[meteorite-list] Alien Contact Predicted

From: Pete Pete <rsvp321_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue, 25 Aug 2009 00:06:37 -0400
Message-ID: <BAY141-W221F5B89B83F140E91A2AF8F80_at_phx.gbl>

 
 
As always, a great post, Sterling!
 
 
----------------------------------------
> From: sterling_k_webb at sbcglobal.net
> To: prairiecactus at rtcol.com; meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com
> Date: Mon, 24 Aug 2009 22:04:05 -0500
> Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Alien Contact Predicted
>
> Phil, Eric, List
>
> We are "the only life" in the Universe, you say? Well, Phil,
> The Universe, meaning the part within our particle horizon,
> contains 10,400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 cubic
> light years. That is one hell of a lot of closet space! For it to
> be empty of life is a terrible waste of space, as Carl Sagan said.
>
> There are a vast host of theories offered to explain why we
> haven't found anybody. It is an old paradox. Enrico Fermi, who
> was not only a genius but a very practical man, gave voice to
> the problem in 1950, at a lunchtime conversation with Teller
> and other assorted geniuses, all of whom agreed that there must
> be alien life. Fermi interrupted with, "So? Where are they?" By
> extention, you can ask, "Why haven't we heard from them?"
>
> Because there are so many answers proposed to explain
> the absence of aliens, here are some of those answers in
> shorthand form, but you can figure them out.
>
> They Are Here (The UFO Theories):
> 1 They Are Here and They Call Themselves Hungarians
> 2 They Are Here and Are Meddling in Human Affairs
> 3 They Were Here and Left Evidence of Their Presence
> 4 They Exist and They Are Us - We Are All Aliens!
> 5 The Zoo Scenario: We're Pets.
> 6 The Interdict Scenario: Contact Is Forbidden
> 7 The Planetarium Hypothesis: The Universe Is An Illusion
> 8 They Exist, Are VERY Advanced, and We Call Them God
>
> They Exist But Have Not Yet Communicated ("They're Out There!"):
> 9 The Stars Are Too Far Away
> 10 They Have Not Had Time to Reach Us
> 11 A Percolation Theory Approach -- We're In a Place They Didn't Go To
> 12 Bracewell-von Neumann Probes Are All They Send
> 13 We Are Solar Chauvinists; Their Planets Are Not Like Ours
> 14 They Stay at Home . . .
> 15 . . . and Surf the Net
> 16 They Are Signaling But We Do Not Know How to Listen
> 17 They Are Signaling But We Do Not Know at Which Frequency to Listen
> 18 Our Search Strategy Is Wrong
> 19 The Signal Is Already There in the Data
> 20 We Have Not Listened Long Enough
> 21 Everyone Is Listening, No One Is Transmitting
> 22 Berserkers
> 23 They Have No Desire to Communicate
> 24 They Develop a Different Mathematics
> 25 They Are Calling But We Do Not Recognize the Signal
> 26 They Are Somewhere But the Universe Is Stranger Than We Imagine
> 27 A Choice of Catastrophes: Intelligent Life Always Destroys Itself
> 28 They Hit the Singularity
> 29 Cloudy Skies Are Common
> 30 Infinitely Many ETCs Exist But Only One Within Our Particle Horizon:
> Us
>
> They Do Not Exist ("We're The Only Ones!"):
> 31 The Universe Is Here for Us
> 32 Life Can Have Emerged Only Recently
> 33 Planetary Systems Are Rare
> 34 We Are the First
> 35 Rocky Planets Are Rare
> 36 Continuously Habitable Zones Are Narrow
> 37 Jupiters Are Rare
> 38 Earth Has an Optimal "Pump of Evolution"
> 39 The Galaxy Is a Dangerous Place
> 40 A Planetary System Is a Dangerous Place
> 41 Earth's System of Plate Tectonics Is Unique
> 42 The Moon Is Unique
> 43 Life's Genesis Is Rare
> 44 The Prokaryote-Eukaryote Transition Is Rare
> 45 Toolmaking Species Are Rare
> 46 Technological Progress Is Not Inevitable
> 47 Intelligence at the Human Level Is Rare
> 48 Language Is Unique to Humans
> 49 Science Is Not Inevitable
> *from
> http://books.google.com/books?id=-vZ0BVSHix4C&dq=webb+where+is+everybody%3F+download&printsec=frontcover&source=in&hl=en&ei=eDqTSva8GYXWsgOgguXJDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=11#v=onepage&q=&f=false
>
> Some of these answers have already been shot down
> since the above book listed them. Planets, it turns out are
> NOT rare. Neither are Jupiters.
>
> We are NOT signalling and advertising our presence to
> the Galaxy. Why should anyone else? We (humans) have
> only done so once, when Frank Drake sent a signal to Tau
> Ceti one night for half an hour without consulting anybody.
> Everyone was horrified and jumped all over him. Now, there
> are Federal regs that, in effect, make it a crime to try to talk
> to Alien Civilizations. Too dangerous. So why would we think
> that "they" would signal us? Unless they are so powerful they
> have no reason to be afraid of anybody, in which case I suggest
> we don't answer if they ring our doorbell.
>
> Suppose, just suppose, that there are no warp drives, no
> wormholes, no faster than light travel. Einstein was right and
> there IS a speed limit. Suppose that travelling between stars
> is extremely difficult no matter how advanced you are, and
> beyond one or two hundred light years, it's more costly than
> any civilization is likely to be willing to spend, and suppose
> there's nobody that close. All technologies have limits.
>
> Suppose we became dedicated to colonizing the Galaxy no
> matter how long it takes. Every 1000 years, we sent 100,000
> humans on a giant ship to a habitable system only 25-30 light
> years away. It takes us 1000 years to get there. We defrost, settle
> down, build a civilization, increase in numbers and power,
> and only 1000 years later, we (now they) send out their own
> colony ship to repeat the process. Every 1000 years, every planet
> repeats the procedure with another colony in another direction.
> In a mere 6,000,000 years, humanity inhabits 5,000,000 planets
> stretching over the entire Milky Way Galaxy.
>
> Obviously, no other species has done this in the last few billion
> years or they'd be thick as fleas on a dog. Or maybe it's been done
> over and over, 129 times by 129 intelligent species, and each
> species has become extinct every single time, utterly vanished
> and all their vast monuments with them. Maybe we are ready
> to be Number 130.
>
> Maybe not. Maybe every intelligent species destroys itself
> shortly (a few thousand years) after achieving technological
> prowess. Get smart. Start fiddling with the Universe. Blow
> yourself up. Or wipe yourself out. Or poison your world and
> fall back into savagery. Screw things up beyond fixing. Maybe
> it's inevitable for every critter with a brain a bit too big for
> its appetites.
>
> Maybe we're just lost in time. No human can even vaguely
> conceive of what a billion years is like. Even a mere one million
> years is too great a stretch. A million years ago, there were no
> humans. 100,000 years ago there were no humans. 10,000
> years ago we knew about as much about the Universe beyond
> the Earth as the dog of today. The Sea of Stars is vast and the
> Ocean of Time is deep. And we woke up about 1/25000000th
> of the life of the cosmos ago.
>
> That we have listened to the stars for any word from another
> intelligent species for 40-50 years and are desparate because
> we have no message in our Inbox yet shows we have the attention
> span of a gnat. Unless, of course, we expected the interstellar
> equivalent of Top 40 radio. Hold your complaints (and your
> conclusions) for a century (or two... or five), then get back to me.
> We'll do lunch.
>
> As for "Whoopie! The Universe Is Ours!" I'd hold off a bit
> before you run the Human Pan-Galactic Federation flag up
> and salute it. It's a little too early to celebrate.
>
> You'll find a lot of interesting discussion of these issues in
> the URL above at Google Books and this excellent summary of
> the problem, by David Brin, "The Great Silence" (free download):
> http://www.brin-l.com/downloads/silence.pdf
>
>
>
> Sterling K. Webb
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Phil Whitmer"
> To:
> Sent: Monday, August 24, 2009 11:17 AM
> Subject: [meteorite-list] Alien Contact Predicted
>
>
>> Eric:
>>
>> It's my belief that We Are Alone! There's nobody out there. Life and
>> intelligence is a singularity, a miracle, call it what you will, it
>> only happened once, here on good old Planet Earth. We are the Seed
>> that will spread throughout the Universe by Space Migration. It's our
>> manifest destiny and a matter of survival. Nobody knows how or why it
>> happened, it just did. It was either God or chance, take your pick.
>> There are those who claim otherwise, but they have yet to provide even
>> the thinnest shred of evidence. Those who make extraordinary claims
>> must provide some extraordinary evidence to back it up. And they
>> never do! Not one person abducted by ETs has ever grabbed an alien
>> cellphone or anything else to prove they were aboard an intergalactic
>> space ship.
>>
>> The argument for aliens goes something like this: "Well there's
>> billions and billions of galaxies, one of them has to harbor life. It
>> just has to! You know, a billion monkeys typing for a billion years,
>> and one of them writes a Shakespearean Sonnet or the Book of Genesis,
>> whatever. I think they will just type gibberish for eternity. Life
>> doesn't just pop up all over the place. It can never be created in the
>> laboratory. It's impossible to make live stuff out of dead stuff!
>> (Except for that one time.)
>>
>> This argument puts a lot of faith in Chance and the Laws of
>> Probability. Might as well say Yahweh or Brahma did it. Evolution
>> guided by chance and probability, how is that any different from chaos
>> and total randomness?
>>
>> And why do the aliens always appear in trailer parks and never at
>> Houston Control, NAU, or the JPL?
>>
>> Now if I could see one bit of hard evidence, I would change my mind in
>> a minute.
>>
>> Just my dos pesos,
>>
>> Phil Whitmer
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>
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Received on Tue 25 Aug 2009 12:06:37 AM PDT