MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
We will be in touch
Proper.contact moment. Maybe...
Is this part of the shake up of the schedule of 6 music?
among a minority of observers, some form of alien spaceship.
Well, you have to put the cranks at the bottom of the pile just in case it upsets Me &Mrs General Public.
I like the idea that this could be a manufactured signal by some other race... 🤯👽
As these signals originated 1.5 billion years ago, I’m not holding my breath for a visit any time soon.
They are the signals that are controlling the imaginary drones, or the imagination of those seeing the drones, must be or it's just repeats of top gear bouncing off a misaligned Dave transmission.
As these signals originated 1.5 billion years ago, I’m not holding my breath for a visit any time soon.
but what of a civilisation advanced enough 1.5 billion years ago to send signals?
quite soon this news, after the Gatwick "drones", are were being prepared?
Is this the beginning the field of exoarchaeology?
are were being prepared?
You hopin' for a probin'?
I liked a few lines from Richard Morgan's latest..
Of course, once they’d actually found the alien signals—four of them, undeniable, entirely unrelated to one another, too far off to do anything about or even ascertain whether the civilizations that had sent them still existed—all that enthusiasm for SETI began to wane. Search for extraterrestrial intelligence, right—been there, done that. Box ticked. Funding sputtered, dried to a trickle, finally choked off altogether.
Is this the beginning the field of exoarchaeology?
Are we the ones researching or are we being researched though? Makes you think...
As these signals originated 1.5 billion years ago,
Radio Two?
The telescope only got up and running last year, detecting 13 of the radio bursts almost immediately, including the repeater.
Seems a bit too convenient. My money is on the neutron star.
Seems a bit too convenient. My money is on the neutron star.
Nah, it won’t be her, she’s put nothing out since Grease.
They've cracked the code:
"#inbeforemike"
first man on the MOON.? Neil A. which is Alien spelt backwards, makes you think.
52% of the country can't even stand having European neighbours, how on earth are they going to react when aliens come down here, looking and speaking all funny and setting up shops selling that weird intergalactic muck they eat?
I was watching a couple of YouTube videos on the Fermi Paradox last week. I was taken by the fact that they both concluded we were alone and that was an even more important reason to "save the planet".
how on earth are they going to react when aliens come down here, looking and speaking all funny and setting up shops selling that weird intergalactic muck they eat?
There was a documentary on that - called District 9. My wife still can't hear the word 'prawns' without cracking up.
One things for sure, if these signals are from an intelligent Alien life form,
They sure as hell aren’t going to class this 3rd rock from the sun as being populated by intelligent life if they look at our so called leaders 😥
Probably complaining about the new classifieds.
I bet the guy who predicted first contact on the 2019 predictions thread can`t believe his luck!
>As these signals originated 1.5 billion years ago
Oh god. So they'll still be dealing with fallout from the fire which killed Grace?
Meh, natural radio burst we just don't understand yet and may struggle to given the distance. We can make up something though. Like dark matter/energy.
Probably colliding black holes from colliding galaxies. Repeats from spinning orbits of black holes perhaps. Stuff near black holes orbit at ludicrous speed.
The interesting bit is the ability to gain information about the signals travels through the universe, what they interact with, apparently.
I was watching a couple of YouTube videos on the Fermi Paradox last week. I was taken by the fact that they both concluded we were alone
I generally think we are not alone, but other life is likely to be so untouchably far away that we might as well be.
This 1.5 billion year old signal kind of illustrates the problem. They could have been sending us high-def alien tentacle grot for the past million years and we'd have no idea yet.
Likewise our own radio signals haven't exactly got very far yet:
https://twitter.com/d0b0/status/628629178733047809
This is all fake. I mean how did they position a camera to take GrahamS's picture?
This is all fake. I mean how did they position a camera to take GrahamS’s picture?
Drones above Gatwick.
Oh god. So they’ll still be dealing with fallout from the fire which killed Grace?
Titchener plus time machine........
This is all fake. I mean how did they position a camera to take GrahamS’s picture?
Stolen from the first comment in the link..... read the replies too, they are hilarious
A very long selfie stick
Stolen from the first comment in the link
Came up with it meself, honest.
Probably just an unidentified pulsar
I generally think we are not alone, but other life is likely to be so untouchably far away that we might as well be.
TBH, this is my stance also.
The problem with thinking about this is that it involves some (pardon me) astronomically large numbers, and our puny human brains are really quite bad at coping with extremely large numbers.
The odds of life forming are incredibly small, and what we'd consider to be intelligent life even more so. But as Douglas Adams will tell you, “Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.” And when you have sufficient numbers of anything, what was highly unlikely actually becomes really quite likely indeed. The chances of someone winning the National Lottery are something like 1 in 45 million, it feels like it should be impossible to win. Yet, it happens.
There are an estimated 250 billion stars in our galaxy alone, and the Milky Way is pretty small. Our next door neighbour Andromeda has a trillion. Wikipedia suggests that "Recent estimates of the number of galaxies in the observable universe range from 200 billion (2×10^11) to 2 trillion (2×10^12) or more, containing more stars than all the grains of sand on planet Earth." And that's just the bit that we can see.
So yeah, I'd be shocked if there weren't other life out there. It wouldn't surprise if there were billions of inhabited planets in fact, just by dint of numbers. But ET popping round to say "hi" ain't gonna happen. Even if we discovered faster than light travel or teleporters or something, we could find a random Earth-like planet but do so before life had began or billions of years after full civilisations had been wiped out.
I generally think we are not alone, but other life is likely to be so untouchably far away that we might as well be.
The improbable chance of intelligent life evolving in the right place and conditions could be around the number of stars in the universe, so I do feel we could be the one fluke about of the gazillions.
But yes, if there are others, we'll never know. Aside from distance there's also time. Chances of any existing at the same time are zero, given life may have a finite existence due to the relatively short period of habitability of a suitable planet. Even if they did we can't communicate unless we happen to be next door to each other, which is even less likely.
Unless god, etc.
Unless god, etc.
Tell me more of this 'God' you speak of
I belive current thinking is that the universe is flat and goes on forever in all directions.
Given infinity, it got to be a dead cert that there is other intelligent life somewhere. Not only that, but its possible that at some point the pattern will start to repeat itself. So in some unimaginably remote area of the cosmos, a bunch of middle aged ex mountain bikers could be typing out this same conversation.
95 light years in that picture isn't even as wide as a single pixel.
Aside from distance there’s also time.
Yeah - there's an idea that there is a sweet-spot for the development of life(as we know it) and that the universe might have been too chaotic for there to have been life many, many billions of years ago.
Plus the universe is expanding so we'd all be getting further away from each other.
Tell me more of this ‘God’ you speak of
I direct you to the fiction section. Though God stuff seems to get misfiled.
I generally think we are not alone, but other life is likely to be so untouchably far away that we might as well be.
Reminds me of my current relationship.
it's a bit odd that god(s I kind of like the idea of it being a bit of team effort 😉 ) created a huge universe just for us but then confined us to an absolutely minuscule corner of it
I generally think we are not alone, but other life is likely to be so untouchably far away that we might as well be.
I feel the same way too. I think it was Brian Cox that once described the chances of two recognisable lifeforms (aliens could come in any shape or form - they may not be little green men and may not communicate in a format we understand – potentially in a dimension we do not even know exists) passing each other at the same arc of their respective civilizations then reaching out at the same time are infinitesimally small. A bit like two blindfolded people shooting guns (up/down, left/right, ahead/behind) somewhere within a vast open space and expecting the bullets to hit each other at the first attempt.
potentially in a dimension we do not even know exists)
didn't the recent gravity wave results prove there no extra dimensions.
didn’t the recent gravity wave results prove there no extra dimensions.
Possibly - I hadn't heard that bit of research – although I don't see how we can confidently say that other dimensions categorically do not exist. And it ruins the long-held idea I have had for a sci-fi book where we get into a war with aliens that inhabit another dimension and have worked out how to port into ours.
95 light years in that picture isn’t even as wide as a single pixel.
Yeah. My first reaction was to think that was far far far too big a circle.
It's sad to think it will be a long long time before some other civilisation gets to hear John Peel.
Tell me more of this ‘God’ you speak of
Well. In the beginning there was The Word. But now Terry Christian is a presenter on Stockport-based radio station Imagine FM
There are an estimated 250 billion stars in our galaxy alone, and the Milky Way is pretty small. Our next door neighbour Andromeda has a trillion. Wikipedia suggests that “Recent estimates of the number of galaxies in the observable universe range from 200 billion (2×10^11) to 2 trillion (2×10^12) or more, containing more stars than all the grains of sand on planet Earth.” And that’s just the bit that we can see.
The Hubble Deep Field photo, a very long exposure taken of one tiny patch of sky with no significant stars in it, shows galaxies almost beyond counting - that’s one tiny segment.
but other life is likely to be so untouchably far away that we might as well be.
The thing is, though, there’s intelligent life on this planet that isn’t only not human, it’s not even primate, not even a mammal, so there’s huge scope for intelligent life out there that we may not recognise, it may not communicate in a way that we could interpret and respond to, because the thought processes are entirely different, and the physical structure of the entity may enable it to produce a variety of different sounds of different frequencies almost simultaneously, plus they may not even use any form of written language, or if they do, the symbology may be almost impossible to interpret.
Those entities may not even have hands or similar, but still have the ability to use tools, and devise ways of creating and adapting tools to changing circumstances.
Such creatures live alongside us now, I see no reason at all for many other planets to have environments capable of sustaining life that may resemble such creatures, where mammals may never have found the ecological niches in which to evolve.
There’s at least two worlds in our solar system with vast quantities of liquid water, where conditions may well have allowed reasonably complex life forms to develop.
Makes you think.