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Post by nightangel1282 on Jun 28, 2011 22:49:11 GMT -5
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Post by MaybeNever on Jun 28, 2011 23:41:18 GMT -5
They are Russians - Jewish Russians, at that - so their argument is invalid.
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Post by Art Vandelay on Jun 28, 2011 23:44:35 GMT -5
I thought it's invalid because it's fucking retarded.
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Post by MaybeNever on Jun 28, 2011 23:44:55 GMT -5
Nope, the Jewish thing.
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Post by Her3tiK on Jun 28, 2011 23:46:00 GMT -5
When the aliens come back, can we have them use their de-probing technology to remove the sticks from politicians' and evangelicals' asses?
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Post by Yla on Jun 29, 2011 4:24:23 GMT -5
He's repeating well-known thoughts about aliens, expressed at elementary school's level (skin color? WTF), then non-sequituring to the 20 years number. Mind, this all could be the fault of the article writer, and the original quote was quite coherent, but I don't think so in this case.
That said, I think it's actually possible that we get evidence of alien life in the next decade(=/= contact). We're pretty close to analyzing an exoplanet's atmosphere, and in the case it's earth-like, we have a precedent to assume that there's life on it.
Edit: Amending my opinion. I'm blaming the journalist.
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Post by katsuro on Jun 29, 2011 5:57:49 GMT -5
Finkelstein sounds like a character from a shitty, and kinda racist, comedy.
Not that it's important at all, it just amused me.
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Post by lighthorseman on Jun 29, 2011 6:30:48 GMT -5
Oh, those Russians!
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Post by Oriet on Jun 29, 2011 7:42:11 GMT -5
Sounds like he's been watching too much cheesy sci-fi and is confusing it with reality. I'm not sure if the largest departure from reality is expecting aliens to be humanoid or that we'll find technologically advanced multicellular life within the next two decades.
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Post by Yla on Jun 29, 2011 8:13:22 GMT -5
The latter. Humanoid aliens are a not completely unreasonable assumption for the same reasons that we are humanoid. The shape has its advantages, after all.
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Post by shykid on Jun 29, 2011 12:27:34 GMT -5
This sort of thing depends on how you define "humanoid."
Bipedal with opposable thumbs? That's not so far-fetched, at least relatively speaking.
Aliens that actually resemble hominids on a less superficial level? A lot less likely when taking into account potential climate/environmental differences and what have you.
If they did come from a planet that closely resembled Earth, then it's more reasonable to expect rather hominid-like aliens. After all, our traits are what got us where we are now. At the same time, however, it's also to some extent what limits us and keeps us from being more technologically advanced. So, if they're visiting us, there'd have to at least be some serious intellectual differences unless they had a massive, several-billion-year jump start to advance their own technology well beyond ours. I think that would suggest the possibility of more physical differences as well, since extremely minor changes to our DNA can cause extremely major changes to us. The mutations necessary to bring about a significantly increased intellect would likely have some other ramifications or "side effects" that could make them look less human-like.
...but all of this is assuming the aliens even have DNA as we know it. That said, in order for them to evolve into whatever they are, they would have to have at least some form of biological "blueprint" prone to mutations during reproduction.
None of this stuff is my specialty, though, as you can probably tell—so I'm mostly just babbling nonsense out of my ass.
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Post by Smurfette Principle on Jun 29, 2011 13:13:03 GMT -5
Considering that we, humans, are far outnumbered on this planet by things that are not humanoid, then the likelihood of an alien species being humanoid is, to me, very low. Especially if we are discovering them, as opposed to them contacting us.
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Post by shykid on Jun 29, 2011 13:28:01 GMT -5
I've always kinda assumed they'd be the ones to make contact with us, since they're probably very, very far away and we've been unable to get in contact with them thus far.
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Alyra
Full Member
ex-fundie
Posts: 143
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Post by Alyra on Jun 29, 2011 15:14:37 GMT -5
Unless we're more advanced than they are. There's no reason to assume they'd be technologically ahead of us.
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Post by MaybeNever on Jun 29, 2011 18:29:37 GMT -5
Unless we're more advanced than they are. There's no reason to assume they'd be technologically ahead of us. The only hope we have of making contact with advanced alien life within the span of our lives - say, the next 50 years - is for the aliens to be dramatically more advanced than we are. Even if we use generous values in the Drake Equation, the odds of alien life existing within, say, fifty light years of us is exceptionally small, and even at that distance we'd only get a transmission today if they sent it five decades ago. And they had a transmitter powerful enough to send information that would still be coherent over fifty light years. And we had our receivers pointed in just the right direction. And we could identify it as a meaningful communication, since alien psychology is reasonably likely to be, you know, alien, and their methods of communication pretty inscrutable. Although Harry Turtledove once wrote a story in which the secret of faster than light travel was actually something really basic that somehow we'd just overlooked, and so when aliens finally make contact with Earth they're using, in some cases, bronze age technology.
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