone voluntarily visit us? We cant even learn to live with each other yet....

Many "physics"? Cite your sources. And by the way, your tinfoil hat is crooked.

Thanks Just

LOLed!

Alien experiment or Truman Show? lol

many physics think this could be possible

you sure you didn't mean psychic? Or psycho?

I think this applies most to the idea of religion... It is a lot easier to believe God could know what we are thinking, doing, and control the cosmo's if we truly are in a mass matrix kind of environment. The universe can seem infinite while the real resources would be concentrated in areas that matter, when you consider the traditional view that light from many of the galaxies and stars we see are actually tens of billions of years old, the majority of the night sky is simply a projection of a reality that may or may not exist anymore and we have no way of ever knowing in our lifetimes. Consider the advances we have made in brain chemistry and behavior in the last 10 years, I read an article yesterday about how they can now piece together a pretty disturbingly accurate picture of what someone is looking at by brain scans... If God is even 5000 years more advanced he could easily have technology to immerse us in a realistic world that we would never know was not 100% real.

Not to sound like The History Channel here, but if you break down what we think of God as, someone possessing vastly superior technology to us could very well fulfill mankind's expectations and ideals of what God is..

If 'God' is some kind of an alien race that has mastered the ability to put us in a vast virtual world and experience life while measuring all of our thoughts, dreams, goals, and efforts then they likely also have the ability to confer upon us vast amounts of further knowledge, long life if not immortality, and abililty to do the same ourselves at some point. Perhaps the process of becoming a 'God' is expensive and they want someone who will be fair, benevolent, and hard working to run the show and use this as a process to screen out those who would abuse it. Either way, if you consider the effects that thousands of years of computer, nano, and material breakthroughs would provide it isn't really all that far fetched.

Holodeck... Arch!

Exactly! And not only more advanced than us, but also close enough that we're not significantly out of the way! Even if they decided to launch a ship in response to the Trinity test or the first radio/TV broadcasts, they'd still have to have been able to actually get here within 70-120 years....

Newt will claim alien worlds as US territory.

True we can't go faster than light, but we don't have to, you just have to bridge spacetime. One way is to create a large amount of gravity in front of your ship (think gravity, not antigravity), another is to use a wormhole. So going from point a to point b, traveling beyond light speed is not necessary, that's way to much trouble. And yes, ET knows about us, and has for some time now. We are likes ants in the forest to ET however, not even worth investigating or being worried about. As a matter of fact, like bugs in the forest, ET is right in front of our noses right now and we are too ignorant to even be able to detect "him".

You say that like it's no big deal... The amount of energy output required to "bridge spacetime" would be impossible for humans to be able to generate without some type of unfathomable revolutionary breakthrough in technology. Who even knows if it would ever be possible?!?

No i heard that element 115 is all that's needed. It comes is a wedge shaped pieces and provides enough energy to generate that kind of gravity. Also, it has a neat side effect that it makes you appear to be invisible, even though you are not.

DTomasello:

Who knows, indeed. But if you consider how much technology has advanced in just the last 50 years (we can carry a powerful computer in our pocket that can access a global network of knowledge (and crap)!), the next couple hundred years will build on current tech even faster and result in things we can't imagine today. Or consider telling someone 200 years ago that we'd have flying machines that can carry 400 people across an ocean at incredible speeds.

So I am confident that these technical barriers will eventually be overcome, if our leadership keeps the vision and we don't wipe ourselves out first. The alternative is too depressing to contemplate.

PlaySF

" all you need is a large amount of gravity in front of your ship"

" Element 115"

"...we are too ignorant to even be able to detect him.

******************************************************************************

Your posts are pretty much proof of that.

Or Santa Claus. How can you ignore him? He's everywhere around Christmas time and yet people are constantly saying he doesn't exist. Or the tooth fairy. Why, I'll bet there are people who even believe we live in a democracy.

Jack, I think Mike was referring to actual encounters not fairy tales. I do agree with you on the broken democracy though...

My cousin's an E.T.