9 ms·

Alien Dreams: The long history of speculation about extraterrestrials

58 points by anarbadalov 5y ago

flerovium 5y ago
> Whewell pointed out that humans, according to the geological record then being unearthed, had been present on this planet for only an “atom of time.” By Bayesian logic, this says ominous things about the expected value of how long humanity will remain on the planet...
waybaily 5y ago
The universe is so vast; you can't confidently say that we are the only ones living here. Maybe we're not up to a point in time in which we can explore the worlds outside of the Earth, especially we don't have the equipment to last long and withstand extreme temperatures of other planets. There is so much out there, it may not be in our time, but there will be a big chance our future generations can truly meet and interact with extraterrestrials.
- awb 5y ago
  Maybe. Things are still very far apart relative to our current lifespan. We might be 1,000 years or more away from fully colonizing our own solar system before it’s worth a long, dangerous journey to another star.
  - bufferoverflow 5y ago
    Due to time dilation, the journey might not be that long.
    - monkeynotes 5y ago
      But reporting back to your home world would be almost irrelevant since thousands of years would have passed there, right?
  - throwaway316943 5y ago
    Everyone always thinks along the lines of current biological limitations when talking about space travel while ignoring the huge advances that are being made in biotechnology. Given another 100 years I think we’ll be pretty good at customizing our biology to suit our needs. Hell, we probably have the required technical ability right now, we just lack the theoretical understanding.
- BulgarianIdiot 5y ago
  Technically we can confidently say we're the only ones living here, because we've defined the word "life" and what it means. And we tend to define life in a very terrestrially and DNA-specific way, despite we don't mention it explicitly. My favorite are the pointless arguments about whether viruses are alive or not. As if "it's alive" is some objective property of a thing. It's not. It's a word we made up. Maybe the Moon is conscious for all we know. We know almost nothing. As for effective communication and interaction with aliens, it'll most likely require cybernetics and genetic engineering. The idea humans will colonize the universe is very naive. We're Earthlings. We're extremely fragile outside very specific conditions on this very specific planet. To live successfully outside we'll have to change a lot. Sure, technically whatever that ends up being we can still call "humans" but it won't look like humans do right now, that's for sure.
  - mekkkkkk 5y ago
    I don't know which definition of life you go by, but most of them seems to be pretty lenient. Not sure how you can be confident about earthlings being the only ones living up to those (pun intended).
    - Aeronwen 5y ago
      It's easy. If aliens turn up, everyone will be too busy worrying about aliens to care about some prediction being wrong.
    - BulgarianIdiot 5y ago
      Maybe you can tell me which definition of life you go by that's "lenient". What I see is bunch of arbitrary capabilities, that we decided sum up to being life. "the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death." Technically if we decide to INTERPET this leniently, then phenomena like crystals and fire would qualify as life. So would viruses. Yet, it also says "the condition that distinguishes from inorganic matter", and those are not "organic matter". And what is organic matter? Well... that happens to be defined as carbon-based DNA/RNA coded proteins. That's QUITE specific to earthlings.
markus_zhang 5y ago
Have to plug in this again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9kbcGfX35M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9kbcGfX35M
- edelans 5y ago
  Nice one ! Consider also reading about the Fermi Paradox : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox It really makes me dizzy every time I take some time to wonder about it...
  - mikeyjk 5y ago
    Your description makes me wonder if you more so meant Drake's equation. But, either way, both are awesome and related. My intro was a discussion panel Seti did in the early 2000's - ~'where is ET?' The conclusion at the time was effectively that the ticket to earth was way too expensive.
awb 5y ago
Funny that our ideas of aliens run a similar trajectory to our own technology. Pre-flight, some were convinced that Martians were building canals or Mars, right as canals were being built to facilitate shipping, the prominent technology of the day. Now, some are convinced that aliens are sending small crafts and probes to study our planet, right as we’re sending small crafts and probes to study other planets. And before modern technology, mythological creatures were human-like or animal-like, which was the pinnacle of intelligence in our pre-tech world.
- 35mm 5y ago
  A drunk guy was stumbling about looking for something under a lamppost. A friendly gentleman asked what the drunk was looking for. “My keys”. The gentleman replied “and did you loose them under this lamppost?” “No, but that’s where the light is”
- johnfn 5y ago
  This is such a cool insight - did you come up with it? It's totally worth writing up into a blog post or something.
  - 52-6F-62 5y ago
    It's pretty much the present background tale to the UFO/UAP scenarios: That every mythology, magical treatise, and religious, occult, or otherwise spiritual experience, UFO experience, etc, are all aspects of reality tuned to the capabilities of our perceptions. The running theory being that they're all the same thing, but rather incorporeal—based on yet-unknown physical principles involving consciousness or the larger reality we reside in and either manifesting from our own consciousness or another consciousness outside of material reality. Of course, such a theory—while fantastical and exciting—is a pretty clever catch-all. Catch up on any modern UFO reading and that's where it all points. And probably fairly, given the kinds of endeavours various defence agencies and their investigations. I think it also follows Jacques Vallée's theories, but I haven't actually read any of his books or papers. I'm intrigued, but not enough to wade too deeply. There are blog posts and online-forum-wiz expoundings galore.
seriousquestion 5y ago
Do people still make claims about alien abduction? Or has that been made extinct by the ubiquity of smartphones?
- ceilingcorner 5y ago
  If the aliens can travel across space and kidnap people, surely they can figure out how to disable a smartphone for a few seconds.
- vlunkr 5y ago
  I don't understand what smartphones have to do with alien abduction.
  - mehphp 5y ago
    Basically, the prevalence of smartphones means we can record pretty much anything at anytime. Therefore, if abductions happen with any regularity, surely at least one would be captured on camera.
    - soylentcola 5y ago
      Hell...you don't even need to snap a photo. Just take a look at your GPS or cell triangulation data for the time you think you may have been abducted.
  - bufferoverflow 5y ago
    As the quality and the number of cameras radically increased in the last decades, the quality and the number of UFO videos didn't increase. The only exception I saw were the videos released by the government agencies, they are actually interesting.
  - smhenderson 5y ago
    My understanding of that statement is that, with the advent of ubiquitous smart phones with cameras, there's not much room to believe someone's claim of alien abduction these days. If they have no picture or video to prove it then it's likely not true. Sure, some people may get abducted without their phone, but the possibility of no one ever having a phone to record such an event is statistically improbable. So, with too few people able to suspend belief and buy into claims of alien abduction without proof from their phone, no one really makes that claim anymore. Maybe that's not what the GP was getting at but that's how I read it...
h2odragon 5y ago
I still think there's room on (and in) this planet for life we don't recognize as such yet. Human ignorance is boundless, but our arrogance tells us we know more than we do.
- seph-reed 5y ago
  I'm on board with this. If we had the technology for it, I would no longer be humanoid. In fact, I'd treat it as an artistic venture to become something completely unbefore seen. And perhaps change with some frequency, just for kicks.
- throwaway316943 5y ago
  Ultraterrestrials would be interesting but they’d also need a really good reason for hiding. Now, if they no longer live here but are just coming back for a visit…
VonGuard 5y ago
The idea that alien lifeforms we could recognize are visiting us and traveling in space is utterly ludicrous. On the cosmic scale, we are the same thing and same size as an ant. No cosmically connected society would even think of talking to us. That's because, I believe, cosmically connected societies are, essentially, floating planet sized brains. Their living beings are basically the cells of this organism, and networks of roads, data lines and such are the connective tissue linking the neurons that exist as beings of that planet. At some point in our future, we'll all be a unified race of people working towards not only the betterment of the planet, but towards the ability for this giant floating spherical brain to reach out to other giant floating spherical brains using methods of communication that can only exist at the planetary scale. By that time, humanity will be unrecognizable for us. People would be as different from normal folks now as those on the autistic spectrum are. We're evolving, the planet is evolving, and on the cosmic scale, it's the only logical explanation for why the universe seems empty: it's not that there aren't other civilizations, it's that they're essentially so different in scale from us when they reach the galactic phase of growth that we will not be able to tell the difference from a planet-sized brain and a regular planet. Additionally, the size of the cosmos hammers home the idea that ant-sized being such as ourselves hoping to navigate the universe is simply silly and we shouldn't be much concerned beyond our solar system for a good million years or so. We can pick this UFO thing back up when we're all one unified peoples across the globe with a single purpose. I will additionally bet that there's about a 99% chance that such a society would be ruled by computer overlords. I'd be OK with that, actually, as we've REALLY fucked things up using people as leaders, recently. I cannot imagine saying that 20 years ago, but here we are. This will all probably start to happen in earnest (these changes to humanity, I mean) sometime after we install dictators to deal with the climate change problems which we allowed to get utterly out of control to a point where the only solution will be utter dictatorships and violence and instant death for anyone who damages the planet. It'll REALLY suck, but we will hopefully come out the other side with fewer opportunities for greedy people to direct entire civilizations to memorialize their greatness in blood.
- whatshisface 5y ago
  >No cosmically connected society would even think of talking to us. I am pretty sure scientists do research that involves laying down and pheromone trails. So, to the extent ants can talk, we have interest in talking to ants. You're making the unfounded assumption that aliens would treat humans like a small and unrepresentative sample (Victorian nobility?) of humans treat other humans. Although there are many anthills we don't talk to, that is because each anthill of the same species would say the same thing. There is only one human anthill, so that objection does not apply.
lalaland1125 5y ago
I think the prevalence of alien abduction testimony says something meaningful about the reliability of human testimony. Don't trust everything you hear.
birriel 5y ago
The 12th episode of Sagan's Cosmos, "Encyclopaedia Galactica", is a classic on this topic.
earthboundkid 5y ago
I like when people drop assertions about aliens to win some rhetorical debate. "Well of course science is real because an alien would also discover the Charm quark." "To a Martian observer, there's no difference between Catholic and Protestant Irish." etc. My dude, we have no evidence that there are aliens, but you're just going to assert that they agree with whatever it is you already think! And yet people don't just laugh it off for the silly move that is.
SeanFerree 5y ago
Awesome article!!
brachika 5y ago
It is so interesting how all the different cultures had different intepretations of the Cosmos, all being mythologically impressive on their own. Probably a result of curiosity and imagination coupled with lots of free time. Still, really amazing.

58 points by anarbadalov 5y ago

> Whewell pointed out that humans, according to the geological record then being unearthed, had been present on this planet for only an “atom of time.” By Bayesian logic, this says ominous things about the expected value of how long humanity will remain on the planet...

waybaily 5y ago

The universe is so vast; you can't confidently say that we are the only ones living here. Maybe we're not up to a point in time in which we can explore the worlds outside of the Earth, especially we don't have the equipment to last long and withstand extreme temperatures of other planets. There is so much out there, it may not be in our time, but there will be a big chance our future generations can truly meet and interact with extraterrestrials.

awb 5y ago
Maybe. Things are still very far apart relative to our current lifespan. We might be 1,000 years or more away from fully colonizing our own solar system before it’s worth a long, dangerous journey to another star.
- bufferoverflow 5y ago
  Due to time dilation, the journey might not be that long.
  - monkeynotes 5y ago
    But reporting back to your home world would be almost irrelevant since thousands of years would have passed there, right?
- throwaway316943 5y ago
  Everyone always thinks along the lines of current biological limitations when talking about space travel while ignoring the huge advances that are being made in biotechnology. Given another 100 years I think we’ll be pretty good at customizing our biology to suit our needs. Hell, we probably have the required technical ability right now, we just lack the theoretical understanding.
BulgarianIdiot 5y ago
Technically we can confidently say we're the only ones living here, because we've defined the word "life" and what it means. And we tend to define life in a very terrestrially and DNA-specific way, despite we don't mention it explicitly. My favorite are the pointless arguments about whether viruses are alive or not. As if "it's alive" is some objective property of a thing. It's not. It's a word we made up. Maybe the Moon is conscious for all we know. We know almost nothing. As for effective communication and interaction with aliens, it'll most likely require cybernetics and genetic engineering. The idea humans will colonize the universe is very naive. We're Earthlings. We're extremely fragile outside very specific conditions on this very specific planet. To live successfully outside we'll have to change a lot. Sure, technically whatever that ends up being we can still call "humans" but it won't look like humans do right now, that's for sure.
- mekkkkkk 5y ago
  I don't know which definition of life you go by, but most of them seems to be pretty lenient. Not sure how you can be confident about earthlings being the only ones living up to those (pun intended).
  - Aeronwen 5y ago
    It's easy. If aliens turn up, everyone will be too busy worrying about aliens to care about some prediction being wrong.
  - BulgarianIdiot 5y ago
    Maybe you can tell me which definition of life you go by that's "lenient". What I see is bunch of arbitrary capabilities, that we decided sum up to being life. "the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death." Technically if we decide to INTERPET this leniently, then phenomena like crystals and fire would qualify as life. So would viruses. Yet, it also says "the condition that distinguishes from inorganic matter", and those are not "organic matter". And what is organic matter? Well... that happens to be defined as carbon-based DNA/RNA coded proteins. That's QUITE specific to earthlings.

markus_zhang 5y ago

Have to plug in this again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9kbcGfX35M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9kbcGfX35M

edelans 5y ago
Nice one ! Consider also reading about the Fermi Paradox : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox It really makes me dizzy every time I take some time to wonder about it...
- mikeyjk 5y ago
  Your description makes me wonder if you more so meant Drake's equation. But, either way, both are awesome and related. My intro was a discussion panel Seti did in the early 2000's - ~'where is ET?' The conclusion at the time was effectively that the ticket to earth was way too expensive.

awb 5y ago

Funny that our ideas of aliens run a similar trajectory to our own technology. Pre-flight, some were convinced that Martians were building canals or Mars, right as canals were being built to facilitate shipping, the prominent technology of the day. Now, some are convinced that aliens are sending small crafts and probes to study our planet, right as we’re sending small crafts and probes to study other planets. And before modern technology, mythological creatures were human-like or animal-like, which was the pinnacle of intelligence in our pre-tech world.

35mm 5y ago
A drunk guy was stumbling about looking for something under a lamppost. A friendly gentleman asked what the drunk was looking for. “My keys”. The gentleman replied “and did you loose them under this lamppost?” “No, but that’s where the light is”
johnfn 5y ago
This is such a cool insight - did you come up with it? It's totally worth writing up into a blog post or something.
- 52-6F-62 5y ago
  It's pretty much the present background tale to the UFO/UAP scenarios: That every mythology, magical treatise, and religious, occult, or otherwise spiritual experience, UFO experience, etc, are all aspects of reality tuned to the capabilities of our perceptions. The running theory being that they're all the same thing, but rather incorporeal—based on yet-unknown physical principles involving consciousness or the larger reality we reside in and either manifesting from our own consciousness or another consciousness outside of material reality. Of course, such a theory—while fantastical and exciting—is a pretty clever catch-all. Catch up on any modern UFO reading and that's where it all points. And probably fairly, given the kinds of endeavours various defence agencies and their investigations. I think it also follows Jacques Vallée's theories, but I haven't actually read any of his books or papers. I'm intrigued, but not enough to wade too deeply. There are blog posts and online-forum-wiz expoundings galore.

seriousquestion 5y ago

Do people still make claims about alien abduction? Or has that been made extinct by the ubiquity of smartphones?

ceilingcorner 5y ago
If the aliens can travel across space and kidnap people, surely they can figure out how to disable a smartphone for a few seconds.
vlunkr 5y ago
I don't understand what smartphones have to do with alien abduction.
- mehphp 5y ago
  Basically, the prevalence of smartphones means we can record pretty much anything at anytime. Therefore, if abductions happen with any regularity, surely at least one would be captured on camera.
  - soylentcola 5y ago
    Hell...you don't even need to snap a photo. Just take a look at your GPS or cell triangulation data for the time you think you may have been abducted.
- bufferoverflow 5y ago
  As the quality and the number of cameras radically increased in the last decades, the quality and the number of UFO videos didn't increase. The only exception I saw were the videos released by the government agencies, they are actually interesting.
- smhenderson 5y ago
  My understanding of that statement is that, with the advent of ubiquitous smart phones with cameras, there's not much room to believe someone's claim of alien abduction these days. If they have no picture or video to prove it then it's likely not true. Sure, some people may get abducted without their phone, but the possibility of no one ever having a phone to record such an event is statistically improbable. So, with too few people able to suspend belief and buy into claims of alien abduction without proof from their phone, no one really makes that claim anymore. Maybe that's not what the GP was getting at but that's how I read it...

h2odragon 5y ago

I still think there's room on (and in) this planet for life we don't recognize as such yet. Human ignorance is boundless, but our arrogance tells us we know more than we do.

seph-reed 5y ago
I'm on board with this. If we had the technology for it, I would no longer be humanoid. In fact, I'd treat it as an artistic venture to become something completely unbefore seen. And perhaps change with some frequency, just for kicks.
throwaway316943 5y ago
Ultraterrestrials would be interesting but they’d also need a really good reason for hiding. Now, if they no longer live here but are just coming back for a visit…

VonGuard 5y ago

The idea that alien lifeforms we could recognize are visiting us and traveling in space is utterly ludicrous. On the cosmic scale, we are the same thing and same size as an ant. No cosmically connected society would even think of talking to us. That's because, I believe, cosmically connected societies are, essentially, floating planet sized brains. Their living beings are basically the cells of this organism, and networks of roads, data lines and such are the connective tissue linking the neurons that exist as beings of that planet. At some point in our future, we'll all be a unified race of people working towards not only the betterment of the planet, but towards the ability for this giant floating spherical brain to reach out to other giant floating spherical brains using methods of communication that can only exist at the planetary scale. By that time, humanity will be unrecognizable for us. People would be as different from normal folks now as those on the autistic spectrum are. We're evolving, the planet is evolving, and on the cosmic scale, it's the only logical explanation for why the universe seems empty: it's not that there aren't other civilizations, it's that they're essentially so different in scale from us when they reach the galactic phase of growth that we will not be able to tell the difference from a planet-sized brain and a regular planet. Additionally, the size of the cosmos hammers home the idea that ant-sized being such as ourselves hoping to navigate the universe is simply silly and we shouldn't be much concerned beyond our solar system for a good million years or so. We can pick this UFO thing back up when we're all one unified peoples across the globe with a single purpose. I will additionally bet that there's about a 99% chance that such a society would be ruled by computer overlords. I'd be OK with that, actually, as we've REALLY fucked things up using people as leaders, recently. I cannot imagine saying that 20 years ago, but here we are. This will all probably start to happen in earnest (these changes to humanity, I mean) sometime after we install dictators to deal with the climate change problems which we allowed to get utterly out of control to a point where the only solution will be utter dictatorships and violence and instant death for anyone who damages the planet. It'll REALLY suck, but we will hopefully come out the other side with fewer opportunities for greedy people to direct entire civilizations to memorialize their greatness in blood.

whatshisface 5y ago
>No cosmically connected society would even think of talking to us. I am pretty sure scientists do research that involves laying down and pheromone trails. So, to the extent ants can talk, we have interest in talking to ants. You're making the unfounded assumption that aliens would treat humans like a small and unrepresentative sample (Victorian nobility?) of humans treat other humans. Although there are many anthills we don't talk to, that is because each anthill of the same species would say the same thing. There is only one human anthill, so that objection does not apply.

lalaland1125 5y ago

I think the prevalence of alien abduction testimony says something meaningful about the reliability of human testimony. Don't trust everything you hear.

birriel 5y ago

The 12th episode of Sagan's Cosmos, "Encyclopaedia Galactica", is a classic on this topic.

earthboundkid 5y ago

I like when people drop assertions about aliens to win some rhetorical debate. "Well of course science is real because an alien would also discover the Charm quark." "To a Martian observer, there's no difference between Catholic and Protestant Irish." etc. My dude, we have no evidence that there are aliens, but you're just going to assert that they agree with whatever it is you already think! And yet people don't just laugh it off for the silly move that is.

SeanFerree 5y ago

Awesome article!!

brachika 5y ago

It is so interesting how all the different cultures had different intepretations of the Cosmos, all being mythologically impressive on their own. Probably a result of curiosity and imagination coupled with lots of free time. Still, really amazing.