Intelligent alien life: astronomy, astrobiology, and the age of inhabitable worlds

I’ve noted an odd lag in our cultural understanding of the probability of advanced alien civilizations in our galaxy and the universe at large, and the bearing of recent scientific discoveries upon this pivotal subject.

Most people still seem to be operating under the limited and now very dated knowledge of the 1970s, rather than the modern status of the scientific data in the keys areas of; the prevalence of warm and potentially inhabitable Earth-like worlds, the distribution of water and amino acids throughout the stars, exoplanetary composition, and the relative age of other star systems like our own. In recent years all of the rapidly advancing scientific findings in these areas have been converging on an entirely new estimation of the prevalence of life and advanced alien civilizations in the universe. So I wrote the following summary earlier today and I thought that some folks here might enjoy reading it, and perhaps we can discuss these and other findings which have reshaped the nature of the debate regarding the extraterrestrial hypothesis:

Our culture seems to be lagging behind the scientific data, when it comes to the subject of warm and potentially living Earth-like worlds in the universe - apparently culture has some kind of cognitive inertia. Because the idea of extraterrestrial life, or even intelligent extraterrestrial life with interstellar spaceflight capability, used to seem improbable to many people before we had the results of the Kepler Mission, and before we knew about the ubiquity of water and amino acids throughout the universe, and before we understood the dynamical evolution of planetary systems and before we knew the age of the solar system relative to other star systems. Now all of that has changed. Today, we know that there are over 40 billion warm Earth-like worlds in our galaxy alone, and over 40 billion trillion warm Earth-like worlds in the observable universe alone (which is in turn only a speck of the entire universe), moving through stellar systems chock full of water and the building blocks of life (and we now know that life appeared on the Earth pretty much as soon as the Earth cooled down enough to support carbon-based life).

So now the odds are extremely favorable toward a model of the universe that's teeming with life, and we have no reason left to presume that it's at all rare. The only remaining question is the prevalence of intelligent life, and even on that question we have no logical reason to presume that the evolution of intelligent life is extremely rare. Seventy years ago it wasn't totally unreasonable to wonder if there were any other intelligent civilizations out there in the universe. But today, the most reasonable scenario appears to describe our galaxy as a system lushly populated with organic life, and probably thousands or more planets inhabited by technological civilizations, most of which are probably many millions or even billions of years ahead of us, because most of the inhabitable planetary systems in our galaxy are much older than ours:

"We found that most potentially habitable star systems are much older than the Sun and located farther from the galactic centre. By comparing the ages of these systems we estimated that ~77% of potentially habitable star systems are on average ~3.13 billion years older than the Sun. This suggests that any intelligent life in the Galaxy is likely to be incredibly more advanced than we are assuming that they have evolved under similar timescales than we have."
"The Age Distribution of Potential Intelligent Life in the Milky Way," Daniel Legassick, 2015

In light of these newly discovered facts, it would be a far greater mystery if our planet weren't being visited by alien civilizations from time to time. Fermi was perfectly correct to ask the question "Where is everybody?" He should've looked up, because the answer appears to be: "all around us."

Excellent topic. It's hard for some people to grasp the immeasurable size our galaxy holding countless stars and planets. Life should be everywhere as long as resources to support life hold out. Some visitors here might be so alien we might not see them as lifeforms.

Kaipo said:

Excellent topic. It's hard for some people to grasp the immeasurable size our galaxy holding countless stars and planets. Life should be everywhere as long as resources to support life hold out. Some visitors here might be so alien we might not see them as lifeforms.

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Thanks for joining the discussion Kaipo. It is impossible for the human mind to fully grasp the scale and numbers involved...some 100-400 billion stars....>40 billion warm Earth-like worlds...100,000 light-years in diameter - it's genuinely mind-boggling. But when confronting a vast number like 40 billion warm Earth-like candidate worlds, that should be compelling to anyone, precisely because it is such an enormous number.

And I tend to agree that the most advanced alien civilizations probably wouldn't be visible to us if they didn't want to be, and if they simply didn't care about being observed, their technology would probably look incomprehensible to us. But I figure that it's a very wide spectrum of sophistication out there, and the least advanced civilizations are more likely to find us interesting, so we probably see craft from those civilizations most of the time. The civilizations billions of years ahead of us could probably be looking over our shoulders right now through some kind of invisible wormhole or something, and we'd never even know about it - but I reckon they've got better things to do with their time than observe primitives like us.

I would guess one of the main factors why the public in general is behind in the subject, is the suppressed discoveries and evidence. We are left with a black listed subject - Star Wars and Star Trek conventions, X-Files and Ancient Aliens. Now we are flooded with the full spectrum of info all at once, along with managed disclosure.

I was listening to a guest on CoasttoCoast and he went on about how the Seti Institute is a total front operation to get us to "look out there" instead of here among us in the atmosphere. Though from your assessment here, we can infer intelligent life and the hypothetical interaction with us, even from looking out there. Imagine if they opened up the vaults to what we already know or in possession here, it would shed light on the phenomenon and bring out of obscurity and ridicule.

The "truth embargo" as Basset puts it, is causing a public retarded view of the subject. It's not their fault to a large degree.

Zeke said:

I would guess one of the main factors why the public in general is behind in the subject, is the suppressed discoveries and evidence. We are left with a black listed subject - Star Wars and Star Trek conventions, X-Files and Ancient Aliens. Now we are flooded with the full spectrum of info all at once, along with managed disclosure.

I was listening to a guest on CoasttoCoast and he went on about how the Seti Institute is a total front operation to get us to "look out there" instead of here among us in the atmosphere. Though from your assessment here, we can infer intelligent life and the hypothetical interaction with us, even from looking out there. Imagine if they opened up the vaults to what we already know or in possession here, it would shed light on the phenomenon and bring out of obscurity and ridicule.

The "truth embargo" as Basset puts it, is causing a public retarded view of the subject. It's not their fault to a large degree.

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It's not actually the public view of all this that's been troubling me - it's the bizarre state of denial going on within the ufology community. There's a large and growing percentage of people who are going around mocking the idea that ufos, or as I prefer, anomalous aerial vehicles (AAVs), are alien technology. A clique of very vocal people in ufology now think that the idea of alien civilizations visiting our planet is a dumb and simplistic explanation, and instead they prefer a supernatural/mystical explanation (which they can't even define). I can understand the average uninformed citizen somehow missing all of the latest public scientific findings that point to the ETH, but these are people who have been studying this stuff for decades in many cases. And they've somehow convinced themselves that when a group of witnesses see a large metallic device hovering in the sky, that it's some kind of illusion, and that in reality some supernatural intelligence has made them see a large metallic craft as some kind of camouflage for something even weirder (which remains unspecified). Madness, I say!

As for the secrecy, yeah that's a complex problem. It's not that "the government" knows the truth - most people in the government and the military and even at the Pentagon, don't know any more about this subject than the average Joe. Only small groups of select intelligence people and research scientists have privileged knowledge, which is certainly highly classified. And they're bound by law to maintain the secrecy. So I can't see anything less than a Congressional resolution to void the secrecy obligations of such people, getting the info out, and honestly I'm not sure if Congress even has the authority to do that under the current security laws. Ultimately I think trying to get that knowledge out would be about as easy as robbing Fort Knox, i.e, impossible.

But I'm fascinated by the drip-drip release of information from this TTSA organization. First we learned that the AATIP reached the same conclusions that most of us reached decades ago: these things are real physical craft and they're not human in origin. Then Tom DeLonge goes on the Joe Rogan show and talks about a photonic metamaterial that allegedly loses mass when activated with THz radiation - a claim that I didn't take very seriously at first, honestly, because he has a tendency to be rather credulous. But then we get confirmation of this exotic metamaterial from Luis Elizondo and George Knapp and Hal Puthoff - that made me sit up and take notice. And just recently Mr. Elizondo provided a video to a ufo conference in South America, claiming that they replicated the physics of the AAV propulsion principle in the lab a couple of years ago, albeit at a very small scale. So apparently all that remains to be done is scaling this effect (whatever it is) up to a macroscopic/practical device. That's unbelievably huge news; we're talking about metric engineering here, and most of the top theoretical physicists today think that's eons away from applied human technology...if it's even possible at all.

But my point here is much simpler: because with these numbers, if a theoretical physicist defiantly proclaims "we won't have that level of technology in a million years!" then we can simply ask "okay how about ten million years, or a billion years?" Because apparently the average age of inhabitable Earth-like worlds in our galaxy and beyond, is about 3 billion years ahead of us. And it's obviously ludicrous to try to assert that producing a viable superluminal spaceflight technology is unlikely to happen in the span of 3 billion years. I would think that long before then we'll have figured out how to do pretty much anything that we can dream of today, if our species survives that long anyway.

Great post Thomas.Im not discounting “supernatural” occurrences in other fields such as ghosts or psychics but I believe that the most logical and probable explanation for what is seen every day in the skies is extra terrestrial in nature.An oft used example is people from just a few hundred years ago seeing our technology would think us to be wizards,witches or gods.As Thomas points out,parts of the universe could contain intelligent life millions or indeed billions of years more advanced than us.That blows my mind.So let’s not go to woo explanations just because we haven’t got a craft (that we know of) for us all to see.

Thomas R. Morrison said:

It's not actually the public view of all this that's been troubling me - it's the bizarre state of denial going on within the ufology community. There's a large and growing percentage of people who are going around mocking the idea that ufos, or as I prefer, anomalous aerial vehicles (AAVs), are alien technology. A clique of very vocal people in ufology now think that the idea of alien civilizations visiting our planet is a dumb and simplistic explanation, and instead they prefer a supernatural/mystical explanation (which they can't even define). I can understand the average uninformed citizen somehow missing all of the latest public scientific findings that point to the ETH, but these are people who have been studying this stuff for decades in many cases. And they've somehow convinced themselves that when a group of witnesses see a large metallic device hovering in the sky, that it's some kind of illusion, and that in reality some supernatural intelligence has made them see a large metallic craft as some kind of camouflage for something even weirder (which remains unspecified). Madness, I say!

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I would first like to expound upon this bit because it has been frustrating to me the last few years...There are people who think that all UFO phenomena is some sort of supernatural phenomena or from some unknown dimensions, completely discounting any possibility that intelligent beings from this galaxy and this universe, physical creatures, are visiting here...It's a completely absurd notion that is even less logical and less rational then the latter...Its a flat earth type of mentality in my opinion...

That being said, there are paranormal and spiritual beings but lets not mix this up with extraterrestrial beings just because we do not know enough about these extraterrestrials and their highly advanced technology...Their technology is likely so far beyond our current comprehension, if a ET craft were to land on my property and I was able to walk right into it and let us say all the language in the craft was even written in English language, I still would need time to sort out how it operates if I could at all, its nothing something that we could just jump into and fly around and master in a day...Its not like driving a car for the first time or walking up to a Branson made ultrasonic welder that could be easily mastered and operated in no time...Take Jiao Yu out of the 14th century and drop him into a modern F-22 Raptor Fighter Jet, how long do you think it would take him to fly it?...My point is that its ridiculous to dump all UFO phenomena into the spirituality bucket simply because we cannot grasp or fathom the incredibly advanced technology that's being deployed to our planet and being witnessed by humans of this planet...

There are physical beings from our galaxy, from our universe visiting this planet regularly, without a doubt...There are also intelligent beings from other universes or dimensions also visiting this planet, probably not just this planet but also many places throughout our galaxy, explorers...I also hold the notion that before we begun detonating nuclear devices a higher percentage of the visitors here were from our local groups of stars with random visits from beings further away from our stellar location...After we begun detonating nuclear devices in earnest, we started to see a much higher percentage of visitors from other dimensions or other universes and from the farther reaches of our own universe...I think this is so because exploding nuclear devices is in a crude way like firing a flare into the sky, the continual testing of nuclear devices attracted higher intelligent species to our planet that would have not known of us previously...Somehow they detected these 'flares', our nuclear detonations, and came to investigate the source...Make no mistake about it, we are being visited by physical beings from our universe, our galaxy and their technology is so beyond our understanding, but there's nothing magical or mystical about it...

...

nivek said:

I would first like to expound upon this bit because it has been frustrating to me the last few years...There are people who think that all UFO phenomena is some sort of supernatural phenomena or from some unknown dimensions, completely discounting any possibility that intelligent beings from this galaxy and this universe, physical creatures, are visiting here...It's a completely absurd notion that is even less logical and less rational then the latter...Its a flat earth type of mentality in my opinion...

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I couldn’t agree more. People pushing “the supernatural hypothesis” are perhaps unintentionally dragging our way of thinking back to the Dark Ages, and lately they’ve even been casting scorn upon the faculty of reason itself (!) – it’s now becoming in vogue to portray sensible rationalists as unimaginative, puny-minded fools. I swear, it’s like some kind of cult mentality.

nivek said:

That being said, there are paranormal and spiritual beings but lets not mix this up with extraterrestrial beings just because we do not know enough about these extraterrestrials and their highly advanced technology.

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All I know for sure is that we’re just beginning the long and fascinating journey of discovery in this vast and ancient cosmos. So I don’t rule much out – we don’t know enough to say what isn’t possible. All we can do is discover what is possible, and hopefully one day figure out how it all works together. Then we might be able to sketch some contours around the possible manifestations of life and consciousness. But on the other hand, I don’t assume that nonphysical intelligent beings are real in the objective sense; I’m waiting on more compelling evidence. I think it’s tragic that subjects like that are taboo to modern science, so they don’t get properly researched. Everything should be researched, especially the anomalies, because that's always where the biggest advancements in our understanding have come from.

nivek said:

There are physical beings from our galaxy, from our universe visiting this planet regularly, without a doubt...

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I favor that view as well – with these kinds of numbers, it seems pretty much unthinkable that we wouldn’t be visited by other species from time to time, and monitored/studied/whatever.

nivek said:

There are also intelligent beings from other universes or dimensions also visiting this planet

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I have a harder time accepting this. We have zero data that there are other universes, at present, so I can’t reasonably accept their existence. I want to see what theoretical physics tells us once there’s a more informed consensus about quantum mechanics and cosmology. At this point it looks like there’s just this one (apparently infinite) universe, so that’s my baseline.

I have a similar issue with the idea of “alternate dimensions of reality,” which is just another term for alternate universes, imo. We still don’t have a reasonable physics model for alternate realities or universes – that stuff is still in the wild speculation category. CERN has been looking for signs of things like higher dimensions, and so far, they’ve come up with donuts. So again, I can’t presume that such a thing is real, so I’m waiting for some kind of empirical evidence or at least a very compelling theoretical framework to prove to my mind, logically, that such things actually exist.

nivek said:

I also hold the notion that before we begun detonating nuclear devices a higher percentage of the visitors here were from our local groups of stars with random visits from beings further away from our stellar location...After we begun detonating nuclear devices in earnest, we started to see a much higher percentage of visitors from other dimensions or other universes and from the farther reaches of our own universe...I think this is so because exploding nuclear devices is in a crude way like firing a flare into the sky, the continual testing of nuclear devices attracted higher intelligent species to our planet that would have not known of us previously...Somehow they detected these 'flares', our nuclear detonations, and came to investigate the source...Make no mistake about it, we are being visited by physical beings from our universe, our galaxy and their technology is so beyond our understanding, but there's nothing magical or mystical about it...

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That’s a very compelling and logical argument – it’s almost impossible to ignore the virtually simultaneous eruption of ufo sightings following the advent of the atomic bomb era.

However, I tend to assume that “they,” whatever network of interstellar civilizations that exists out there, knew about us long ago. And I assume that once we slaughtered entire cities of innocent people with nuclear bombs, and started detonating them by the thousands (over 2000 total, at least), we probably were put on some kind of probation and/or monitoring list. It’s also possible, although I hate to think about it, that once we detonated nuclear weapons on top of people, we steered our civilization down a course of inevitable self-destruction. So they could be showing up in droves now, just to observe our final decent into oblivion, and perhaps record the process as a cautionary tale for their children.

Because I tentatively assume that the older civilizations have been exploring myriad star systems for countless eons, and they’re probably experts at understanding the process of industrialization among sentient technological species. So they probably understand where we’re heading, and how soon we’re going to get there, far better than we do.

And the fact that they don’t seem to have any interest in communicating with us is quite troubling. I figure, they either (perhaps rightly) think that we’re not ready to interact with them yet, or, we won’t be around long enough to build a symbiotic relationship with them anyway, so there’s no point in talking to us.

There aren’t many scenarios where the kind of communications embargo we seem to be experiencing can be viewed in a favorable light.

Hi guys, and Kudos to TRM, this is without doubt an excellent thread.
Albeit I say this because I cannot disagree with any part of Thomas' understanding of the state of the UFO/ETH genre.
I have in the past tried to be more sympathetic to the proposals of the many seemingly intelligent and respected authorities that such things as the "Interdimensional hypothesis" and it's various offshoots , with their assertions that most.. if not all of the fantastic first hand eye witness testimony and well documented RADAR and trace-evidence cases can be summarily lumped into the 'tricked again by the artfully-furtive-bogeyman hypotheses' [TABTAFBH?] ... but alas my personal verisimilitude and rationality virtually excludes me from that cosy little club, and in fact has left me with the task of having to redouble my efforts of fending off the hard-line-sceptics and 'cosmic-joker-proponents' when discussing the possibilities of any case that I deem interesting toward the pro-ETH question.
However as I always stress, I rule nothing [or very little] out as being impossible, but the stretch of imagination required for me to believe that ...for instance, Captain Terauchi Et al was being pranked or receiving some kind of unfathomable subliminal message from beyond the ether... nor do I think that when an experienced pilot says that he actually took pot shots at an anomalous craft with no apparent effect, that it is a sure fire thing that the craft wasn't there in the first place and was merely being projected there by 'the unseen mystical force' with some abstruse goal in mind.
No, of course not , for me personally it stands to reason that when a seasoned pilot says that he saw, was tracked by or even tried to give chase to a solid metallic craft that defied man's own current technological prowess , ... then the chances are that he encountered an alien craft , and didn't just have a directed vision. No matter how hard it is for us to comprehend the unbelievable things that they achieve or the mechanics of their vehicles.
And yes I totally agree that this trend of trying to complicate the already complicated field of ufology by going off tangent when attempting to perceive and understand a UFO report is tantamount to going backwards in our understanding of what is actually happening as regards to ufological studies. ... furthermore I don't know about you or anyone else, but i'm not so sure that this trend that was first toyed with by Meade Layne way back in 1950 and steadily grew to the point where it has been enthusiastically promoted for the last few decades by the likes of Keel, and given the iffy air of propriety by the 'respected scientifically minded Jacques Vallee' is altogether accidental! ... Well the Vallee validation anyway.
Well i'll leave it at that for now, because some of my good friends are convinced that the IDH is a perfectly reasonable road to travel and I do not want to seem as though I am scoffing at the whole genre or at their own powers of discernment, because that is simply not the case! .. The fact is that I know absolutely no more than anyone else, and the thing that I currently believe to be nothing but hot air and a general nuisance that was quite possibly taken up and dripped to the general populace as a means of obfuscatory-misdirection by the relevant agencies ... may well come back and bite me in the ass, ... but I doubt it.

And as to 'why no mass contact yet?'... well the simple answer to that perennial question is that 'we are not worthy'... I once started a blog to fully express my reasoning for that statement, it turned out to be far too long to hold even my own interest , [never mind anyone else.] I started by asserting that most if not all of the many intergalactic civilizations that surely populate our universe and have achieved intergalactic and interplanetary travel were likely much older and both technically superior and mentally much more sophisticated than we are, and therefore by the laws of common sense tells me that just about all of the violently domineering civilisations would have burned out long ago deep in universal antiquity, and what was left were the civilisations that were generally peaceful minded civilisations that share the creed of peaceful exploration... and yes in time it stands to reason to me that there would have been the appetite or necessity for cooperation , which in turn led to [here comes the star trek analogy] to some sort of interspecies league [the federation if you like] that explores the vastness of this endless universe that we share. And just like the best science fiction writers have imagined, they have deemed a 'none interference policy' [prime directive] to be the most prudent in order not to contaminate the collective with bad blood and weaken the status quo of the 'civilised universe'. And in this quest for peaceful cooperation it would be a necessity to keep tabs on all of the 'dirty unwashed barbarians' such as us that still murder other lifeforms unnecessarily 'because they taste good' and are perpetually at war with each other, kill for pleasure and allow vulnerable members to starve or be subject to slavery etc... [aka, selfish murdering Troglodytes] to ensure that they do not reach the civilised collective before evolution has had the time to temper the urges to 'destroy for gain'. And in our case, no matter how much we bathe in the glory of just how far we have come in the last hundred or so years... in my view, you only have to watch the tea time news or read a newspaper to know that we are a very long way from membership qualification... [if we even get there in the end is the big question for me.]
The original blog attempt went on and on, citing many links and references in order to elucidate my point.
...But as I said, it turned out to be a blog that was threatening to be heavier reading than anyone would care to undertake, and so I binned it.
... But in a nutshell they are my general thoughts and the product of a lifetime's cerebration on the subject, so I stand by them, ... they are by no means the thoughts of a genius and may well be slightly off, way off or pure fantasy and have no more legitimacy than the thoughts of my bull terrier.

Cheers Buddy.

Thomas R. Morrison said:

Most people still seem to be operating u nder the limited and now very dated knowledge of the 1970s, rather than the modern status of the scientific data in the keys areas of; the prevalence of warm and potentially inhabitable Earth-like worlds, the distribution of water and amino acids throughout the stars, exoplanetary composition, and the relative age of other star systems like our own. In recent years all of the rapidly advancing scientific findings in these areas have been converging on an entirely new estimation of the prevalence of life and advanced alien civilizations in the universe. So I wrote the following summary earlier today and I thought that some folks here might enjoy reading it, and perhaps we can discuss these and other findings which have reshaped the nature of the debate regarding the extraterrestrial hypothesis:

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Well...

Not sure that they have discovered any planet yet that could support human life. Zero. Zip. Nada.

Until we find another habitable planet it is hard to say there is a lot of aliens out there.

Somebody from a gas giant would just be vapor in a spacesuit.

They have found some planets around red dwarfs that they claim are in the goldie locks zone - orbiting almost in the envelope of the star - but these dwarf have CMEs so bad they are visible from Earth. That means every few years the planets are scrubbed clean. Dubious of the claim a red dwarf can support life anyway.

Haven't found one. Yet.

I'm in the "the nearest alien might be 500 light years away" club. There might be a couple thousand intelligent species in the galaxy.

Thomas R. Morrison said:

I couldn’t agree more. People pushing “the supernatural hypothesis” are perhaps unintentionally dragging our way of thinking back to the Dark Ages, and lately they’ve even been casting scorn upon the faculty of reason itself (!) – it’s now becoming in vogue to portray sensible rationalists as unimaginative, puny-minded fools. I swear, it’s like some kind of cult mentality.

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Indubitably, I also see it as cultish, with a mob rules ignorance in some circles, attempting to stamp out any other theories whether established or recently proposed...

Thomas R. Morrison said:

All I know for sure is that we’re just beginning the long and fascinating journey of discovery in this vast and ancient cosmos. So I don’t rule much out – we don’t know enough to say what isn’t possible. All we can do is discover what is possible, and hopefully one day figure out how it all works together. Then we might be able to sketch some contours around the possible manifestations of life and consciousness. But on the other hand, I don’t assume that nonphysical intelligent beings are real in the objective sense; I’m waiting on more compelling evidence. I think it’s tragic that subjects like that are taboo to modern science, so they don’t get properly researched. Everything should be researched, especially the anomalies, because that's always where the biggest advancements in our understanding have come from.

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It seems a tendency for mankind to find a path of discovery and then attempt to burn the bridges to other possible discoveries either because it doesn't fit the 'generally accepted' ideas of the time or the possibility of a hidden agenda of some sort...I think our technology, although very primitive, has had great leaps and bounds because someone thought outside the box and jumped into the unknown to gain knowledge and understanding...

Thomas R. Morrison said:

I have a harder time accepting this. We have zero data that there are other universes, at present, so I can’t reasonably accept their existence. I want to see what theoretical physics tells us once there’s a more informed consensus about quantum mechanics and cosmology. At this point it looks like there’s just this one (apparently infinite) universe, so that’s my baseline.

I have a similar issue with the idea of “alternate dimensions of reality,” which is just another term for alternate universes, imo. We still don’t have a reasonable physics model for alternate realities or universes – that stuff is still in the wild speculation category. CERN has been looking for signs of things like higher dimensions, and so far, they’ve come up with donuts. So again, I can’t presume that such a thing is real, so I’m waiting for some kind of empirical evidence or at least a very compelling theoretical framework to prove to my mind, logically, that such things actually exist.

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There are a few good reasons I have come to accept this, and I think this would be a good topic for another thread so that we do not derail this thread, something along the lines of "theorizing the existence of inter-dimensional or multi-universe intelligent life" which I tend include quantum physics in my points of view on this topic, I think the two nest well together to a certain degree...

Thomas R. Morrison said:

That’s a very compelling and logical argument – it’s almost impossible to ignore the virtually simultaneous eruption of ufo sightings following the advent of the atomic bomb era.

However, I tend to assume that “they,” whatever network of interstellar civilizations that exists out there, knew about us long ago. And I assume that once we slaughtered entire cities of innocent people with nuclear bombs, and started detonating them by the thousands (over 2000 total, at least), we probably were put on some kind of probation and/or monitoring list. It’s also possible, although I hate to think about it, that once we detonated nuclear weapons on top of people, we steered our civilization down a course of inevitable self-destruction. So they could be showing up in droves now, just to observe our final decent into oblivion, and perhaps record the process as a cautionary tale for their children.

Because I tentatively assume that the older civilizations have been exploring myriad star systems for countless eons, and they’re probably experts at understanding the process of industrialization among sentient technological species. So they probably understand where we’re heading, and how soon we’re going to get there, far better than we do.

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Once we started our nuclear madness of exploding nuclear devices growing in yield and destructive capability and continued this path, we saw a growing number of visitations and UFOs, but these sightings and encounters were not confined to a small group of similar features and sizes of the craft nor a similar group of aliens as you would expect from a local group of stars...We saw that too but during our decades of nuclear madness we saw quite an array of UFOs of unique features and designs...The witnessed encounters of alien beings landing and coming out of their craft show a wide variety of alien species, not just a handful...That's just the UFOs and aliens that people witnessed, what about all the others that no one ever saw?...It seems to me without a doubt we made ourselves known to a countless number of alien species who most likely did not know about us or did not care about us before our nuclear age...

Thomas R. Morrison said:

And the fact that they don’t seem to have any interest in communicating with us is quite troubling. I figure, they either (perhaps rightly) think that we’re not ready to interact with them yet, or, we won’t be around long enough to build a symbiotic relationship with them anyway, so there’s no point in talking to us.

There aren’t many scenarios where the kind of communications embargo we seem to be experiencing can be viewed in a favorable light.

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There are a few possibilities that come to mind in why we have not had direct communication with any of these visitors yet, any theories or ideas we come up with will be very limited mainly because we are only using human reason and logic...Alien species are not necessarily going to think similar to us, or have rational or reason similar to ours...What they deem logical may not be understood by us as logic, their whole psyche could be very alien to us and in many cases this seems so evident by the technology they have wielded...

So as you stated, we're not ready yet because we are too 'young', probably in every way, technologically, psychologically, physically and so on and because possibly in many cases we are just too alien to them and they to us, there is no common ground yet...

...

Thomas R. Morrison said:

I couldn’t agree more. People pushing “the supernatural hypothesis” are perhaps unintentionally dragging our way of thinking back to the Dark Ages, and lately they’ve even been casting scorn upon the faculty of reason itself (!) – it’s now becoming in vogue to portray sensible rationalists as unimaginative, puny-minded fools. I swear, it’s like some kind of cult mentality.

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Well, you got to admit they are pretty unimaginative.

The supernatural explanations are kind of dubious, more so than the other dimensions/other universe/higher dimensions theory.

Can't disprove a negative. So you can't categorically say they are wrong. But it wouldn't be my first bet.

I'm pretty sure that whatever "we" are isn't tied to the body. But not at all sure that the "spiritual" plane such as it is, is visible. Which means a supernatural explanation isn't an explanation.

The higher dimensions is another problem. We wouldn't recognize a higher dimensional being if it bit us in the ass.

For example: if I intrude my finger into a 2-dimensional world I would appear as circle, a small circle.

Is a simple circle (and a small one less than an inch across) a fair representation of a human being?

nivek said:

There are a few possibilities that come to mind in why we have not had direct communication with any of these visitors yet, any theories or ideas we come up with will be very limited mainly because we are only using human reason and logic...Alien species are not necessarily going to think similar to us, or have rational or reason similar to ours...What they deem logical may not be understood by us as logic, their whole psyche could be very alien to us and in many cases this seems so evident by the technology they have wielded...

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I tend to disagree with this actually: reason is based on logic, and logic is founded on axioms derived from the observation of physical reality, which yields science and technology. So I think it's very likely that alien intelligence will share a deep common foundation with our way of thinking - they're just obviously much better at it, which is evident because their technology is so vastly superior to our own.

So I think that their motivations and behavior will be highly logical, intrinsically. in which case it's the context of their decision-making process that we're missing. If we understood their context, we could understand their behavior. But we can only sketch the most tenuous outlines of that context - as a technologically superior interstellar civilization. Beyond that, their context is largely unknowable: it would be like the ancient Greeks trying to figure out modern economics and international relations and our daily lives....they could probably sketch some broad outlines, since all intelligent beings are driven by organic and psychological needs, and compete for resources and soforth. I think we're in a similar position with respect to these alien beings - they must also be driven by their survival instincts and the needs of the physical body and the sentient mind (for greater understanding, and purpose, and such). I wouldn't be surprised if their motivations and behavior would make a great deal to sense to us, if we knew the context of their lives and their civilization.

CasualBystander said:

The higher dimensions is another problem. We wouldn't recognize a higher dimensional being if it bit us in the ass.

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But that's not entirely true, and your comment below proves it:

CasualBystander said:

For example: if I intrude my finger into a 2-dimensional world I would appear as circle, a small circle.

Is a simple circle (and a small one less than an inch across) a fair representation of a human being?

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A higher dimensional being would intersect with all four of the dimensions that we're familiar with, so they might seem highly exotic, but they'd be visible. So what people seem to be suggesting, is that there are beings that exist in other dimensions, not more dimensions. And that sounds illogical to me.

For example, a three-dimensional object exists as a two-dimensional object plus one dimension, and it exists as a one-dimensional object with two additional dimensions. It's hard to imagine how any object could be a higher-dimensional object, without also being a physical object in the dimensions that we can observe, y'know? How can any object just ":skip over" the four dimensions that we're aware of? It doesn't seem to make sense.

I think the problem is that most people don't know what the word "dimension" means. It just means a direction. But people have read science fiction stories that talk about "other dimensions" in the sense of "other realities," so they think that's possible when they hear physicists talk about higher dimensions. They think that means "higher planes of existence." But that's not what physicists mean when they use that term. And there's zero evidence of them anyway.

But what fascinates me is the concept of inner dimensions - not external physical dimensions like x, y, z, and t. But rather the nature of the inner realms of consciousness. For example, I can travel to Jupiter in my mind's eye in an instant; it is possible to actually see with mind's eye in that way? Can we explore the universe by closing our eyes and in some sense "leaving our body?" And are there other realities within? Do things like dreams exist in some real sense, or are they merely phantasms? I'm not sure that we have any level of understanding of this kind of thing - we have yet to develop a science of the inner realms of consciousness. And honestly I think we're long overdue to pursue that direction.

One of the things I learned while studying ancient mysticism, which absolutely fascinated me, was learning about acupuncture and the meridians. Specifically, how they were discovered and charted in paper in the first place. Apparently, it was done like this: ancient mystics would meditate and actually move their consciousness from the area behind the eyes, where we normally experience our locus of consciousness, and they'd move this point of awareness throughout their bodies, noting the meridians and the acupuncture pints as they move their mind around inside of their bodies. Then they'd draw what they found on illustrations of the body. Today, we can find those acupuncture points with a scientific instrument. But they did it by moving their minds through their bodies. So can the mind leave the body? Can it travel through space or time, or even into other realities through some kind of inner portals of consciousness? The shamen of remote tribes in cultures all around the world seem to think so. Maybe they're right. They've certainly been mapping the territory for a very long time. Maybe they've actually found something, but Western civilization is just too snooty and beguiled by the study of objective reality to take their findings seriously. And maybe there are forms of intelligence populating those inner realities that have figured out how to make the journey into our physical reality.

It's a shame that we've never studied such things seriously. Who knows what we might learn by checking out the meditation techniques and the metaphysics of the ancients? Because one thing we do know, is that reality is comprised of both the observer and the observed. But we've only studied the observed, so at best we only have half the picture. The least important half, I should probably mention.

Thomas R. Morrison said:

I

But that's not entirely true, and your comment below proves it:


A higher dimensional being would intersect with all four of the dimensions that we're familiar with, so they might seem highly exotic, but they'd be visible. So what people seem to be suggesting, is that there are beings that exist in other dimensions, not more dimensions. And that sounds illogical to me.

For example, a three-dimensional object exists as a two-dimensional object plus one dimension, and it exists as a one-dimensional object with two additional dimensions. It's hard to imagine how any object could be a higher-dimensional object, without also being a physical object in the dimensions that we can observe, y'know? How can any object just ":skip over" the four dimensions that we're aware of? It doesn't seem to make sense.

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You missed my point so I will have another go at it. Lets see what our alien could look like in practice:

We see 4 daughter ships and a mother ship moving together. The daughterships and the mothership alternately disappear and go in different directions. They are then replaced by a cube.The cube then disappears and reappears on the other side of the earth and is then replaced by what looks like an enormous salami.

All one alien with 4 or 5 dimensions moving through our space. Parts of it could be light years away doing the same thing.

Take a 3 dimensional slice of a 4 or 5 dimensional (you can repeat this experiment with a CAT scan in random directions of the human body to see what a 2 dimensional person would see) and when the intersection moves the results are completely unpredictable.

Unless the alien deliberately presents an avatar in space time we wouldn't know what it is and it could look like a cloud.

Further - there is supposed to be another time dimension - so we don't even know that it's time runs in the same direction.

Further many of the dimensions are compactified and that might render as invisible - but still be a solid object. Or the dimensions that map to our 3-space might change. A 3-space rendering of 2 physical dimensions and one compactified dimension would render as a 2 dimensional object (no thickness in other words).

Some of the really weird observations could be the intersection of an N-space creature moving through 3-space. And we haven't even addressed the fact that the N-space creature doesn't have to be composed of atoms.

If it isn't composed of atoms the most it would be is a moving shadow.

Thomas R. Morrison said:

I tend to disagree with this actually: reason is based on logic, and logic is founded on axioms derived from the observation of physical reality, which yields science and technology. So I think it's very likely that alien intelligence will share a deep common foundation with our way of thinking - they're just obviously much better at it, which is evident because their technology is so vastly superior to our own.

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Foundations of logic may be derived from observation, but if there are alien intelligence existing now that are millions of years older than us, they may have evolved mentally and psychologically to such a point so as to see reality far differently than we would, they may be able to see layers of reality we cannot fathom...So from that possibly 'advanced' insight or observation of reality their logic could very well be amalgamated in a way too alien for us to understand at this point in our evolution...Their technology would obviously reflect their advanced knowledge of reality creating the incredible craft that has been seen in our skies...

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CasualBystander said:

You missed my point so I will have another go at it. Lets see what our alien could look like in practice:

We see 4 daughter ships and a mother ship moving together. The daughterships and the mothership alternately disappear and go in different directions. They are then replaced by a cube.The cube then disappears and reappears on the other side of the earth and is then replaced by what looks like an enormous salami.

All one alien with 4 or 5 dimensions moving through our space. Parts of it could be light years away doing the same thing.

Take a 3 dimensional slice of a 4 or 5 dimensional (you can repeat this experiment with a CAT scan in random directions of the human body to see what a 2 dimensional person would see) and when the intersection moves the results are completely unpredictable.

Unless the alien deliberately presents an avatar in space time we wouldn't know what it is and it could look like a cloud.

Further - there is supposed to be another time dimension - so we don't even know that it's time runs in the same direction.

Further many of the dimensions are compactified and that might render as invisible - but still be a solid object. Or the dimensions that map to our 3-space might change. A 3-space rendering of 2 physical dimensions and one compactified dimension would render as a 2 dimensional object (no thickness in other words).

Some of the really weird observations could be the intersection of an N-space creature moving through 3-space. And we haven't even addressed the fact that the N-space creature doesn't have to be composed of atoms.

If it isn't composed of atoms the most it would be is a moving shadow.

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I understand how a hyperdimensional object intersecting our 4D spacetime would behave. My point is simple: A.) such a thing would be observable as physical, although it would appear to act strangely under rotation etc.; and B.) there’s at present zero empirical evidence to even indirectly suggest that there are additional dimensions of space and/or time. So the whole topic generally falls into the category of “baseless speculation”: no matter how vocal the proponents of string theory and M theory may be. At present, there’s less evidence of higher dimensions, than there is for goblins, Tinkerbell, and the tooth fairy.

There is one really intriguing model of physics based on 4-space and 2-time dimensions, which has been proposed by Dr. Itzhak Bars at USC. In his model all 6 dimensions are large in scale – none of them are wrapped up into knots at some subnuclear scale. But his model is viable because the 6D physical reality is constrained by a specific gauge symmetry that mimics the physics of 4D spacetime, so the two additional dimensions are unobservable. Dr. Bars is probably one of the top five most brilliant minds in theoretical physics today, so I recommend a look at his papers on the subject, here’s a good one:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0106021.pdf

nivek said:

Foundations of logic may be derived from observation, but if there are alien intelligence existing now that are millions of years older than us, they may have evolved mentally and psychologically to such a point so as to see reality far differently than we would, they may be able to see layers of reality we cannot fathom...So from that possibly 'advanced' insight or observation of reality their logic could very well be amalgamated in a way too alien for us to understand at this point in our evolution...Their technology would obviously reflect their advanced knowledge of reality creating the incredible craft that has been seen in our skies...

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No matter how sophisticated our understanding of physical reality becomes, the fundamental properties like inertia and space and time and energy are still the defining experiential qualities for any physical being, so I’m just saying that we share this bedrock in common. The edifice of logic builds vertically, so the foundations are always the same. For example, our top quantum physicist today could still easily relate to the fears and desires of an ancient Neanderthal. If he wanted to curry favor with a Neanderthal, then he could bring him a fresh deer kill to eat, and a basket of fruit, maybe a bear skin to keep warm. Perhaps in time he could teach him how to make a fire. The physicist’s understanding that matter is comprised of quantum particles that obey the Schrödinger wavefunction doesn’t alter the capacity of the Neanderthal or the physicist to engage each other and understand each other in all of the most important and fundamental ways.

No matter how advanced we become, we can still relate to each other at some level, because we evolved in the same physical universe that obeys the same physical laws everywhere. So no sentient and relatively solid organic life form can ever be truly divorced from the physical reality that we all observe and contend with every day. However, our limited understanding of physical reality and consciousness may make us an exceeding boring species from the perspective of a being millions or billions of years ahead of us. So the extent of their interest may be as trivial as creating an Animal Planet show about the funny little hairless apes on Earth, perhaps for the amusement of their children, or their bipedal pets.

And we’ve seen ourselves that here on Earth, technological advancement means very little in terms of societal sophistication. We all carry magical little portable telecommunications computers in our pockets that are vastly more powerful than the supercomputers of the 70s and 80s, but most of us just use them to post selfies on facebook. Maybe .1% of us actually have a good understanding of how they work.

So the sophistication of the technology that we’re seeing doesn’t necessarily imply that the citizens of those civilizations are significantly ahead of us in terms of physics expertise or anything else. You can’t judge a man by the sophistication of his toys - some of the dumbest people I know have private jets and all of the latest technology at their fingertips; and the same could easily apply to alien beings visiting our planet. Look at how far our technology has come in the last century, and look how far we haven’t come as a species in that same interval: the two simply aren’t correlated.

Honestly I think we’ll probably have gravitational field propulsion and manned interstellar spaceflight capability fairly soon; maybe even within the next century or two. It would be a mistake, possibly a fatal mistake, for the people of a less advanced civilization that we go and visit to assume that we’re in any meaningful sense more advanced/intelligent/sophisticated as a species than they are.

In fact I don’t see much in the way of human progress since the dawn of human civilization. Technological advancement, definitely. But is the average person today really noticeably different than an ancient Greek or an ancient Egyptian? Evidently not. We’re still a predominantly petty, murderous, selfish monkey with a modest glimmer of higher cognition. Perhaps evolution can only take us so far, and we’ve already maxed out. So our technology will continue to evolve, while we’re standing still. Perhaps in a billion years we’ll have wormholes in every home and a warp drive spacecraft in the garage, but we’ll still be spending our evenings watching the latest Beavis and Butthead or Sex in the City types of shows on the HoloTube, and shopping for a better lotion to keep our earholes moist and freshly scented.

Thomas R. Morrison said:

. So the whole topic generally falls into the category of “baseless speculation”: no matter how vocal the proponents of string theory and M theory may be. At present, there’s less evidence of higher dimensions, than there is for goblins, Tinkerbell, and the tooth fairy.

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Well...

There are a number of anthropic arguments, including electron orbitals wouldn't be stable (N>3) and particles which decay would not behave predictably (T>1).

How do you access these arguments?

The lack of super-symmetric particles would seem to doom supersymmetry.

Would this also doom most of the other higher dimensional theories?

i still think IDH is the closest we will ever get to truth on the ufo phenomena, the reason people hate it so much is because it destroys their childhood fantasies
there i said it, let the wave of haters attack me

humanoidlord said:

i still think IDH is the closest we will ever get to truth on the ufo phenomena, the reason people hate it so much is because it destroys their childhood fantasies
there i said it, let the wave of haters attack me

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The interdimensional theory is a cop-out, intelligent people want to understand, not be given the excuse its because of magic that we will never understand...The interdimensional theory is a child-like fantasy in my opinion...

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nivek said:

The interdimensional theory is a cop-out, intelligent people want to understand, not be given the excuse its because of magic that we will never understand...The interdimensional theory is a child-like fantasy in my opinion...

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again its not magic
what appeals more to the public: a bizzare god-like entity that is so bizzare that science cant understand it or a fantastic universe full of alien civilizations with FTL travel?
there is a reason disclosure exists and old contracts with aliens is not it