Is finding aliens a good idea?

[Kortney]

definitely not a good idea. i've always held the belief (long before it became mainstream (yeah, "i liked that before it was popular!")) that even if we contacted a peaceful alien race, there would be war, because we would start one. this would be due either to simple xenophobia, or to greed, or fear outside of xenophobia. basically, either "kill them because they're different" or "kill them for their stuff" or "kill them before they kill us".

I don't agree. Surely a society so advanced that they have perfected space travel over incredibly long distances would have evolved past the point of being reactionary, bigoted psychopaths. A society that xenophobic would never have existed long enough to be space faring.

 

[DaMullet]

I don't believe that aliens exsist; the universe is such a hostile and unforgiving ***** of a place and there are too many ways for life to be wiped out.

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So aliens are probably going to be like klingons and krogans for the most part. I'd vote that would be a bad idea.

Doesn't the mere existence of the Human race sort of put a damper on both of those theories? We're here, are we not? And humans have always been omnivores of all shapes and sizes and ideals.

Not at all. It would take a billion billion billion chances to get one solar system right. You put the earth in any other solar system in this galaxy and life will die, eventually. Sol has no twin in the milky way. And not every solar system has a nice vacume cleaner on the outside like Sol's gas giants that suck up life snuffing asteroids. And the majority of other galaxies are too chaotic and not perfectly stable like the milky way is, which kills off planets and therefore life. And actually Sol isn't that safe. In another million years, the sun's increasing luminousity will make photosynthesis imposible and poof, there goes earth.

I mean evolution doesn't even to get on stage for most of the universe, and if it did, without proper protection for that planet, its like your little brother hitting the reset button on your NES while playing mario 1 over and over like the little brat that he is.

I think looking for aliens is a waste of time. We should probably scrap that fairytail and go colonize the Moon and look for fossils of earth mark 1, before the moon was created, to gain a better understanding of how life started. And with that knowledge, then look for aliens because then we'll have a clue as to what we're looking for.

Human still hunted though. Still had to outsmart prey in order to kill it.

 

[Thedutchjelle]

If aliens are found I doubt it's likely they're intelligent/sentient. A bacteria under a rock on Mars or a plant in a crevice on the Moon also count as aliens. I have absolutely no problem with bringing them to Earth and studying them. To see how an organism functions without terrestrial mechanisms can reveal a lot about our own biology.

 

[Timmibal]

And actually Sol isn't that safe. In another million years, the sun's increasing luminousity will make photosynthesis imposible and poof, there goes earth.

I think you're missing a few zeroes on the end of that figure, m'laddo. Sol is still a relatively 'young' star, as far as they go. It's got at least 4 billion years before it starts getting pregnant on us.

I think the kicker is interstellar travel. If it's possible in meatbag bodies, then we'll meet aliens.

If not, We'll have to wait until we get to K2 or K3 levels of civilization before we have the capability to make first contact, and at that stage we'll be looking for others at a similar stage of development, because communicating with meatbags over audio analogue will be like reading war and peace at a rate of one word a week.

If a K3+ meets us, better hope they feel like uplifting us rather than just downloading our brains and grinding a few million of us up for genetic data modelling before deconstructing our planet.

 

[Carnagath]

I don't think humanity will ever manage to get in contact with an alien species. People in this here fine thread seem to think that there are technologically advanced aliens just around the corner, and even go so far as to mention galactic wars etc. Too much Mass Effect probably

People seem to forget that the universe is a pretty damn big place, beyond any human being's imagination (and if recent theories are to be accounted, it's only one of many universes). If we've learned anything from the planets outside our solar system that we've managed to locate so far, it's that the vast VAST majority of them are incapable of sustaining any form of life (with the sole exception of Gliese 581 g, which still wouldn't be able to sustain life as we know it on Earth, but could possibly have some sort of life, if we assume that it would flourish at extreme temperatures and without a day/night cycle).

Of course, I'm not trying to say that the universe is lifeless. It's pretty much given that life exists out there. Intelligent life however is an entirely different deal. There may very well be NO other intelligent life in our universe. Out of the billions of species that have lived on our Earth, ours is a really freaky exception that could have very very easily never happened.

Even if we assume that there are intelligent forms of life out there however, this is where the true madness begins. Contacting an alien species that is at approximately the same stage of technological advancement as we are is, in my opinion, out of the question. Neither are we likely to discover any kind of communicative species in an early agricultural / hunting stage, since that would require us to actually land and look for them. Not gonna happen, and even if it did, they would be of no use to us and we would probably exterminate them because we are assholes and their planet has high gold deposits or whatever. As for far more advanced civilizations than us... I don't think we would even count as "intelligent" to them. If such species do exist, I don't see any reason why they would give a fuck about us. They might even already know of our existence and have chosen to ignore us, the same way that we ignore ants while we're walking down the street.

As for the whole "galactic war" business... I'm not even gonna comment on that. We can't even sustain our own stock market and banks without them crashing every couple of decades, but we would be able to engage in a galactic war? Seriously.