To think we shouldn't try to contact aliens?

[Hotzenplotz]

They might enslave us.

That's not aliens, that's the Auditors

YANBU, because if they're more advanced than us, they will have cracked space travel and be so far advanced they'll find us first. OTOH, if they're primitive beings they may well not welcome us invading their planet.

But I do think exploring space is worth doing, partly because we might need to decamp to other planets once we've finished wrecking this one (not that we necessarily deserve a second chance). Also, the problems we solve through space travel sometimes have benefits for our life on earth.

@liverpool1981

Does anyone actually believe in aliens??

As. in ET? No. I'm not confident enough to say we're the only life form in the whole entire universe, though. And I think we need to leave well alone.

Humans are the village idiots of the universe. They will definitely mash us up for fertilizer

You are quite right, of course. I've rarely encountered such a sensible point of view expressed on an internet forum in the middle of the night.

OP I think I love you.
You have cheered me tight up when I was despondent.

I sometimes they that we humans fall far short of 'intelligent life' ourselves...

Not 'they' but 'feel' (demonstrates my point really!

It's all alien to me right now.
💩

Tbh I already suspect we're currently living under the cat overlords, and they're just quietly bidding their time and manipulating us until the day they evolve to apposable thumbs 🥺

@Wandavision

To be fair if they bothered to send out a fact finding reco they'd sharp discover we've basically wrecked the planet we are lucky enough to enhabit, ruined all natural resources and are sharply on a downward spiral to very imminent destruction. At that point I'd imagine they'd tut and fuck off again with a 'you keeps your pollution filled seas and 3 eyed fishes 🙄'.

Hopefully.

@EmmanuelleMakro

You are quite right, of course. I've rarely encountered such a sensible point of view expressed on an internet forum in the middle of the night. OP I think I love you. You have cheered me tight up when I was despondent.

You won't find it so funny when our alien "friends" rock up, dear!

@TwoLeftSocksWithHoles

I sometimes they that we humans fall far short of 'intelligent life' ourselves...

"And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space because there's bugger all down here on Earth."

I don't know why the assumption is that the aliens are more intelligent or developed than us. Chances they are on the same level of intelligence as humans. Probably as blood thirsty as well though so that's no good.....

But I love the fact that scientists and engineers have send these probes to space with greetings and music etc. To hope to find a new land with new creatures. Such a human thing to be that curious and hopeful and colonial.

The answer to 'do ailens exist' lies in the pyramids. Apperently.

@1forAll74

I think aliens are here on earth already, there are lots of them on the streets especially at night, you cant see their faces,or have a face at all, as they all wear the same garb, which is grey hoodies,and they lurk about upsetting humans.

I think I might have seen one of those.

@Kljnmw3459

I don't know why the assumption is that the aliens are more intelligent or developed than us. Chances they are on the same level of intelligence as humans. Probably as blood thirsty as well though so that's no good.....

Because to come here, they've have to be. They managed not to kill themselves while developing interstellar travel.

By definition, they are more intelligent and more developed than is.

There are probably a lot of idiot species who destroyed their planets before they managed it, like us!

The thing that always blows my mind is that (and I can't remember the exact fact but it's something like...) IF a spaceship had flown past us anytime in planet earth's history, it's only in the last 200 years or so that they would have seen or heard anything. Now we "glow" because of all the electric lights, but before that we'd have just been in complete darkness.

And, without outing myself as a total loon, the whole Ancient Alien thing is a teeny tiny bit interesting imho. Yes it's OTT and a bit ridiculous and makes me feel like a tin hat wearing numpty when I watch it... but then you look at the pyramids, and the carvings dug up in South America, and some of the references in the bible that it covers. And you can't help but wonder...

I agree we shouldn't be contacting them, though. We'd be eaten / enslaved / conquered in a heartbeat. I actually make a decent living writing books which cover exactly that topic... except the alien race are always six foot and muscled, and they always have a shortage of women so one half of the human race turns out okay 😂.

My one hope is that if the aliens do find us, maybe it will stop the human race from fighting with each other and unite us against a common enemy.

I can dream.

There's an excellent trilogy of hard-science fiction novels by Liu Cixin called The Three Body Problem that deal with this subject incredibly engagingly. They also have exactly the right feel for these pandemic times.

Things will get worrying when the Klingons find us. Romulans and Vulcans too. And the Breen and Jem'Hadar.

But the scariest of them all........Cardassians. Watch out for them space lizards.

This is 😮.

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/have-aliens-found-us-a-harvard-astronomer-on-the-mysterious-interstellar-object-oumuamua/amp

except the alien race are always six foot and muscled, and they always have a shortage of women so one half of the human race turns out okay

That is the exact plot to the book I'm writing @DebatableHmm.

it could well be that the earth is nothing more than a petri dish in a year 7 class for superior beings, and at the end of the lesson it will be put into a dishwasher & cleaned ready for the next teaching experiment.

I've probably given this more thought than I should have but have come to the conclusion that us trying to contact them is irrelevant.

The map on voyager would be useless for finding Earth (more about that here www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/08/17/voyagers-cosmic-map-of-earths-location-is-hopelessly-wrong/amp/). Plus despite it being launched decades ago it's only just left our solar system (not even a light year away) and will take another 44,000,000 years to reach our nearest neighbouring galaxy. Our radio waves don't fair much better, with the earliest signal only traveling 200 light years from earth. Again for reference our nearest galactic neighbour andromeda is 2.5 million light years away. So that more or less rules out our attempts at communication reaching anything resembling alien life before we manage to destroy ourselves.

That means for alien contact to happen you're relying on space fairing beings find us and that in itself is very unlike. If alien's could travel at, or near, light speed it will still take them millions, or billions of years to travel the galaxy. Even if they've mastered faster than light travel they'd still have to know where to find us and that would be akin to trying to find a single, specific grain of sand from anywhere in the world.

We also know that the images we see of other planets/stars are of how they were when light left them. Again using andromada as our base, an advanced alien race looking at Earth from andromada would be seeing earth as it was roughly 2.5 million years ago. It won't be till around 2,490,000 a.d. before they'd see more advanced human life.

Of course there's the possibility that they've already been here but if they arrived thousands or millions of years in the past and didn't destroy/conquer/integrate/harvest us (or the dinosaurs) then they're unlikely to come back anytime soon.

Finally it may be that whatever form of alien life out there is so far beyond our understanding that we simply can't comprehend them. We may be like an ant colony in the middle of a rainforest, busy getting in with our lives, completely oblivious to the advanced beings around us.