h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Someones logic above went along the lines of there's an infinite amount of space, and therfore an infinite number of stars. They then say that there must be a large number of planets. Hmm, that number should be infinite then!

Though I'm not sure that the universe is infinite. Big though.

My take on contact with another culture by them visiting us is this:

For them to develop to a point where they have the ability to build craft/systems to travel vast interstella distances requires some co-operation on the planet. Elce whoever first comes up with the idea keeps it to them selves and uses it for their personal gain and or eventual war breaks out and kills the species. We are in danger of doing this.

In order for this species or multiple species (which would be more cool, we could use the help of some mice) to work together enough to reach us requires a state which I long for, when the whole planet realises that killing each other is just stupid. Only a species working together can reach us.

I thinks that ants could do it, if we gave them a bit of space to evolve.

Anyway if they have reached us it will be because they want to or possibly need to and wont just come round here to kill us because it's fun.

So possibly this is taking Human morals and applying it to an alien spacies

The size of the universe is a different problem. Many people assume that as objects more than 12 billion light years away can't be seen (as the universe isn't old enough for the light to reach us) then they don't exist. This is still argued about ! The practicalities of contacting an alien race are separate too. Technology is tricky, and in history contact with outside cultures has had drastic effects (like the native americans).

There's another train of thought I find quite appealing which explains the both the similarity of the "crews" of these "ships" to us, and the reason they only ever show up where no-one will believe they were there... They *are* us!

The theory goes that these are not alien space ships, but rather time machines from our own future. They cannot interact with us in any way that would change the future significantly, or they would risk a paradox situation. But they always seem to be hovering around important military and religous events... I suspect they are just a school history class on an outing, and occasionally they amuse themselves by drawing pretty pictures in crops just to see how we'll react, as a sort of "social science" experiment.

Cattle mutilations could just be the collection of genetic material to re-establish lost bloodlines, as, perhaps, could "abductions"... If this were the case, it would be a good pointer that we were dealing with a future version of ourselves, as an "outsider" might just treat all us mammals alike, and leave the countryside covered in surgically mutilated people...

There's an old equation which runs something like this:
There are a hundred million stars in our galaxy. If only 1% of those stars have planets, that's 1000000 solar systems. And if only 1% of those have life, that's still 10000 inhabited worlds.
And if only 1% of those have life that has advanced to a point similar to or greater than out own, that's still 100 advanced civilisations out there somewhere.

As to the "time travel" idea - i was wondering when someone would mention that. Yes, it seems like a good idea. But with one small flaw.

We haven't invented time travel yet. Current theory says you couldn't take a time machine back to before it was created. That's a paradox. So the reason we haven't seen time travellers is that they can't reach us. Interesting idea.
The "Grays" certainly do have a number of superficial similarities to us; enough to consider that they might be a future humanity. And their habit of popping up and carrying out research without asking anyone is certainly consistent with human behaviour.

However, I don't tend to follow the ETH hypothesis when it comes to UFOs. In fact, since I have no idea what they are, I'll listen to anything .

Most current theories of time travel state you could never travel back to a time before the "time machine" was built... But, what if, sometime in the future, we discover a natural phenomenon which facilitates time travel which has lain undiscovered for millions of years...?

We'd probably not want to alert our past selves to it, partly to avoid paradoxes, but more importantly to stop huge hairy pink relatives with unnaturally small heads and creepy white bits round their eyes dropping in to cocktail parties...

That's a pretty big "What If". But I can sympathise with the "ancestors at the cocktail party" thing. No one really wants that kind of scene, do they?

I'm fascinated by the cattle mutilation thing. What i want to know is, given that whoever is dong it inevitably excises the same bits of the cow...WHY??? What's so important about those locations?

And why do they use black helecopters and laser surgery equipment to do it - wouldn't it be cheaper to buy the cattle legitimately, then sell on the bits they don't want to Burger King?

LOL! Maybe they do!!

Anyway, backtracking a bit... (sorry about this)
How can we make a "good guess" if we have only ever looked on one other planet?
And applying someone else's logic, if there is an infinite amount of galaxies, stars and therefore planets, any guess we make about the probability of existance of other life would surely be infinitely inaccurate? I think...

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You know, I don't think black helicopters are responsible for the actual mutilating.

For one thing, that would argue that they are manned by a human agency. If that were the case, why would they leave evidence lying around? It's not the way a government organisation would operate. Why leave messy and perplexing evidence when you could make the cattle disappear...by selling them on to govmt. commissaries for example.

Nope, cattle mutilation is either a hell of a lot more mundane than I'm thinking or an awful lot wierder...

I can accept the concept of aliens, but I have a lot of difficulty with the idea that they'd come a heck of a long way from wherever; expending, I presume, considerable effort, just to mutilate some cattle and make patterns in wheatfields. I know that I shouldn't try and ascribe human motivation to something not human, but it's a non-starter, isn't it?

Turning to the infinite universe thing (and I understood that most scientists think that space is finite - just because we can't see the edges doesn't mean it goes on forever, and if Big Bang theory is correct then it can't be infinite) if the universe is infinite, then it has an infinite number of stars in it, and an infinite number of planets.

I would have thought that given an infinite number of planets it is certain that conditions to support life would exist on more than one, and indeed that intelligent life would evolve on more than one. How could it not, given infinte opportunities? In fact I would expect they had digital watches somewhere out there. In an infinite number of places, in fact.

Of course if the universe is finite then this argument is nonsense, but given that the universe is, if not infinite, then big (see the Guide for an explanation of how big space is) it still seems quite likely that a star similar to our sun exists somewhere else with a planet similar to earth orbiting it. And if it does, then life may have evolved. It doesn't mean that they are going to come here and find us though, there's presumably a lot more stars where life didn't evolve to explore first.

If the universe is infinite, then *every* possible occurence would statistically happen somewhere. For example, somewhere in the universe a planet looking exactly like earth but where was free would exist, because it's possible that it could happen.

If the universe is finite this isn't true. Pity.

This all takes a different turn when you put Quantum mechanics into the brew.

I'd personally be surprised if life did not exists elsewhere in the Universe. I'd also be very surprised if there were advanced technological civilisations in the galactic neighbourhood. Fermi's Paradox poses this question, and comes to the conclusion that they don't exist. Period.

How so?

Enrico Fermi stated that if one looks at the rate at which an advanced (i.e. spacefaring) civilisation would spread through the universe, compared with the age of the universe itself, in all probability we would be overrun by them by now. We've also probed a hell of a lot of space in the vicinity and detected not a peep from anyone. Of course, we might, as a race, be so shockingly boring that we've been labelled forever as 'harmless' and ignored thereafter.

And if they are in fact the same age as us and a long way away?

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Then they ain't advanced. Well, certainly not advanced enough to go walking round country roads in silly helmets and saying 'bleep bleep', then doing horrible things to cows afterwards.

Fermi also assumed that interstellar travel is possible, and that it would be realistic for a civilisation to spread throughout the universe. But populations don't always expand exponentially forever.

Fermi's paradox (like the Drake equation) is quoted far more than it deserves to be. We know that intelligent (ish) life has evolved on one planet. This tells us nothing about how likely it is to evolve on another planet, and we don't know enough about evolution to draw any conclusions.

The anthropic principle ("the universe is just so, however improbable, as if it weren't we wouldn't be here to question it") tells us that it is quite possible that the evolution and survival of intelligent life is so improbable that it is found on only one planet in the universe.

Be it is equally possible that such life is common. We don't know.

So you know for a fact that interstellar travel is possible?

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Simpost, oopsy...

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