Opinion Poll on Bigfoot, Alien, Ghosts

[SGT]

I don't know, and for the purposes of my paper I don't really care whether they are one or the other. What I am interested in is why so many people find it so easy to believe that they are neither.

If someone sees something in the sky that is strange...I have no trouble believing them, that they saw something. If they tell me it was an Alien spaceship, why would I accept that at face value? Why would I think they know what an alien spaceship looks like? Why would I think they would know what the flight pattern of an alien spacecraft would be?

I am trying to understand both A) Why people who see strange things are so willing to attribute it to be Alien in nature, and B) Why people who haven't seen them are so willing to accept that that is in fact what other people have seen?

I can understand believing that they have seen SOMETHING, but why the ready acceptance of the definition?

I think it is a cultural problem. Before the 20th century, people associated unidentified sightings with angels or saints. Still now people see Jesus in a tortilla or the Virgin Mary in a stained window.
From the second half of the 20th century, science fiction movies and TV shows made popular the idea of ETs. Nothing more natural that people started to associate unidentified sightings to aliens instead of angels.

 

[zoobyshoe]

The notion there might be life on other planets came up very soon after Galileo studied the moon and found the moons of Jupiter. Since the moon turned out to have a very imperfect surface, in contradiction to the Aristotelian concepts about the perfection of heavenly bodies, and since the moons of Jupiter surprised everyone, there being no mention of them in the Bible or Aristotle, the next step was to speculate that other heavenly bodies could well be inhabited just like earth.

Eventually someone hoaxed having discovered life on the moon through a telescope. This hoax was reported as fact in many newpapers during it's short life, but it helped to spread the notion of life elsewhere.

Then there was the misunderstanding about the "canals" of Mars. I believe the person who first saw and described them meant the term very loosely, just as a descriptive one, but it got taken literally as a report of intentionally manufactured canals, leading to rumors of current or past life there.

H.G Wells is the one who really set the idea of ET in peoples minds with War Of The Worlds, essentially a creative expansion out from the canal thing. I would imagine all subsequent ascribing of unexplained aerial phenomena to beings from another planet is due to Wells.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

I think SGT makes the key point: Reports have been around for centuries but the explanation keeps changing names according to the culture and era.

 

[SGT]

I mean no offence but that is a stunningly egocentric observation, or homosapienscentric would be more accurate. Prove we are the "centre" of the universe and I'll deny inevitabiltiy of life elsewhere in it

Earth is not unique IMO, and atm it is just that, I don't see how a trillion star systems would alow just one Earth. It's fairly unfeasable. Again I'm hypothesising, but it's not a bad hypothesis to supose life is out there elsewhere.

There are two different issues here: life and civilization.
The abundance and diversity of life on Earth suggests that it is inevitable. Life will probably arise in any suitable environment. Once life appears, evolution will take place and life will spread to fill every possible niche.
I am not sure if intelligence and civilization are inevitable. Present life on Earth is the result of five mass extinctions. If those extinctions did not happen when they did, present life would probably be very different.
Two of these extinctions where fundamental to the appearance of humans on Earth: The Cambrian and the Cretaceous.
The Cambrian fauna was dominated by invertebrates. Some of them were fierce predators. In the Cambrian appeared the first cordate, the Pichaia, probable ancestor of all vertebrates, from fishes to humans. The Pichaia was a small animal, that protected itself against the predators by hiding in the mud at the bottom of the ocean. A very unlikely habitat for producing complex organisms.
With the mass extinction at the end of the Cambrian, the predators were almost wiped off and the cordates were able to get out of the closet and evolve, giving origin to fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals.
The Cretaceous was dominated by the dinosaurs. The mammals were small, timid animals, that were no match for the great reptilians. The extinction of the dinosaurs 65 millions years ago allowed the evolution of mammals, culminating with the appearance of homo sapiens.
Could intelligence arise in other species? We don't know! But it is not likely that a strong predator would have any evolutionary advantage by being intelligent. Sharks have changed very little in the last 300 million years. They are so suited to their environment that there is no evolutionary pressure for their evolution.
Besides, we don't know if intelligence will lead inevitably to civilization. Dolphins are quite intelligent, but living in an aquatic environment they can't use fire. No fire, no metallurgy, no civilization. It is possible that in other worlds intelligent beings appeared and did not develop a technological civilization.
Finally, once a species evolves and creates a civilization, how long will it exist? Forty years ago our civilization almost destroyed itself in a nuclear war. Now we are trying very hard to destroy the environment with pollution and global warming. Should other intelligent beings be wiser than us? we don't really know.

 

[Schrodinger's Dog]

Of course not, there's no reason to believe that aliens would be wiser than us, more technologically advanced doesn't mean wiser it just means more powerful weapons with which to anhialate your own species.

I suspect technology is somewhat dependant on an aggresive nature, war and or competition often sees quantum leaps(quite literally in the 20th century) that lead to significant technological advancement. We maybe lucky and meet an alien that has "grown up" and put away petty bickering and politcal deviency. On the other hand they could be just like us and colonise our world, subjugating those who don't follow their beliefs and supplanting our religion and government with the Zanubian home worlds one true way? Who knows

And I don't really believe you have to have mass extinctions for intelligent life to arise, there are many reasons why intelligent life might arise other than mass extinctions. A world with violent weather changes, scarce food seasons, high competition amongst predators. The list is pretty endless. Intelligent life I believe is almost as inevitable given the right conditions as life itself, it's simply a matter of time scale or a matter of time.

 

[SGT]

Of course not, there's no reason to believe that aliens would be wiser than us, more technologically advanced doesn't mean wiser it just means more powerful weapons with which to anhialate your own species.

I suspect technology is somewhat dependant on an aggresive nature, war and or competition often sees quantum leaps(quite literally in the 20th century) that lead to significant technological advancement. We maybe lucky and meet an alien that has "grown up" and put away petty bickering and politcal deviency. On the other hand they could be just like us and colonise our world, subjugating those who don't follow their beliefs and supplanting our religion and government with the Zanubian home worlds one true way? Who knows

And I don't really believe you have to have mass extinctions for intelligent life to arise, there are many reasons why intelligent life might arise other than mass extinctions. A world with violent weather changes, scarce food seasons, high competition amongst predators. The list is pretty endless. Intelligent life I believe is almost as inevitable given the right conditions as life itself, it's simply a matter of time scale or a matter of time.

Of course mass extinctions are not necessary for the evolving of intelligence. But they were necessary for the evolving of OUR intelligence.
I agree with you that intelligence is an attribute of predators. A complex brain needs a lot of energy, that is only available by taking proteins (supposing that alien life is similar enough to ours and use proteins as building material). But very strong predators don't need intelligence. Sharks don't need and T.Rex would not need either. Your assumption of high competition is right in my opinion.
You have touched an important point: the matter of time.
Life exists on Earth for 3.5 billion years. Intelligence is here for a mere 1.5 million years (0.05% of the total). Civilization arose some 10000 years ago and technology is 200 years old. How long will it last?
The Universe is 13.5 billion years old. First generation stars lacked the complex elements necessary to life, but we can suppose that much prior to the formation of the solar system there existed stars with planets where life could arise. In all that time many civilizations can be born and die. The great question is: if technological civilizations are short lived can two or more of them coexist in the Universe?

 

[Schrodinger's Dog]

Yeah that's what I was driving at with the time and timescale thing. One small thing though technology has been around for at least as long as humans have been around and probably a lot longer. Unless you don't consider tool making, hunting(weapon making and use), writing, engineering skills as technologies

I saw a conservative estimate put 1 intelligent life existent at anyone time per galaxy at anyone time, and this is without knowing if life is more common than we think or a half a zillion unknowable variables.I'd say with this conservative estimate with a billion galaxies out there, there are a fair few million life forms probably that exist now and a few hundred thousand intelligent ones, that's fairly likely IMO. It's also not beyond the realms of reason to think that sometimes the existence of one coincides with the existence of another in a galaxy, and even in fairly close proximity. Let's not forget if we colonise other worlds, long after this one has been incinerated by our own sun, the Milky Way will collide with the Andromeda galaxy (an event which with the sparsity of systems in a galaxy will be unlikely to disturb much existent life and which will lead to a larger eliptical galaxy) There are far larger older galaxies than our own that are made up of far more stars, we may not have met ET yet, but someone or something out there probably has: EZ though, Extra Zanubian obviously

 

[SGT]

Yeah that's what I was driving at with the time and timescale thing. One small thing though technology has been around for at least as long as humans have been around and probably a lot longer. Unless you don't consider tool making, hunting(weapon making and use), writing, engineering skills as technologies

When I say technological civilization, I mean a civilization capable to communicate with an extra planetary one. Human beings have known radio for less than 200 years and have sent a probe that will leave the solar system some 30 years ago.

I saw a conservative estimate put 1 intelligent life existent at anyone time per galaxy at anyone time, and this is without knowing if life is more common than we think or a half a zillion unknowable variables. I'd say with this conservative estimate with a billion galaxies out there, there are a fair few million life forms probably that exist now and a few hundred thousand intelligent ones, that's fairly likely IMO. It's also not beyond the realms of reason to think that sometimes the existence of one coincides with the existence of another in a galaxy, and even in fairly close proximity. Let's not forget if we colonise other worlds, long after this one has been incinerated by our own sun, the Milky Way will collide with the Andromeda galaxy (an event which with the sparsity of systems in a galaxy will be unlikely to disturb much existent life and which will lead to a larger eliptical galaxy) There are far larger older galaxies than our own that are made up of far more stars, we may not have met ET yet, but someone or something out there probably has: EZ though, Extra Zanubian obviously

I have read uch an article, written by Angie Feazel at THE ELECTRONIC JOURNAL OF THE ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY OF THE ATLANTIC Volume 1, Number 4 - November 1989.
Using a lifetime of 10000 years for a civilization after it acquires the capacity to communicate extraplanetarily, the author arrives at an estimate of 1.56 civilizations per galaxy.
There are hundreds of billions of galaxies in the Universe, but unless our present knowledge of physics is extremely wrong, it is not probable that communication could make an intergalactic jump.

 

[zoobyshoe]

On the subject of extra-terrestrial life:

Scientists find liquid water on Enceladus

By ALICIA CHANG - Associated Press

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The Cassini spacecraft has found evidence of liquid water spewing from geysers on one of Saturn’s icy moons, raising the tantalizing possibility that the celestial object harbors life.

The surprising discovery excited some scientists, who say the Saturn moon, Enceladus, should be added to the short list of places within the solar system most likely to have extraterrestrial life.

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Space/2006/03/09/1480282-ap.html

 

[kahless2005]

I voted May exist for Bigfoot. There are a lot of eye witness accounts all across the world, with startling accuracy to the claims.

I voted Aliens may exist, not confirmed Earth visits. I mean why would an advanced civilization want to come and shove probes up our butts? I thik that we are too primative for them and therefore they don't waste their time with us.

I voted Ghosts may exist, there are a lot of bogus claims and myths on this subject, but there are also a lot of unexpalined events. ie Gozer the Gosariean!:rofl:

 

[ptabor]

I think it is a cultural problem. Before the 20th century, people associated unidentified sightings with angels or saints. Still now people see Jesus in a tortilla or the Virgin Mary in a stained window.
From the second half of the 20th century, science fiction movies and TV shows made popular the idea of ETs. Nothing more natural that people started to associate unidentified sightings to aliens instead of angels.

Perhaps it was always aliens?

 

[SGT]

Perhaps it was always aliens?

And perhaps what is now believed to be spaceships are angels.

 

[zoobyshoe]

And perhaps what is now believed to be spaceships are angels.

SGT, I don't know what kind of television service you have access to, but you would greatly enjoy a series of debunking programs that are often aired on The National Geographic Channel on US cable television.

A show on the chupacabra was very enlightening concerning people's desire to believe, even in horrible things, and unwillingness to let go of beliefs even in the face of scientific proof.

A farmer somewhere in Latin America shot at a "chupacabra" and a few days later found a somewhat decomposed corpse which he recognized as the beast he'd shot at. He told the police and the corpse was taken to a university lab for examination. The whole exam was filmed and they showed footage of the scientists looking at the corpse.

Well, it was just a dog. They recognized it at first glance despite it being half decayed but went throught the proper identification proceedure anyway and showed the film crew all the important ways it matched dog specimens they had on file.

The public, however, was enraged at their conclusion and they received many threats and accusations that they were engaged in a cover-up. One of the examiners said this has happened over and over again each time they get something and determine it isn't anything unusual. He said he was glad he lived in the city, and not in the rural areas where these reports and corpses come from because he's authentically afraid some of these rural people would harm him for saying it isn't some kind of alien or lab created mutation.

 

[SGT]

SGT, I don't know what kind of television service you have access to, but you would greatly enjoy a series of debunking programs that are often aired on The National Geographic Channel on US cable television.

A show on the chupacabra was very enlightening concerning people's desire to believe, even in horrible things, and unwillingness to let go of beliefs even in the face of scientific proof.

A farmer somewhere in Latin America shot at a "chupacabra" and a few days later found a somewhat decomposed corpse which he recognized as the beast he'd shot at. He told the police and the corpse was taken to a university lab for examination. The whole exam was filmed and they showed footage of the scientists looking at the corpse.

Well, it was just a dog. They recognized it at first glance despite it being half decayed but went throught the proper identification proceedure anyway and showed the film crew all the important ways it matched dog specimens they had on file.

The public, however, was enraged at their conclusion and they received many threats and accusations that they were engaged in a cover-up. One of the examiners said this has happened over and over again each time they get something and determine it isn't anything unusual. He said he was glad he lived in the city, and not in the rural areas where these reports and corpses come from because he's authentically afraid some of these rural people would harm him for saying it isn't some kind of alien or lab created mutation.

Thank you for the information. My cable service features Nat Geo. Since they air a lot of reprises, I will probably be able to see it in the near future.

 

[my_wan]

Funny ghost got more votes than bigfoot

If even 1 spacefaring race managed to colonize mutiliple worlds it would not only greatly improve long term chances of survival but withing a few million years they would essentially own at least the galaxy, even with the present limitations in physics as we know them. Such a race would likely posses godlike powers in our estimation. What are the odds this hasn't already happened? However unlikely it's certainly not 0. Such a race would be unlikely to depend on a planet for providing life support, only raw materials.

Point is that even though by far the greatest probability is that we are essentially alone at least in this galaxy the possibilities are more outrageous than we can possibly imagine. We suffer culture shock just moving around within our own societies and we want to pretend we can intellectualize races millions of years more advanced. It's fun to try though

 

[SGT]

Funny ghost got more votes than bigfoot

If even 1 spacefaring race managed to colonize mutiliple worlds it would not only greatly improve long term chances of survival but withing a few million years they would essentially own at least the galaxy, even with the present limitations in physics as we know them. Such a race would likely posses godlike powers in our estimation. What are the odds this hasn't already happened? However unlikely it's certainly not 0. Such a race would be unlikely to depend on a planet for providing life support, only raw materials.

Point is that even though by far the greatest probability is that we are essentially alone at least in this galaxy the possibilities are more outrageous than we can possibly imagine. We suffer culture shock just moving around within our own societies and we want to pretend we can intellectualize races millions of years more advanced. It's fun to try though

I agree with you, provided that such a civilization could last millions of years. Our civilization acquired the means to extinguish itself about 60 years ago and we almost did it.
Will we be able to leave the planet before we deplete it from all its resources through exploitation and pollution? I don't really know.
Provided that another race has escaped self destruction and is going where no LGM has been before, would they need to mutilate cattle, draw crop circles and introduce anal probes in human beings? I don't think so! As you said, such a race would be godlike in our eyes and could study the life in our tiny rock with less invasive means.
Besides, escaping self destruction means that they achieved not only advanced technology, but advanced moral principles, so they would not kill and torture living beings, specially sentient ones.

 

[zoobyshoe]

We suffer culture shock just moving around within our own societies and we want to pretend we can intellectualize races millions of years more advanced. It's fun to try though

I don't think a lot of time is any guarrantee of advancement, or, rather, that being advanced has to indicate a long history.

 

[Anttech]

I mean no offence but that is a stunningly egocentric observation, or homosapienscentric would be more accurate. Prove we are the "centre" of the universe and I'll deny inevitabiltiy of life elsewhere in it

Earth is not unique IMO, and atm it is just that, I don't see how a trillion star systems would alow just one Earth. It's fairly unfeasable. Again I'm hypothesising, but it's not a bad hypothesis to supose life is out there elsewhere.

no offence taken.. I am just giving a different view point.. I am sceptical that there is other life forms out there, I see no reason why there should be, as I don't accept that we are a fluke...

 

[my_wan]

I don't think a lot of time is any guarrantee of advancement, or, rather, that being advanced has to indicate a long history.

I don't disagree. I even find the ideas I stated highly unlikely in general. However if a technologicaly advanced civilization is found what are the odds they attained that status within last few million years. Given the estimated age of the universe their technological status will likely be at least that old. The only thing to moderate those odds is that any live planet would likely have a lifespan much shorter than that. Escaping dependence on a particular planet is paramont to truly long term survival.

 

[zoobyshoe]

I don't disagree. I even find the ideas I stated highly unlikely in general. However if a technologicaly advanced civilization is found what are the odds they attained that status within last few million years. Given the estimated age of the universe their technological status will likely be at least that old. The only thing to moderate those odds is that any live planet would likely have a lifespan much shorter than that. Escaping dependence on a particular planet is paramont to truly long term survival.

The idea I'm putting out is that I don't think there's any reason to assume technological advancement is limited to earth-paced advancement. The quality we call "intelligence" which allows for technology might well have evolved much more quickly and to a much more sophisticated level in a different environment, and a given alien may be able to reach, say, Feynman levels of understanding in his first year of life. Rather than the slow, clumsey accumulation of knowledge over generations, with the concommitant fights against the preconceptions of previous generations, aliens might be neurologically wired to see and grasp things extremely rapidy. An alien race might have figured out how to escape dependence on an individual planet in the course of a hundred Earth years.

 

[SGT]

The idea I'm putting out is that I don't think there's any reason to assume technological advancement is limited to earth-paced advancement. The quality we call "intelligence" which allows for technology might well have evolved much more quickly and to a much more sophisticated level in a different environment, and a given alien may be able to reach, say, Feynman levels of understanding in his first year of life. Rather than the slow, clumsey accumulation of knowledge over generations, with the concommitant fights against the preconceptions of previous generations, aliens might be neurologically wired to see and grasp things extremely rapidy. An alien race might have figured out how to escape dependence on an individual planet in the course of a hundred Earth years.

The only examples of life and intelligence we have are those on Earth. To speculate about very dissimilar forms of life will lead us nowhere. I think we must assume that life in another planet is similar to that on Earth: carbon based, with some form of genetic code (not necessarily DNA) and with simple organisms attaining maturity very quickly, being short lived and reproducing fast. More complex organisms should have larger brains (or whatever aliens use to think), mature more slowly and have larger lifespans and smaller progenies.
We don't have to speculate for faster maturity in aliens. In the billions of years of existence of our galaxy it is very likely that if life and intelligence have appeared elsewhere, it could be thousands or millions of years ahead of us. The problem, as I pointed in a previous post, is how long a civilization survives after getting the means to suicide.

 

[zoobyshoe]

The only examples of life and intelligence we have are those on Earth. To speculate about very dissimilar forms of life will lead us nowhere.

The aliens I'm inviting you to imagine aren't basically dissimilar to us. Their ability to advance would be the result of being wired, neurologically, differently in a way that might have happened to us but didn't.

We don't have to speculate for faster maturity in aliens.

No, we don't have to, but we don't have to be limited to speculating in terms of homo-sapiens-paced advancement either.

The problem, as I pointed in a previous post, is how long a civilization survives after getting the means to suicide.

This is only something we'd have to take into consideration if we assume human-like emotions and values for them. That's not something we can definitely assume for other life forms here on earth, much less beings on another planet.

 

[SGT]

The aliens I'm inviting you to imagine aren't basically dissimilar to us. Their ability to advance would be the result of being wired, neurologically, differently in a way that might have happened to us but didn't.

No, we don't have to, but we don't have to be limited to speculating in terms of homo-sapiens-paced advancement either.

This is only something we'd have to take into consideration if we assume human-like emotions and values for them. That's not something we can definitely assume for other life forms here on earth, much less beings on another planet.

Other species on Earth have beeing and will be extinct by external factors. The only species that has the power to extinguish itself is homo sapiens and this has being true only for 60 years.