Metropol

Now i've just been watching sky news, in particular their alien story. Ok it's about a super duper telesope in Cheshire that is searching billions of stars for intelligent lifeforms. It can also pick up a mobile phone from about a gazillion miles away. I'm surprised the telescope can concentrate with the amount of mobile phones around today.

Now this has got me thinking. Apparently scientists understand about 4% of what makes up the universe so there is 96% left to play with. Dangerous, for someone like me who has an overactive imaginantion.

What are you thoughts about extraterrestrials?

Do any of you reckon we're the only intelligent life forms in the universe (i use the word intelligent fairly loosely). What do you think they will look like, do you think they will come to earth for a visit, also have any of you been abducted by aliens?

I'm off to let my imagination run away with itself, what with a certain new avatar and intergalactic adventures i'm sure to have nightmares tonight.


Tell you my thoughts later....


* edited; is that better?*

do we have to mention jamez in every thread. nothing against the guy btw.

I agree.

As for aliens, well, my belief is that they're already living amoungst us. Just visit Swansea, and you'll find that 1 in 10 people there are from another planet.

Although of course it's impossible to prove otherwise at the present time, it's seems inconceivable to think that we are the only intelligent life in the universe. Whether or not that other life is close enough to visit us is quite a different matter.

My personal belief is that alien life has visited this planet, and there's far more to the Roswell Incident of the 1940's than we will ever be allowed to know (call me a conspiracy theorist if you like, but when the report onto the incident was put into the public domain, why is half of it, including complete page after complete page, blacked out?).

That said, I think you'd be very naieve to believe every flying saucer/crop circle/alien abduction story you hear about - I doubt very much that alien life is as common a presence on the planet as the frequency of these reports would seem to suggest.

The big unanswered question in my head is whether any visiting alien life is benelvolant or hostile. Are any alien visitors just here in the spirit of explortation and research, or are they here to take us over, in which case we need to quickly ship some women with purple hair and men with a penchant for wearing bodysuits made of fishing nets up to the moon to defend us...

I saw Dr Who on Xmas day too - not sure about the obvious Belgrano/Falklands political reference at the end when the British government blew up that spaceship as it was leaving!

cwathen wrote:Although of course it's impossible to prove otherwise at the present time, it's seems inconceivable to think that we are the only intelligent life in the universe.

Agreed. If all life on earth began from simple carbon compounds and hydrogen gas reacting in a flash of lightning, there has to be a massive probability that in the vast space that is the universe, the same, or similar events have occured.

I personally have very little doubts that there is other life out there but I severly doubt that we will ever find any.

I'm sure we are not alone in the Universe. But the Sun is quite a young star and we've only been around for a nano-second in cosmological terms, so chances are that any other life form is far more advanced than us.

If they have visited, they probably thought we weren't worth bothering about.........any more than we would try to make meaningful conversation with an ant colony.

Perhaps in another few thousand years (assuming we haven't blown ourselves up) we might have the technology to go out there and have a look ourselves.

Call me a pessimist, but short of a complete change in human behaviour, I reckon we will go the way of the dinosaurs and another species will take over before we ever get to that stage.

The dinosaurs didn't blow themselves up, they were hit by a meteorite.

I doubt humans would be stupid enough to blow themselves up - although we do have the worst possible human imaginable in the White House at the moment.

Until Bush is kicked from office, we should all be very worried.

I know the dinosaurs didn't blow themselves up, even after 160 million years they didn't have the intelligence to. However, after only 1 million years we have the technology to destroy ourselves, and you are right that with idiots in the White House we probably will sooner rather than later.

miss hellfire wrote:Now i've just been watching sky news, in particular their alien story. Ok it's about a super duper telesope in Cheshire that is searching billions of stars for intelligent lifeforms.

YAY Jodrell Bank's SETI thing! Did the report feature a slightly fat scientist with an unconvincing combover? That man is FAB.

As for mobile phones, I didn't leave mine on when I was last down there...honest!

He was slightly overweight but surprisingly i didn't take much notice of his hair.
Shamefully i can't even remember who was covering the story either. I remember the content though which is important.