Hey guys, what are your thoughts on the existence of extraterrestrial life and the potential involvement of governments in concealing or studying such entities.
I think it’s silly to rule out alien life all together. We don’t know so much about the universe. Whether extra terrestrial life has visited Earth, I don’t know and I don’t think anyone does.
Extraterrestrial life = yes. It’s a big universe and the chances of us being the only life in the entire universe is slim.
Aliens visiting us = no. For the same reason as above. It’s a big ass universe.
Governments being able to hide aliens from us = lol no
Anyone who thinks the government can hide anything is vastly overestimating their capabilities. They’re basically keystone cops with the demeanor of storm troopers. Play benny hill or imperial march over literally any declassified CIA document and at least one of them will fit.
If aliens had the tech to travel a million light years to visit us, they’d have taken over the planet in an hour.
Lol Too long, 10 minutes?
TBF, it took 2 minutes for aliens to be worshiped as “eye in the sky” in 3bp
I assume other life exists somewhere, because the universe is practically infinite in size, but I also assume that we will not meet them, because the universe is practically infinite in size.
Basically my thoughts. The speed of light, while the fastest thing we know, is as slow as smell on the scale of the universe. Any race of beings able to get here, check us out, and leave, would need technology that would break physics as we understand it. Not to say it’s impossible, but we’ve now firmly stepped into beliefs, rather than anything based on observable data. Also, the notion of a race being so advanced they can travel faster than light accidentally crashing on our planet is pretty silly to me.
GET THIS MAN HIS VOTES
I mean, we could potentially see them if they’re in any of the neighboring galaxies, and if they’re in ours they should have arrived and turned Earth into a colony long ago. Space is big, but time is long. Loud aliens would have to be truly rare indeed for this.
I don’t know, if this is worth arguing over. Depending on how far advanced you expect such a life form to be, obviously they might be capable of things that we currently consider impossible. But well, to illustrate what I mean:
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The next galaxy is the Andromeda galaxy. It is 2.5 million light years away. There could be life over there right now, but we wouldn’t know, until about 2.5 million years from now.
Compare that to the emergence of modern humans, which was 300,000 years ago. We didn’t start sending out radio waves until some generations ago.
None of this means that it’s not possible for life to have existed on some planet 2.5 million years ago, so we’d be seeing their radio waves right now, but even then, we might interpret them as background noise. -
The next star is Proxima Centauri. It is 4.24 light years away. So, we could see things from there in 4.24 years, which is pretty good, although still absolute hell of a delay for exchanging messages.
But for them to actually visit us, even if they go at 1% the speed of light, that would mean they’d need 424 years of travel time. With little sunlight or other energy sources on the way.
And 1% of the speed of light is an insane 10,800,000 km/h. Compare that to the fastest man-made object, the Parker Solar Probe, which is expected to go 720,000 km/h, when it closely passes by the Sun.
Basically, we can be extremely generous with these examples and still see practically insurmountable time frames.
Worm holes could theoretically exist. Maybe a sufficiently advanced race could defy physics as we know it. But if they can’t, that’s a pretty good explanation why they’re hiding.
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The universe has so many planets that it is unlikely that life only started on earth. However, the universe is simply too big. We are alone in the universe. And the aliens, they are alone too.
I like those last three sentences. You managed to capture the infinite size of the universe and what it means. Bravo.
Has intelligent life that we could communicate with ever existed in time? Yes. Does it exist in this exact moment? Unlikely. Is it or is it ever been in a proximity that we could communicate? No.
That’s not to say there isn’t intelligent life that we cannot understand or communicate with. If we exist inside the brain of some universally large creature, and our existence is just luck, we won’t ever be able to communicate.
All the whistleblowers have testified under oath and were demonstrably employed by the aforementioned organizations. Further disregard would be arrogance. However, it’s less about “aliens” and more about additional forms of non-human intelligence. Essentially, we are facing a new paradigm in physics. This is a positive development.
The whistleblowers are around in an amount and level of story consistency that makes me think they are grifters.
Roughly estimating, there are about 500 employees from CIA subprograms making such claims. They do so under oath and without significant financial gain. If their employer were to contradict or refute their claims, they could be prosecuted criminally in the US. This is a different quality than before, where witnesses had no connection to government agencies.
Is there a list somewhere? I’ve only heard about a handful, and according to Wikipedia the CIA only employs 21,575, so that would be quite a lot.
If their employer were to contradict or refute their claims, they could be prosecuted criminally in the US.
The CIA famously doesn’t confirm or deny very much.
I don’t know about a complete list. You also have three sources. First, David Grusch mentions 80 additional witnesses. Then there’s Dr. Steven Greer, who mentions 300 to 500 witnesses in his videos. And then there’s the “To the Stars Academy,” which is said to be purely a CIA affair. I can’t imagine that in the USA you can accuse the CIA of crimes and come from the same place. So, I consider such witnesses to be of higher value. But of course, always with caution. Once CIA, always CIA. So, targeted disinformation is also possible. But the topic has already changed. No more green men, but “there’s something.” Also, how the media in the US report. Once a UFO landing in Las Vegas. Then that in the Mal in Florida. Quite interesting.
Claimed witnesses mean nothing, and I have 3,000 that will back that up. /s
Three sources. That’s what I was thinking, and their stories don’t much up or hold constant very well. It doesn’t matter what their clearance was, anybody can like dirty money (like from a book deal or appearance where they say what enthusiasts want to hear). That’s actually where most spies come from, and so why the CIA exists in the first place.
One can perceive many things stereotypically. However, I don’t think all UFO witnesses are bought or trying to sell books. Many just want to share their story, and in the past, they were often stigmatized and marginalized. However, that’s becoming less and less common.
I mean, I’ve personally seen a UFO more than once. I have no idea what they were - especially the one during a thunderstorm - but I’m pretty sure they were human, just based on who normally builds things like that.
I never had a little green man visit me, and to my knowledge most the cases of that read a lot like someone’s sleep disturbance or episode. The remainder are few enough I do go to lying. If one landed in a crowd in Arizona, I’d give it to you, aliens are here, but they just haven’t.
The government stuff is more about not wanting anyone to feel like they’ll be ridiculed and their career will be over if they talk about seeing things they can’t explain in case that thing turns out to be some new technology developed by other people. And that there might be ways the laws of physics behave to make weird stuff show up that we don’t understand, so studying it could result in improvements to our understanding of physics. There’s no credible evidence of aliens that has been uncovered by any of that.
You can see it in the renaming of UFO to UAP. UFO stands for unidentified flying object and never implied aliens were the ones flying the object. It was changed to unidentified aerial phenomenon because UFO did imply that whatever was seen was flying and an object when it could just be refracted light in some cases, which is neither flying nor an object.
I want to believe but there isn’t a good reason to do so at this point.
And there is non-human intelligence on earth, but outside of humans it’s only used for problem solving, communication, and basic tool use. I’m not even aware of any animal that uses tools to make other tools other than humans and maybe some of the other extinct hominids, which would be a requirement if you’re saying non-human intelligence on earth is capable of creating UAPs. Unless I’m misunderstanding what you mean.
Carl Sagan was the Neil deGrasse Tyson of his day. No contributions to science other than self-popularization.
Yet he left this lingering idea that because the universe is immense the unique preconditions required for life would necessarily appear many times. Many people assume this is a “scientific” position and just rattle it off like a pull-string toy.
I can’t even begin to describe how abhorent this is. Leave. And let the door hit you on the way out.
I’m so sorry that happened to you sweetheart! Tell me where, exactly, did the bad man touch you?
I’m open to the idea of life outside of Earth, but I’m sceptical that governments can keep them secret when they can’t keep sex scandals, drug use or financial crimes by leaders secret.
There’s one more thing to consider: when we think of aliens, we constantly think of those blue human-like creatures based on carbon life forms.
Most likely, alien life will be formed entirely differently: maybe it will be silicon-based, maybe something else, or a planetary mind, or something we can’t even imagine.
And no, we didn’t contact them yet and are unlikely to in many, many lifetimes.
As other people have said we cannot for of they do our do not exist.
That said thinking about how big the universe is, my personal opinion is they have to exist.
As for governments covering them up… highly unlikely. They can’t even cover up their dirty laundry, let alone aliens
Depends on what do you mean by existence of aliens:
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Some chemical/biological processes happen on other planets in the universe, that are necessary for life to exist. Or maybe there are “life” forms like viruses.
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Life exists, but only in the simplest form, like single-cell organisms (e.g. bacteria).
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Life exists, but only in the form of simple multi-cell organisms.
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More advanced species exist, like fish or frogs on Earth, but nothing like Humans.
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Other advanced species with their own civilizations exist (or existed and destroyed themselves), similar to ours, but again they might not look like humans at all.
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Super advanced civilization of aliens exists, and they have tech we could only dream of.
Given that we know only one place where life naturally exists (Earth), it’s probably hard to tell which one is true. But I think that it’s sane to think that there are at least several other civilizations out there similar to ours, but given that our universe is relatively young, we might be the only one in our neighborhood (even on galaxy level) for now.
It’s also very important to note that extraterrestrial life might not resemble our life at all, and make us reconsider what even is life.
I’m intrigued by 0. Nobody ever talks about that one. Multicellular life and complex life have independently shown up more than once on Earth, so 2 and 3 are hard to defend.
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I refuse to believe that we are the only intelligent life in the universe, even though for most humans that bar is pretty low.
When I finally “die” I’ll no doubt get kicked back out into the real world and have to plug in another quarter.
You will never die. You will watch everyone else die out over the next million or so years, and then you will be alone until you figure out how to create new people.
…story of my life.
Story of all our lives, unfortunately
I kinda don’t think there are little gray men
But I think we fundamentally do not understand what it is to be conscious. I don’t think we know what is and is not conscious. I think we’re limited by our brains and our dimensionality. I think there’s a lot more right under our noses.
Life probably exists somewhere else.
That doesn’t mean they visit us in secret and there’s a conspiracy to hide it.
It’s two very different things
Also, life and intelligent life are two different things.
Doesn’t mean they don’t either. :)
I think it’s likely they do. There has been so many sightings through the years and so many stories that I believe no smoke without fire, so to speak.
It’s also what we would do. We (humans) would have similar strategy if we had similar technology to visit other planets.
the pentagon did release that footage back in 2020.
wont hold my breath until we actually get to know more about it, but something really appears to be going on.
I do! Perhaps alien life could even be hiding in plain sight on Earth, and someday we will discover a virus or a bacteria that looks nothing like anything else on Earth and could’ve hitched a ride on a meteorite!
Google water bears.
Tardigrades are animals, as confirmed by genetic analysis, and morphologically resemble what we think of as everyday animals even more closely than, say, Cnidaria (jellyfish, corals, hydras, etc.)
