Do you believe we are being visited by intelligent aliens from another planet?

"Science" is the biggest religion the world has ever seen. And the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist

The beings might not be as susceptible to time as us… maybe they age differently, or don’t die, or maybe their craft could be traversing time differently than us. To the people saying they don’t crash, maybe they do in fact crash. It’s also perfectly reasonable that this is a publicity stunt, or the DOD uses this crazy alien story to compartmentize SAP’s, and the tic tacks turn out to be optical illusions or odd but earthly phenomena. I’d encourage an open mind until congress can find a way to use the evidence gathered to provide a more conclusive explanation.

not annoying, but curious coz it comes across as careless writing; or a bit childish like some of those who like to write their name in entirely in small letters to be special, but your posts discounting the lazy perioding otherwise read well.

In my childish days, I went through a phase where I’d start all my emails with a small letter while everything else would be perfectly grammatical and punctuated (as exemplified in this post). :)

Navy fighter pilots with thousands of hours of flight time have made visual observation of objects doing things that our current technology is not capable of, they have recorded these objects on video and the carrier battle groups have recorded the objects and their capabilities on multiple sensor systems. Hence the reason for the hearings. Two of these fighter pilots and an intelligence officer just testified under oath in public hearings before Congress and provided much more information in classified hearings to members of the congressional committees responsible for military matters. None of those senators/representatives are saying it's bullsh!t. In fact, they seem to be kind of spooked because the demonstrated capabilities expose real vulnerabilities in our defense. Something is happening out there and at this point you're just not paying attention if you say there is no evidence. It could be that the Russians or Chinese have made a quantum leap in technology but these military professionals don't believe that. I tend to agree because if they had developed the ability to completely outclass our forces, I think they would be using it to their advantage already.

Cute. Stup!d, to be sure. But cute.

Ah, more cuteness.

Good job!

No, he was not asserting the anthropic principle. His "argument" was, in fact, patently absurd and really did boil down to what I stated in my post.

You are completely wrong again. Not very bright.

The Big Bang is not an origin myth, dummy. It's just an explanation for what we think happened given that the our observable universe is apparently expanding.

You don’t understand science. The Big Bang model helps give interpretation to the Hubble expansion, but is woefully inadequate in other areas. In some ways the explanation in Genesis or the Bhagavad Gita is just as valid. I say this as an agnostic and Ph.D. in Physics.

in fact mathematically it's a basic certainty that there are other lifeforms out there in the infinite universe. The problem is not with the question but how we think about it - we may have been visited, however our understanding of what constitutes 'intelligent life' might be drastically misguided, and on the other hand, we presume it would even be in a format we could see/hear/feel/understand. If alien life came here, it could be in a form we do not comprehend, hell it blows most people's mind's just watching youtube videos explaining the 4th dimension.

I believe they've infiltrated LRC

I saw a UFO, weather guy on TV said phone ringing off the hook with something in the sky. Cut to commercial then not another word

Appeal to authority = throwing in the towel.

Even if odds are other life exist(ed), modern humans have only been around about 0.002% of the time the universe existed. So this other life has to not only find us, but in this very tiny window of time we existed. Ok, cue the time travel theories...

False attribution…

I’m trying to point out that science functions in many respects as an additional religion, and there are many people in threads Iike this who confidently make proclamations about what science says without having the faintest idea of what those things mean.

True, but I don’t know that the small fraction relative to the universe’s lifetime is all that material if we assume that most advanced species would have taken a long time to evolve and, almost by definition, would’ve had to stay extant and advancing for a long enough time to be able to achieve a level where they can harness their galaxy’s energy to be able to travel to far away galaxies. Whether our ~300K years is a long enough period to overlap with other life forms depends on how many other life forms out there have ever existed, eg if it’s in many thousands, there’s a pretty nontrivial probability even assuming they were randomly scattered throughout the universe’s lifetime despite our 0.002% existence.

We are all too anthropocentric.

I think that is a faulty assumption that an AI would need more and more power. I see no reason why computational power necessarily requires more and more power. In the example of humanity, it requires less and less power.

"exhibiting" is a tricky word. I would say yes to that word, however I would not say that it does not seem as though we have achieved AI that has general intelligence, self-awareness or consciousness. But it also doesn't appear a though there is any reason to believe that these characteristics are inherently unachievable in AI. And looking at the time scale, from calculator to AI that can pass the Turing test to Superintelligent AI will be a blink of an eye, and then hard to say that we can remotely anticipate what is achievable after that occurs for an AI.