The Borg, The Romulans, the Klingons and...

[Saxum]

On 6/12/2022 at 2:53 AM, DefenseWins said:

A point I have never heard discussed in conversations of this type is whether "visitation" is actually practical/possible given the biological factors involved. Think "War of the Worlds" as an example. The Martians are defeated because they had no "resistance" to earthbound viruses and bacteria. What effect might COVID have if an alien race were to visit earth and become infected. Sending machines/robots/drones to survey and visit other planets seems like a safer approach, followed by some kind of direct radio/whatever contact between two different interplanetary species assuming both parties were actually interested in communicating. Any thoughts? 

 

Actually COVID is a bad example.  It attacks cells connecting its spiky surface viral proteins to ACE2 receptors on healthy cells, especially those in your lungs.

If an alien race visited they might not be affected by most bacterial, fungi and viruses on earth.

 

Despite being a SF fan since reading Isaac Asimov when I was 5 I do not think alien races visiting are at all likely. If so likely a genetically engineered one whose drones / robots are sent on sleeper type ships to do remote mining and extraction from other worlds and would be less interested in inhabited planets whose resources would be used up but uninhabited ones.

Edited June 17, 2022 by Limeaid
Put in wrong name. Best way to get comments is to put in a mistake.

[Tony P]

On 6/14/2022 at 1:45 PM, Limeaid said:

 

...Despite being a SF fan since reading Robert Asimov when I was 5 I do not think alien races visiting are at all likely....

Isaac's little brother? 😇 I keed, I keed. 

[Wacka]

If they look anything like  Marc Aliamo, they are probably a-holes (he played Gul Ducat on Deep Space 9, Cardassians, Klingons? and other assorted a-holes on ST;TNG).

[That's No Moon]

On 5/30/2022 at 5:25 PM, Nextmanup said:

Actually, it's more likely that humans on Earth are the only intelligent creatures in our galaxy, and maybe even our neighborhood of galaxies.

 

If intelligent civilizations were so common that you could get 5 of them in 1 galaxy, we would have been visited by someone by now..

 

 

The Milky Way Galaxy alone is over 100,000 light years wide.  We've been sending signals into space since roughly 1936 and able to send people to the front porch of our own planet for about 55 years and I think it's fair to assume that we are the most advanced species in this particular backwater of a solar system.  All of recorded human history will have come and gone 20 times by the time the light from the most distant stars in this galaxy reaches Earth.  But yes, because we haven't been visited yet, or at least visited in a manner that anyone was able to comprehend, survive, and record, means that there's clearly nothing else out there.

 

There are 4.5 billion years of Earth history. Who's to say someone didn't cruise past here a billion years ago, see essentially nothing, and keep going?  We aren't in an area of our own galaxy where I would expect to see a high level of activity just based upon the dispersion of material. Closer to the center there is a greater concentration and thus a greater likelihood of interstellar beings interacting with one another based on relative proximity compared to where we are.

 

Human beings seem to have a need for humans and Earth to be the zenith of the universe when it's far more likely that we aren't.  FWIW, if you were a species capable of coming this far to land on Earth and communicate with us, you'd be able to monitor us from a good distance away undetected. Based on what we pump out into the universe, how we treat each other, and how we treat our own planet, why would they stop here?  Because we are an "intelligent species" I see plenty of evidence every day that we are willfully stupid and if an alien spaceship showed up tomorrow IMO it's a better than 50/50 chance that one of our moronic tribes will shoot at it.