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It's not easy to see Earth-sized planets outside our solar system. To see a planet, you need it to make a gravity signature against its star and that's a lot easier to see when the planets are big.
The James Webb telescope, launching in 2018, will be able to image earth sized planets, but they'll be dots. However, this will be enough to do spectral analyses for the signatures of carbon-based life.
The High Definition Space Telescope planned for launch in the 2030s will be five times larger than the Hubble and 100 times more sensitive. Its primary goal is to find and analyze earth-like planets, not the huge gas giants and sterile super Earths orbiting close to their stars that Hubble's been finding. Here's an article about it ... I hope I live long enough to see the results of its investigations:
I have seen a few articles recently about the great barrier theory.
I enjoy the show Ancient Aliens, even though it is way over the top.
That said i think part of the problem with the "geez we have been looking for alien life for the last 100ish years and nothing... They must not exist".
We have had written history for what a few thousand of years. If the aliens came before that we would have no record. If the aliens came when we had primitive writing we just write it off as oh our primitives ancestors making things up.
So really how far back in history would we believe aliens made contact with us?
500 years? UFO 'battle' over Nuremberg, Germany in 1561.... well that is obviously non sense....
400 years? FRANCE 1790 During the summer, Police Inspector Liabeuf witnessed and investigated a large red globe
300 years? UFO Over New York's Schoharie County - 1790.... again
I guess my point is that contact would have to be very recent and very wide spread to be believed.
The Wow signal and star KIC 8462852 are still unexplained.
That said i think part of the problem with the "geez we have been looking for alien life for the last 100ish years and nothing... They must not exist".
That's because people still suffer from what C.S. Lewis called "chronological snobbery." We assume we're the smartest, most advanced, most bestest people ever, and generations who came before us just weren't as awesome as we are. It's a false assumption.
It also goes a long way to explaining why the kooks think that the pyramids and Stonehenge and Machu Pichu must have been built by aliens. They can't get it through their head that people thousands of years ago were born with essentially the same brains we have. Our ancestors were pretty smart and have been for millennia.
That's because people still suffer from what C.S. Lewis called "chronological snobbery." We assume we're the smartest, most advanced, most bestest people ever, and generations who came before us just weren't as awesome as we are. It's a false assumption.
It also goes a long way to explaining why the kooks think that the pyramids and Stonehenge and Machu Pichu must have been built by aliens. They can't get it through their head that people thousands of years ago were born with essentially the same brains we have. Our ancestors were pretty smart and have been for millennia.
Lots of assumptions in these pages. The biggest one, that the bulk of people seem to be making, is that any alien life that might exist is more advanced than we are. While not demonstrably false, there is absolutely no basis for making it.
Our tiny little bit of the universe*, what we call the 'visible universe', all got started at roughly the same time on the cosmic scale of things. Even if other life does exist somewhere out there, we could very well be the most advanced form of it, and there is no reason to assume otherwise.
***(Now, anyone who thinks that the portion of the universe that we can see, is all that there is, does not correctly grasp the concept of 'infinite'. Vast as it may appear to us, the 'visible universe' is less than a grain of sand compared to all the deserts of the world. Are there any other aggregations of matter, similar to what we call the 'visible universe', *beyond* what we can currently see? There might be, or there might not...I should think, given the nature of 'infinity', that the possibility leans more toward 'might be', but even if we could travel to the edge of what we can currently see, any other such aggregation of matter could be so far away as to be undetectable...our tiny little portion of the true Universe could expand and collapse a billion times, a billion 'Big Bangs', over aeons of aeons, and still remain unnoticed and insignificant in the grand scheme of things.)
Great show.....but, if there was one alien spaceship flying around today....why wouldn't they just land in a major city? What could possibly be a reason for flying around for hundreds or thousands of years? Has anyone on this forum actually ever seen a single UFO or even known someone who has?
I remember watching a show about a ship that sunk in the Great Lakes, the Captain believed (before he passed) that earth was a prison planet created by aliens. This logic was born of the different races and languages. Of course, God may have made different races and languages so one person couldn't seize control of the entire earth through gifted speech or looks.
So really how far back in history would we believe aliens made contact with us?
500 years? UFO 'battle' over Nuremberg, Germany in 1561.... well that is obviously non sense....
400 years? FRANCE 1790 During the summer, Police Inspector Liabeuf witnessed and investigated a large red globe
300 years? UFO Over New York's Schoharie County - 1790.... again
The problem with these old tales is that it's impossible to say what part of them is based on something that really happened vs the remainder that was made up or embellished. Take the green children of Woolpit:
There might be a historical core to this strange story, but if so it's likely mixed in with folklore and was embellished by those who told the story over the years. We see the same thing happening today with the spread of urban legends, and conspiracy theories. For example: the Slender Man was an internet meme created in 2009 in an internet forum. In spite of our knowing the date of its creation and its creator, Slender Man has inspired stabbings as well as suicide attempts:
if there was one alien spaceship flying around today....why wouldn't they just land in a major city?
When you go for a stroll in the woods, why don't you stop to greet the largest ant hill? Or when you're at the beach, why don't you attempt communication with all those crabs and jellyfish? Or when you catch the flu and your body is swarming with viruses, why don't you just ask them politely to stop?
The answer to those questions may well be the same answer to yours.
Quote:
Originally Posted by retired11
Has anyone on this forum actually ever seen a single UFO or even known someone who has?
Yes. I have. If by UFO you mean an Unidentified Flying Object. I saw a flying object behaving in ways I cannot explain. What was it? I don't know. It was unidentified.
Has anyone on this forum actually ever seen a single UFO or even known someone who has?
I saw two back in the 1960s: a light I thought was a satellite that made (or seemed to make) a 90 degree turn, and a silver zeppelin shaped thing that changed shapes as I watched (and was most likely I suspect a mirage). I think both might have been during UFO flaps. I was in my parents' house around the same time frame when my mother, grandmother, and sisters came running in the house because something large and dark with lights had flown over the house; and my father once watched a disk shaped thing with lighted windows at night over a field on the way home from work, thinking it was an "airplane in trouble" (probably some agricultural building he misidentified in the dark). I also have known two people over the years who had experiences that fit at least some of the criteria for abductions: missing time, unexplained lights over their car, strange electromagnetic anomalies happening around them for months or years after.
I don't claim any of these are evidence of ETs visiting earth. I don't know what they were. Their nature was and remains unknown, and from an evidentiary perspective, they're pretty much worthless except as interesting stories to tell.
UFOs - The point which many people seem to ignore is there are many, many people who have had experiences they cannot explain. Yes, some maybe misidentification, swamp gas, etc, but the fact remains there is still that 5% of unexplainable reports which SHOULD leave us wondering what it was enough to investigate it. Governments have investigated these things but they do not share with us what they found. Hence the conspiracy.
Those people who just say, " I saw something which I cannot explain and I dont know what it was" really need to get up off their chair and find out if more people saw it or become more curious. Rather than telling we who ARE more curious that everything is fine and dandy, we are the ones who want to know more about this phenomena. We dont want to accept the governments word (and some of its agents) that there are no extraterrestrial things flying about.
Maybe the 5% are black projects? Maybe they are not? The short answer is that we have found aliens on other planets in our solar system, but however much you show people things which should not be on an uninhabited planet, they cannot believe it is aliens. What other explanation is there?
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Aliens are not the same thing as UFOs because UFOs could be our black projects. Do not be fooled. Some motivated people love to move the discussion towards UFOs because they know the argument is easier to 'win' as a secret project.
This thread is about aliens NOT ufos
Aliens cannot be anything else but aliens.
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