More like only one star! Ha! Get it cause… we’ve only got one… Fine! Never mine!
Anywho, this is a pretty interesting problem posed in the Fermi Paradox, where it asks that very question. If there really were aliens or time travelers or any of that other kind of stuff… why have we not met any yet? Couple that with the Drake Equation (which puts the number of intelligent civilization in the galaxy between 1 and 20,000) and it’s a very valid question… where is everyone?
So where are they? Saying the hell away from us if they’re even the slightest bit intelligent! Come on, who are we fooling here? If there are aliens, why would they want to talk to us? We’re constantly at the brink of global war and insanely intolerant of our own kind, let alone an extraterrestrial one. As for time travelers, why would they even want to visit us yet? What have we done so far that would warrant seeing again? Maybe to us it might seem exciting, but who knows, maybe the best is yet to come!
That, and all them thick glasses types try to say “oh if you go back in time, it would create another universe/timeline so we would never know it happened”. Bupkis I say! Yeah, I know that’s what all the popular kids are saying, but I just never liked the multiverse thing. I guess if you apply my “time as a field” theory, it would explain how it’s possible to have multiple versions of a universe going while able to share the same space and matter. Works pretty nice actually… Anyways, I’ve never like the whole paradox thing either. Not sure what my thoughts are on it other than “it doesn’t matter cause it’s all a probability field”, but that seems a little too easy. Still… I like that timey wimey wibbly wobbly goo idea… Ah well… who knows, maybe Time Cop was right; if you come into contact with yourself from your past you’ll implode! XD
Since we don’t have any inkling of how FTL or time travel technology will work/could work/is even possible, anyone who says they are even able to reasonably hypothesize about such topics is either delusional or a liar. With the whole multiverse theory and whatnot, same thing. I can’t imagine how people can think themselves smart enough to imagine they can make reasonable hypotheses about anything beyond our universe when we can’t even grasp how our own universe fully works.
Long story short, everyone who thinks they know anything about time travel or other universes or aliens is wishing or guessing at best.
yeah, that’s one of those great things about science eh? kinda goes along with my “science is a belief” thing, cause at the end of the day, we know jack about any of it and “why” it works. maybe the ICP was a bit more profound than we gave them credit for… how do magnets work indeed!
but yeah, here’s the thing about stuff we “can’t” actually interact with… think about dimensions. all these scientists try to understand how things look and work in dimensions past our own 3, but I don’t think we can (least not yet… if ever). you can see down just fine, but you can’t see up. a 2d object in 1 dimension looks like a bunch of dashes or a line. a 3d object in 2 dimensions looks like it was drawn on paper; like a sphere in 2d is a circle. same with a 4d object. the best we can comprehend is the 3d cross section.
what I mean by all that is when we talk about trying to “see up” through dimensions or universes or cross-sections of time, all we can really hope to accomplish is our best shot in the dark. so you’re right; anyone trying to claim any kind of universal doctrine about how things work is probably talking a bit out of both ends. of course, I’m different, cause I already know my posterior is doing most of the talking and inform my readers as such. >)
true true, they may be wishing or guessing… that is… of course… unless they’re time traveling aliens (preferably in a blue wooden box), then I guess they have a little bit more credibility. >D
I remember seeing something on TV once about a machine that someone is trying to build that would be able to send data back in time, the only issue with the design is that it would only be able to send data back as far as the device itself was on for apparently. So it could be something like we won’t be able to see it happening around us until it’s actually made possible. As far as aliens, the chances of them being out there is small, and the chances of them being smarter then a cat is even smaller IMHO. Sure, we could find life out there, but it could just end up being more critters for us to take care of.
the cool thing with that would be, as soon as you built the machine, you’d start getting all kinds of tweets from the future! >D
well… lets look at things objectively… up until, say, 10,000 yrs ago (which is, by universal standards, a blink of they eye) we weren’t all that much smarter than a cat ourselves. ok, that’s probably a bit of an underestimation, but you get my point.
but hey, I’m going with Captain Kirk on this one… as long as they look human enough, they don’t got to be all that smart. 7)
that was supposed to be a wink… kinda fail…
i’m more thinking that if time travel is possible, it’s meant to be, like you think you go back in time to change stuff, but all you’re doing is keeping it the way it is.
well, here’s the thing… there’s not a whole lot out there in the way of physics to say you can’t go back in time. we seem to observe and interpret the universe as being linear, but this may not necessarily be the end all be all.
for instance… those sciency types believe there was a point before the big bang when even time didn’t exist… how that works, I don’t even have the brain power to imagine (well… at least not without a few drinks first). but yeah, they got some theoretical particles that can go backwards in time, all that junk with time dilation because of speed or gravity, and then you got my personal little idea about it being a field (which is probably bupkis too).
anyways, yeah… at the end of the day, what you have is a lot of possibilities and not a whole lot of hard facts. give it another few hundred years and if we haven’t blown ourselves apart by then, maybe we’ll know a bit better how it all works.
Why do we assume, that if aliens exist, they have to be more advanced then us? That’s what I never understood.
ha, that’s actually kinda like one of my comics coming in the near future… but yeah, I think we just hope that there are smarter folks out there than us… cause I mean really… look at us… we’re kinda tarded. >)
@Pip, we can’t travel between stars but if they can that means, yes, they are more technologically advanced. It is a linear algorithm and there aint no way to be able to travel like that and have a steam-age technology level, as far as we know. Mind you if our maths and physics are wrong then maybe you can, but again that means they are still way ahead of us but running on steam power.
psh, if they work a basic zipper they’re probably smarter than us. >)
hmm… we certainly need to revamp our methods of propulsion if we’re going to be traveling between the stars in any kind of reasonable time. I think we’ll get there though… not sure when, but eventually.
hey! what’s wrong with steam power!!! I’ve seen some crazy awesome inventions! like a steam powered computer! think in a past life I was a steam punker. >D
[has to snicker at the comments] Sorry, they’re just… Well, I agree with Pip&Coffin… Assuming they’d be advanced is kind of possible wishful thinking. I mean let’s face it, we’re screw ups. We’re Hoping somebody Else will come along and pick us up out of the gutter.
But at the same time, a lot of us are terrified of just that. We’ve been sitting here going, “Look at us! We has Thumbs! We is All Smart n… stuff.”
And we’d really s.o.l. if somebody smarter came along and went, “Oy vey… What a lot of meshugenahs.”
Which quite honestly, think about it… Nobody wants to visit where “Deliverance” was set… If they’re smarter than us, neither would they.
[snickers again]@Coffin kind of off topic sorta but your thing where you don’t see how it would hurt anything reminds me of several scenes from various Star Trek episodes. Mostly Capt. Kirk giving the bureaucrats fits because he kept saying everything was fine, nothing was changed to which one of the bureaucrats groans and says, “Why do they Always say that… Like they would Know if it had!”
Also wanted to add: The whole thing about knowing anything about any of this… The truth is nobody knows anything… Yet.
But there are some brilliant thinkers out there that look at things from angles most people don’t. Before you pooh pooh anybody being able to have a handle on things please remember that before the 1960′s nobody thought we could go into space at all. And before that that there could even Be M Class planets out there. And before that it was that the stars Were suns of other galaxies. Before that the earth went around the sun, before that the earth was round and so on and so on.
The one difference between most religions and science is that science tends to look for the Tangible, look for proof of what it’s claiming. Whereas most religions just sort of wing it; hanging their hooks on the Intangible and just basing things on well… Hearsay.
Not that I don’t agree that science Isn’t its own form of religion, it’s just one with a better track record of having its tenets backed by something concrete and proven as being believable.
psh… what’s so good about thumbs? flippers! flippers is the next evolutionary step! >D
hahaha, true true… that’s probably the reality of it… nothing idealistic like the timeline splitting or causing a paradox, but just causing it to rewrite itself… like recording over an old vhs tape. (do people still remember those?) once I build the machine, I’ll let you all know how it turns out, lol! XD
very true. I’m a great optimist about the turnout of the human race, despite it’s history… I’m sure, given enough time, it will have things figured out… and maybe grow up enough to stop trying to kill itself.
but you know, I wouldn’t say science is always rooted in the tangible. we’ve taken some crazy wild leaps of faith before (I mean, come on… I grew up learning that blood was blue… it’s not btw). kinda hinges on my “science as belief” thingy. and if you trace religion back far enough, your shamans were both priest and scientist; indistinguishable from one another, since at their most basic fundamentals, both parties were just trying to understand the universe. I think the difference between them (beyond the obvious) is the flexibility to change. but you are right that science’s branch does favor to seek the visual tactile results… except for, you know, those weirdo mathy types… that’s a faith all its own. but that’s a story for another time… preferably one that’s not at 3am… XD
excellent chat btw! I love seeing what y’all got going on in your heads!
The surest sign that there are intelligent dimension travelers, time travelers or alien races out there is the fact that they haven’t revealed themselves to us. :)
ha! I really like that!
Well, when i was little, i used to put myself to sleep by thinking of how time travel was possible, and i was very delighted when i found out that my stupid ideas as a kid before bedtime were actually what most people believe today. Really, the only way to prove or disprove time travel is to do it. Also, i may have had a brain fart and forgot what the hell i was posting to begin with….
hehe, isn’t it cool when that happens?!
that’s what I like to hear! theoretical physics be darned! we need to fire up the Tesla Coils and start doing some REAL science!