Anyone believe in UFO's?

Anyone here believe in UFO’s? I know UFO stands for Unidentified Flying Object but I mean in the sense of alien visitors.

Maybe, you got something you want to tell us?

Cross-posted from the latest god forum,

“I have no reason to believe in UFOs, other than a healthy interest in science fiction. It’s possible that an alien spaceship crashed in Area 51, but it’s highly unlikely. I do actually believe that there could well life on other planets, simply because there’s so damn many of them, but we’re unlikely ever to make contact because of the immense distances involved.”

I’d like to, but no, I’m pretty sure that if anything had developed the capability to cross the distances involved, they wouldn’t be stupid enough to a) come here b) if they did let us spot them

I am certain there will be other intelligences out there somewhere. Why they would come to the earth kidnap rednecks and show things up their fundament I am much less sure

Sex tourism isn’t it?

Agree with TJ 8O

It is statistically-speaking extremely unlikely that our planet has the only life in the universe. So yes, I believe in aliens.

But they are also likely to be so far away that (unless they have developed a way to travel faster than light which we believe to be impossible with our understanding of physics) we are unlikely to ever hear from them or be visited by them.

Which is a shame.

Oh there has to be intelligent life out there, unfortunately they’ve been using the Daily Mail website to guage that and so far thought it wasn’t worth the effort.

I think it’s terribly niave to believe that earth is the only planet able to sustain life, just because we haven’t got the proof yet doesn’t mean it’s not there.

Hope they look like this:

Do you mean do I believe in extra terrestrial intelligence that just so happens to co-exist in the same point in time as us?

No. It’s possible but given the amount of time involved since what we have been able to measure as the start of the universe, even given the size of the universe I don’t believe that if life has evolved anywhere else that it’s existence will coincide with ours. And that is even without taking in to account travel/communication.

But hey what do I know, I can quite happily accept that I am 100% wrong. I don’t believe in god/gods either but I can accept that I may well be wrong.

Find it hard to believe that there aren’t any aliens but the chances of them visiting us (and crashing in the process lol) seems as unlikely as finding a unicorn on Cannock Chase.

Who knows, show me the evidence.

well the reason I ask is because I crashed landed here about 60 Earth years ago and was wondering if anyone has spotted a scout craft? I know my kind have been here before as I’ve read the documentation in a book you call ‘The Bible’ my great, great grandfather landed somewhere in the Middle East and ended up chating a local virgin making out he was some angel called Micheal.

THis is definitelt a UFO and y’all should prepare to be probed.

wasn’t that gabriel?

Arthur C Clarke said something like “Sometimes I think we’re alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we’re not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.”

Michael/Gabriel, you say tomatoe…

GrahamS – Member
Agree with TJ
So yes, I believe in aliens.

And if one of them call himself God?

Drake equation
Fermi paradox

Mysel;f I tend to follow the Zoo hypothesis

To quote Douglas Adams…

‘Unfortunately I got stuck on the Earth for rather longer than I indended’,
said Ford. ‘I came for a week and got stuck for fifteen years.’

‘But how did you get there in the first place then?’

‘Easy, I got a lift with a teaser.’

‘A teaser?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Er, what is…’

‘A teaser? Teasers are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They cruise around
looking for planets which haven’t made interstellar contact yet and buzz them.’

‘Buzz them?’ Arthur began to feel that Ford was enjoying making life difficult
for him.

‘Yeah,’ said Ford, ‘they buzz them. They find some isolated spot with very few
people around, then land right by some poor unsuspecting soul whom no one’s ever
going to believe and them strut up and down in front of him wearing silly antennae
on their head and making beep beep noises. Rather childish really.’

[/b]

No. It’s possible but given the amount of time involved since what we have been able to measure as the start of the universe, even given the size of the universe I don’t believe that if life has evolved anywhere else that it’s existence will coincide with ours. And that is even without taking in to account travel/communication.

The Fermi Paradox.

I think that life will be discovered in the solar system within my lifetime- really simple organisms on Europa or something. And more complex stuff like us* might well be out there but I don’t think we’ll ever meet any unless the laws of physics have a pretty drastic re-write.

*Development wise, not Star Trek-style green humans necessarily.

I don’t really believe no. However, if someone could show me a large book about them made up in the times when folk still believed the world was flat and I think you might be onto something..

See I just don’t believe the statistics argument. To my mind it’s a bit like the people who thought that when statistics said that the chances of an accidental nuclear war occurring was 1 in 10 billion years they all thought “oh great it’s be 10 billion years before it happens”.

The statistics argument is purely a numbers game. We do not know how life on earth really came about. We do seem to understand a lot of the factors that allowed for it to happen but what I have seen these factors have not been modelled mathematically and used in the calculation. My understanding is that its simply says, we ll we now life exists around 1 star so therefore if there are X stars of the same type then there must be blah blah chance of life existing around some of them.

I can’t even get exited about all these planets now cropping up in the so called Cinderella zone. To me one of the things that makes life on earth possible at this time is that we have a massive moon at just the right distance that in combination with the sun at just the right distance has an effect on tides and the planets mantle that creates a dynamic planet. Obviously I’m assuming you need similar conditions elsewhere for life to arise but of the limited sampling we have (the other planets in the solar system) it would appear that this is a sound basis to work from.

I don’t really believe no. However, if someone could show me a large book about them made up in the times when folk still believed the world was flat and I think you might be onto something..

ACE! :lol:

lol @ the Cinderella zone fairytail mix-up

Statistics are just models that help up predict things, they of course could be wrong, but we can use them to try to improve the chances of discovering if life has evolved elsewhere, the alternative is to just look randomly about the cosmos, which seems a bit silly.

mE WooNDErs iffff THis will TURN IN2 A serIOUs Topic??? :roll:

See I just don’t believe the statistics argument. To my mind it’s a bit like the people who thought that when statistics said that the chances of an accidental nuclear war occurring was 1 in 10 billion years they all thought “oh great it’s be 10 billion years before it happens”.

I LOL’d at this.

I suppose some voodoo magic created life on earth.

There are in terms of human comprehension effectively an infinite number of planets in this universe. Scientists are finding many more planets in the habitable zone than they expected, they are quite literally being discovered every week.

Once we’ve worked out how RNA was produced in the oceans then this question is over, it’s just a matter of finding the right planet. That might not even happen though as the conditions on earth might actually have been incorrect to produce RNA, a few scientists have postulated it might have got here on an asteroid. You never **** now, Prometheus might be closer to home than we thought. We might be travelling to Europa to discover where life on earth originated from.

You don’t need a moon for life either, bacteria can survive in places you wouldn’t imagine.

If the universe is infinite then statistically, there’s an exact duplicate of earth out there with an exact duplicate of STW and exactly the same arguments being waged right now.

Food for thought :)

It’s not…. but for this discussion plus all intents and purposes it is….as the numbers fry most peoples fragile minds.

Thank god for that! (see what I did there ;) )

It won’t happen for thousands of years because we lack the aility to produce the amount of energy needed……

…..but I’ll also add that I think humans will once day embark upon interstellar travel. Slower than light travel could do it because of time dilation, whilst it would take many hundreds or thousands of earth years to pull off….at a certain speed it could be achievable for those on board the craft.

Perhaps AI will play a part, think some kind “abandon earth” mission, where hundreds of ships are fired off in each direction armed with an AI that tracks for habitable planets, lands on them and then goes about producing human individuals using genetic code embedded in the space craft.

My imagination is running away with me now.

I’m not delusional religious, but the scientist in me believes statistically due to the gigantic number of ‘other’ planets which may be out there – there is most likely some other life form out there in the galaxy. Whether humans will ever have contact is another thing entirely. Maybe they have, but the Gov’s don’t want us to know…

Maybe they have, but the Gov’s don’t want us to know…

I used to wonder that. I ruled it out in the end because there’s no way any of the other countries would’ve let them get away with it for so long.

I’m not delusional religious,

xiphion, that belongs to me, use it by all means, but be aware that you are “being offensive” if you do.

I suspect that they are out there;

I hope to God that they never arrive. In our history it’s never turned out well when the advanced culture has arrived at the shores of the primitives.

Moaris, American Indians, Incas, Aborigines not many left are there…..

It’s also an Outside Context Problem (so says Iain Banks):

The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you’d tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbors were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass… when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you’ve just been discovered, you’re all subjects of the Emperor now, he’s keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests.

> So yes, I believe in aliens.
And if one of them call himself God?

Then I’d be very surprised that aliens spoke English.

On earth we have perfect conditions for life to appear and evolve but its only done it once. All life on earth is related and comes from the same starting block.
If, in the billions of years its only appeared here once, why is it any more likely to appear somewhere else?
Probablility is about something not happening. Its not happened more than once.
So likelyhood may be we are the only part of the universe that knows its here.

Yeah, think we must have had some help in the past, certainly to get where we are today.

The thing you’re missing is, there’s an almost unimaginable number of other places where life isn’t likely to appear. With such staggering odds, the impossible becomes actually quite likely.

The odds of winning the lottery are pretty much zero (1 in 14 million, IIRC). Yet, someone somewhere wins it, most weeks.