WINNER & RESULT ANNOUNCED!! 50/50 FOH's Weekly Poll Comp: #26

[MoeFOH]

27 minutes ago, Ken Gargett said:

i'm looking at the way the voting is going and then at the comments and they do not match. 

it seems most people believe that there is alien life. i should point out that the question makes no mention of intelligence. so basically if another planet has pond scum, you should be voting yes. then the 2nd part of the answer about possibly visiting. sure, possible (as in it is possible i'll start dating supermodels but extremely unlikely) but the way i read it is that whether or not they have, the vote should go to yes. but that is not happening. does that make sense? 

Agree, Ken. I'm surprised, too. So I'm not sure if lots of "no's" are just not commenting or whether I've framed the options poorly. Maybe both.

The two answers have a hard/soft option.

1. Hard no, or no with an option to entertain the idea--requiring proof. 

2. Hard yes, with an option that they may or may not have visited earth. 

Intelligent life I thought went without saying in this context, but I'm descended from a long line of pond scum on Saturn, so I should really have known better. 

 

[OldEasy]

Yes, that had me confused. I understood the no, but thought the yes option more strongly implied that they had visited or that this was at least a likely scenario. As such I decided my answer was closer to the soft no than to yes, even though I am pretty confident they exist somewhere.

[Deeg]

My answer was yes, but in truth not encompassed by either of those two choices.

i absolutely believe there’s other intelligent life out there - the numbers make it almost inevitable.  I also think it’s very unlikely they have or ever will visit the Earth simply based on he sheer size of the galaxy, never mind the universe.

[MrGlass]

“The universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space.”

I voted yes.  

[GavLew79]

I'm probably misquoting but I think it was Arthur C. Clarke that said "Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not. Either of those two possibilities are mind boggling". 

[Auspaul]

Cant be the most advanced species in the universe and have seen some strange stuff in the sky

[David88]

I think I may have got confused with my answer choice. Alien life existing I’m fairly confident is a yes. Visiting earth is a definite no for me. 

[joeypots]

   This is what put the size of the universe in perspective for me. If the universe can be put in perspective, that is. As has been noted, much life  should exist because of the vastness of the universe. But the size of the universe is  mind boggling. The closest neighbor to our sun are the stars Alpha A, B, and Proxima Centauri. Call the three Alpha Centauri. They are about 4.3 light years from our sun. Say we had a ship that could travel at a million miles an hour. Never mind worm holes and warp drive and science fiction. If we are being real about what we know and what we can conceive, at a million miles /hour, how long does it take  to travel from our sun to the next closest star? Three thousand years. And then, three thousand years to get back.  And, that's only travel between our two closest stars.  So sure, there's all sorts of stuff out there because the universe is a sphere  thought to have a diameter of 93 billion light-years.    And I flipped out at 4.3......

  To get a handle on the big thinking about extra terrestrial life visiting Earth look up the Fermi Paradox.  And that's only about our galaxy.

 

[scap99]

I voted yes.

I believe we've been visited and might even have originated from some form of extraterrestrial involvement.  

Darwin's Origin of Species has some logic to it, but I don't think it correctly accounts for the origins and advancement of humans through the ages.

[Habana Mike]

Hard maybe....

[westg]

Yes. Step outside and look around..

So many living creatures which are clearly from outer space.

[MigsG]

I voted yes.  Archaeologists have been digging up the evidence for centuries but popular science still refuses to see it.  Some of these different forms of aliens became gods to ancient civilizations.  Doesn't anybody watch Ancient Aliens? ?

[LLC]

Possible yes but not likely will have hard proof. 

[SirVantes]

It's a No, because we're still here.  See the Dark Forest theory, well expounded in Cixin Liu's The Three-Body Problem trilogy (specifically, the second book).

[Cairo]

8 minutes ago, SirVantes said:

It's a No, because we're still here.  See the Dark Forest theory, well expounded in Cixin Liu's The Three-Body Problem trilogy (specifically, the second book).

Interesting stuff--(even if I don't agree)--thanks for the reference.

[Weeqi]

The ways of approaching that stats on this are beyond my ken. There are three ways of approaching it: 

1. It's odd enough that life exists at all in the universe as it it is, so the odds of it happening more than once seem astronomical. Smaller even that it occurred once. 
2. The chances that there could be a habital world are astronomically small. The chances of there being two is even lower.

Points and one and two are statements about the set of things where life might occur. The first refers to a property common to each item, that is of being in the universe where it seems odd that there even is life. The second says that every item in the set happens to have the same property: worlds rarely, very much so, seem to be livable. 

The third oberservation assumes something like, 

For every object (planet) in the set, there exists an X chance for life to exist, where X is greater than zero. The number of items in the set is sufficiently multitudinous to assume that the occurrence of life is greater than 1. 

So, number three is: 

3. It is unlikely that only one planet supports life. 

Both have some strong intuitive weight to them. However, it seems more likely than 1 or 2 is a better picture of things. 

[Fuzz]

18 hours ago, joeypots said:

   This is what put the size of the universe in perspective for me. If the universe can be put in perspective, that is. As has been noted, much life  should exist because of the vastness of the universe. But the size of the universe is  mind boggling. The closest neighbor to our sun are the stars Alpha A, B, and Proxima Centauri. Call the three Alpha Centauri. They are about 4.3 light years from our sun. Say we had a ship that could travel at a million miles an hour. Never mind worm holes and warp drive and science fiction. If we are being real about what we know and what we can conceive, at a million miles /hour, how long does it take  to travel from our sun to the next closest star? Three thousand years. And then, three thousand years to get back.  And, that's only travel between our two closest stars.  So sure, there's all sorts of stuff out there because the universe is a sphere  thought to have a diameter of 93 billion light-years.    And I flipped out at 4.3......

  To get a handle on the big thinking about extra terrestrial life visiting Earth look up the Fermi Paradox.  And that's only about our galaxy.

 

The fastest human made object is the Parker Space probe. It reached the record breaking speed of about 343,000km/h. The average distance between the Sun and Earth is approx 149,600,000km, and it takes light about 8 minutes to travel that distance. For Parker to travel the same distance, it would take about 18 days, if it was going at its record breaking speed the entire distance. To reach Neptune, it would take just under 1.5 years. To the edge of our solar system? Close to 5 years. And to Alpha Centauri?... 14900 years. That's a lot of frequent flyer points.

Mind you, that's all based on going at max speed. If you take into account getting up to that speed, and then decelerating from the midway point, it's going to take a helluva lot longer.

[GrouchoMarx]

Regardless -  they're not talking to us.

Face it, if you were an alien, watching the earth, and you see someone being pulled along by a dog and stopping to pick up its poop - who would YOU think is in charge?

[Wailbait]

On 10/2/2019 at 7:06 PM, Ken Gargett said:

i'm looking at the way the voting is going and then at the comments and they do not match. 

it seems most people believe that there is alien life. i should point out that the question makes no mention of intelligence. so basically if another planet has pond scum, you should be voting yes. then the 2nd part of the answer about possibly visiting. sure, possible (as in it is possible i'll start dating supermodels but extremely unlikely) but the way i read it is that whether or not they have, the vote should go to yes. but that is not happening. does that make sense? 

I see what you are saying but I don’t see it altogether incongruent.  Let’s say every person believes in the possibility, or likelihood on “at least” pond scum somewhere else in this really really really big universe.  Seems presumptive not to believe this.  

2/3 of voters think it’s unlikely for them to have been here.  (Maybe pond scum doesn’t fly a ship?  Maybe they live far away?)

1/3 believe they have been here or currently reside here.  

Comments seem to somewhat jive with that.  

[Philc2001]

If you haven't seen it, watch Bob Lazar. 

First watch or listen to the Joe Rogan interview: 

 

Then watch the netflix video: https://www.netflix.com/title/81083891

 

[Philc2001]

As follow-up to Lazar, take a look at this interview with Cmdr. David Fravor, who had a first-hand encounter with a UFO and tracked it in his F18 Super Hornet. He also does an analysis on other more recent encounters. There are more of these encounters coming out, and it is obvious from the instruments that record these encounters that the technology they are coming in contact with is not in our current inventory. 

 

[earthson]

Consider the attached image, which is an interdimensional entity named Lam that Aleister Crowley claims to have invoked.  Is there something beyond the 4 spatial dimensions we occupy?

[Meklown]

As noted by others, aliens would likely have to travel pretty long distances to be able to reach us. This would mean they either have technology / power source greater than anything we can currently imagine, or they simply have been traveling for a very very long period of time. 

Assuming the former, scientists have also calculated (estimated) that the energy required for a ship to visit another galaxy is greater than the energy required to completely destroy Earth.

if we indeed had been visited by any, they would have come in peace as their technology would likely be enough to destroy the entire Earth instantly. We'd be wiped out before we even know what hit us.

[MoeFOH]

A 60/40 result here for option 1, which kind of surprises...I thought option 2 might have taken this one out... In any case, I subscribe to Douglas Adams' theory:

“It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.” 

Anyhow, my deranged imagination has drawn the imagined random winner @Doctortrent !!

Congrats! 

Please PM your email and delivery address to me @MoeFOH and we'll arrange dispatch of your prize.

Thanks to all participants. Next poll up tomorrow - stay tuned! 

[alloy]

Congrats!