And then the aliens stuck a hairbrush in my...

Apparently, former Van Halen lead singer and outspoken speed limit critic Sammy Hagar thinks he was abducted by aliens, and they "downloaded" something into him.

It's like he's trying to outcrazy Diamond Dave. Don't, Sammy. You can't outcrazy Diamond Dave. It's a fool's errand.

FOCUS: What are your thoughts on alien abductions and/or aliens in general? Have any friends who swear they've seen UFOs or were abducted? Been abducted yourself (if so, please out yourself so we can make fun of you)?

 

I'd like to think they're out there. The Hubble Ultra Deep Field is a good indicator of how much stuff is out there that's not us, and every once in a while we get a tantalizing clue that (at least simple) life probably exists or existed on Mars, which indicates to me that life is pretty damn prevalent.

To make this a little more scientific...

ALT FOCUS: What's your guess for the explanation of the Fermi Paradox?

 

With how much room is out there, there has to be something SOMEWHERE. Have they visited us? Fuck no. The rednecks just have to stop with their stories down south already. You didn't get abducted, Joe-John. You just did too much brown acid while getting drunk off perscription mouthwash again.

 

Perhaps, but they're not spending decades just circling around the Earth, abducting the occasional inbred country idiot, like some anal rape paparazzi.

 

Unless the aliens that do that are the dumb-as-fuck alien rednecks just doing stupid shit for fun by probing our rednecks. Pretty plausible if you ask me!

 

FOCUS: What are your thoughts on aliens in general?

At the very least, the sheer size of the universe and the number of planets out there is mind boggling. To suggest that life/intelligent life doesn't exist somewhere out there is kind of silly in my opinion.

The most interesting concept to me is how long it took humanity to advance technologically. In merely the last few hundred years, we have gone from walking/riding horses to leaving our planet via space shuttle and landing on a moon. That window of time is so insignificant as far as the universe is concerned. If we were to find intelligent life elsewhere, what are the odds of finding them when they are so early in their technological development? Much safer to assume that we will find much less developed life (micro-organisms) or we will be (have been?) found by a species so much more developed than us it wouldn't even be worth considering the consequences of such an interaction (read: we lose).

Then again, all this talk of intelligent life makes me wonder. Are we really intelligent? It seems to me that humanity isn't interested in planning more than a lifetime ahead or maximizing its potential. We're not interested in global unity. We're killing each other off over trivial matters. Given our self-destructive tendencies, will we even last long enough to interact with extraterrestrial life?

 

I've got to agree with previous posters saying that the sheer size of the universe and the number of planets it contains has to mean that there are other intelligent life forms out there. Every couple months, we hear about scientists discovering new planets with at least some Earth-like properties, and that's just in our galaxy alone.

To me, the main reason we haven't made contact with any alien civilizations (and likely won't for many lifetimes) is due to the enormous distances and brief time windows where contact can even be achieved. We've been able to broadcast radio waves for less than two hundred years and detection arrays like SETI have only been operational for a few decades, which is an infinitesimally small window on the cosmic scale. At the same time, we've also been able to develop enough nuclear weapons to wipe out our entire civilization and have come damn close to having it happen. Alien civilizations may evolve differently, but the fact that we were able to develop these technologies almost in parallel means that the window of transmission and detection for any given civilization may be incredibly small. Given the distances of space, even if we could receive a transmission from a distant planet, by the time we sent anything back the other civilization may have completely died out.

This only really addresses civilizations that are on a similar technological level as us though. Stephen Hawking put out a warning last year that essentially said that we need to keep a listen-only policy when it comes to discovering alien life. Any other civilization that could hear our signals and then actually reach Earth would be far more advanced and almost certainly have the ability to either destroy us or enslave the whole planet.

And as for any crazy rednecks that think they've been anally probed.. Really? What are they doing? Harvesting farts?

 

The idea that Einstein might be right and the speed of light is a natural limit makes me sad. If true, it means that even if there is anything else out there it is entirely irrelevant.

More on focus: I would bet the virginity of every girl on this board THEY are out there. Even if THEY are uber plankton with 3 nipples and a combover 6,000,000 light years away.. It’s a definite.

 

Around 3:30-4:30 pretty sums up most abductions stories for me. Dreams/the body can do crazy stuff (what's that one thing your body releases before you die? supposed to be a gigantic drug trip thing..).

I don't think anyone's necessarily crazy to believe they were abducted (could have felt so real), but I always believe it's something else. I've had the most vivid dreams that will stay with me forever. I've actually done Lucid Dreaming, where you're aware you're dreaming and can control it, but even though I knew it was all created by my mind didn't mean something in it didn't affect me more than some things in real life. Some things just get at you in a way that you can't shake, that's why movies can affect us, I know Buzz Lightyear's not real but I can follow the story. So I don't think it automatically makes you crazy if you really believe you were abducted, but I don't believe you really were.

I do believe there must be aliens somewhere, but any abduction story I'll write it off as something else until aliens came out and say 'Ya, you got us, we did that..."

 

I agree with you and here is the best take on the subject I've seen:

 

The lesson that I've taken from the stuff I've read on evolution is that life isn't really the big step. It seems to me like as soon as a molecule comes about that can replicate with error, natural selection takes over and will inevitably create life. The molecule doesn't even have to be created in each environment with meteorites doing all the legwork (see: <a class="postlink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia</a>).The big steps are replicating molecules, eucharyotic (multicellular) life, and intelligence. I suspect that if we don't find definitive proof of life(at some point) on Mars, we'll find it on Titan or somewhere else nearby. Unfortunately, that life will likely be bacterial. As we expand our capabilities to search farther away, I bet we'll find bacterial life all over the place, multicellular life much much less often, and intelligent life probably never. And I'd be willing to accept something having even a very basic brain (or brainlike structure) as intelligent. Finding something as intelligent as a fish would be amazing, but the Fermi Paradox sort of collapses when you take into account the sheer quantity of possible brains there can be out there. We could have a situation of something quite intelligent existing, but lacking the necessary brain components that implore them to explore anywhere outside of their environment.

 

I am just finishing off touches to my BSc thesis project for my Physics degree. What is it you ask? I have been creating a computer simulation that models colonisation of the galaxy and attempts to resolve the Fermi Paradox. It is basically a percolation model created from the group up. If people are interested I can point you in the direction of the code (though it will only be finished at the end of the week).

There are essentially three basic cases. The first two are trivial, i.e. complete colonisation or no colonisation. Complete colonisation of the galaxy happens on very short timescales for naive approximations. Equally if you take the opinion of the rare earth hypothesis it is easy to say that life isn't all that common and there is no reason for interaction with other life.

The third case is the interesting one, and that involves partial colonisation - essentially a limit on the colonising power of a civilisation. There are many explanations for this. The one investigated by my project most fully is the way in which interaction between different civilisations can provide limitations to the colonising lifetime.

If people are interested in this more then I am just starting a 6000 word report on it and so can talk at length...

EDIT: It is worth noting that we are working of the base assuption that intelligent can evolve. This project is looking purely at the physics-y aspects of this problem such as the astrophysics issues and propagation speed etc.

 

Focus: I'm fine with them, as long as they pay their taxes.

 

I think the big difference here is between life and intelligent life. With the unimaginable vastness of the universe, I think it has to be a damn near 100% chance that there is life out there on another planet. However, the chance that any of that life has evolved to the point of intelligence is much, much lower.

Even if there is intelligent life out there, though, it could be so vastly different from us that it would be near impossible to communicate. It may even be so different that we wouldn't be able to recognize it as intelligent life.

I remember reading one of the sequels to Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game (the sequels of course got weird and weren't very good), but if I remember right they encountered life that communicated by swapping various molecular compounds and by trying to communicate with another variety of life they inadvertently introduced some weird virus. Obviously that was just weird science fiction, but with all the space out there and the possibilities for the evolution of life, it could very well be possible. Hell, we recently found life that had been living in an arsenic lake, and that's here on earth. I think the possibilities for crazy forms of intelligent life are basically endless.

Plus what others have already said about the vastness of space and the limitations of the speed of light making it a mostly moot subject.

 

I agree with the general sentiment that it would be more shocking if there weren't many forms of life in the basically endless spacescape. A scientist on a NOVA episode from earlier this season said it quite well, saying (roughly): "If we took a cup of water from the ocean, and didn't detect life in it, we wouldn't conclude that the entire ocean has none either."

I'm not worried though, if there are intelligent life forms with the ability to relocate, that they'd do so with evil intentions, because I think reaching that level of technological ability would require such a collective effort, they would either destroy themselves or attain planet-wide unity before being able to leave. So if they did travel to another planet, it would either be exploratory, or to communicate with another life form, or they'd go to a planet without intelligent life to inhabit.

What I'm most curious about (because it's somewhat of a realistic possibility), is what finding life (of any intelligence) on another planet would mean for religion. As far as I know, the major religions either don't mention life outside earth, or specifically say earth is the only place with life. Somehow I don't think many believers would change their mind (apologies if that's too religious-y).

 

Personally I think that Stephen Hawking has the correct theory about intelligent aliens in the universe:

1.) Why the fuck would aliens want to contact us?

B.) When aliens do come, they will be gunning for our resources.


Don't misunderstand Point 1 though. He's not saying that we should strive to be a bunch of peaceful pussies in a planet wide utopia. It's just that we have nothing to contribute to a race of beings that can already intergalactically travel, until you see point B.

 

This. I'm on the bandwagon with the 'given the size and scope of the universe, other life is statistically probably', but I think it's statistically improbable that we'll ever meet it, for the same reason. It doesn't matter how intelligent an alien race may be, they'll never reach us.