ScienceFocus.com

Are aliens among us?

Star Trek has been making me think this week.

According to Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and president of the Royal Society, “[Aliens] could be staring us in the face and we just don’t recognise them.”

Lord Rees doesn’t mean that aliens are running around disguised as humans like in Men in Black, of course, but that they may not look like life on Earth.

This reminded me of Star Trek, one of many science fiction series in which alien races often appear humanoid: two eyes, two arms, two legs. But is this really realistic?

Rees was speaking at a recent conference in the run up to the 50th anniversary of the SETI project, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.

“The problem is that we’re looking for something very much like us, assuming that they at least have something like the same mathematics and technology,” said Rees. “I suspect there could be life and intelligence out there in forms we can’t conceive.”

Some scientists believe that the chances of finding life are extremely small. Making contact with intelligent life may be even less likely as they would also need to be capable of interstellar communication.

And what if aliens don’t want to speak to us? This brings us back to Star Trek: in the film First Contact, the Vulcans ignored humans until our technology became sophisticated enough to produce a warp engine — it was pure luck that they were flying by when we tested one.

So what do you think? Are humans worth knowing? Or are we being arrogant in assuming that our civilisation is advanced enough for aliens to bother with?

If an ant could talk to us, would we be interested in what it had to say?

Submitted by JV Chamary

There may be aliens

Sun, 2010-06-06 13:21
Guest

among us, yet I don't think we would ever know of such things unless the usa government would release all of its knowledge about incidents that happened and were recorded and perhaps some experiments that they were doing. 

If they are...

Thu, 2010-04-29 12:37
Guest

Even if aliens are among us, then chances are there'll be an argument, which leads into a war that could spell disaster to civilisation. If you think about it, if they are among us, their technology is going to be superior to ours, and therefore we wouldn't stand a chance in a war, and with our natures, there is almost certainly going to be one, so do we really want to make contact?

Not only that...

Thu, 2010-04-29 12:40
Guest

If they did make contact anyway, and came here, it would be a drain on rescources and that could also spell disaster even soone than a war

Are aliens among us?

Thu, 2010-03-04 15:33
Guest

Just consider. When my grandmother was born, cars did not exist. Yet she lived long enough to see man walk on the moon. The more technologically sophisticated we become, the faster we see new advances in science. If aliens had even a marginal head-start in their evolution, say 1000 years, who is to say that they haven't found out how to create wormholes, utilize dark matter to propel their space craft, or to freeze their aging process to enable them to travel the stars. As for the shape aliens have, I would suspect that natural evolutionary laws which drove us to bipedalism, freeing us to use tools, placed our reproductive organs in a relatively safe area of our body, with sensory organs like eyes, ears, sense of smell where it is most effective, etc etc, would hold true elsewhere as well.

arrogant / naive

Thu, 2010-02-25 20:05
nemisis39

I see this crop up all the time when alien life is mentioned, we are the arrogant / naive species if we think that we are the only intelligent life form in the galaxy if not the whole universe. Seti was set up to seek out aliens, by that I mean look for signs of alien life. It could be the fact that we have been contacted by an alien life form and that we have just not recognised it as such due to the parameters / guidelines that we have in place, that we think fit’s the bill.

As Star Trek has been quoted at the start of the thread I give you Star Trek 4, alien probe orbits planet not trying to contact us but trying to contact whale’s so who is to say that this has not happened and the ants have replied back telling whoever to come back in a couple of centuries. Life is out there “but not as we know it Jim :)"

Is it worth it?

Thu, 2010-02-25 16:15
Shadowwolf

Well to begin with there may well be sentient life that is so different that we currently could not recognise it. However we can only look for that which we might know, and hence SETI being geared towards a roughly similar life-form to ourselves.

Are we worth it? From the purely scientific perspective of finding another sentient species in an otherwise sparsely populated galaxy, yes. If we were far behind technologically speaking then any other advanced civilisation may have reservations about contact. They would likely still have taken some interest though, and may assume that when we become sufficiently advanced then we shall find them.

Why would an alien meta squid

Wed, 2010-02-24 23:37
Guest

Why would an alien meta squid be interested in some molten ball with a rice pudding like crust that just so happens to have developed a green mould infested with little mites scurrying around on the surface. On the other hand they may find it more interesting and easier to communicate with our sea life. Or maybe they could find out all they need to know by asking the ants. I'd say the SETI project is fundamentally flawed. Not arrogant, naive maybe.