Do you think any aliens exist in the universe?

[Loren Pechtel]

Yeah, but why would they be destroyed at that instant?

Meteorite strike? Super volcanic eruption? Tsunami? There are lots of ways a species can suddenly go extinct.

But they were around for a hundred million years.

Who is "they?"

Dinosaurs.

Mammals have been around for a lot more than a hundred million years (about 225 million is the current oldest mammal fossil). What are the odds that they would start building cities just in the last few thousand?

Humans, of course, have been around for far less time - as, presumably, would have been any hypothetical intelligent dinosaur.

Something takes them out less than ten thousand years before they could leave recognizable traces? The odds are 1 in 10,000 of this happening.

What is a recognisable trace, that will still be findable after seventy million years?

The coal wasn't mined.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Here on earth, epigenetics suggests a mild form of Lamarckism, though not a driver of evolution.

Source please?

Look it up for yourself. Google is your friend, except for Google AI.

It's not my job to support the claims you make.

It is not my job to respond to you at all. Fortunately, out of the goodness of my heart, I gave you a link to a scientific study that supports just what I said — that epigenetics supports a mild form of Lamarckism in gene expression. You could have looked that up yourself but I did the work for you, without any pay so far.

Epigenetics requires Darwinian evolution to create the switches in the first place. Epigenetics simply allows for some small control of genes which are sometimes good to have and sometimes not.

 

[lostone]

And we might find more in common with some aliens than we do with our own species. Even if they came to eat us.

The idea that aliens might want to eat us is bizarre. I mean, even if we are sufficiently similar biochemically not to poison them outright, we are very unlikely to be palatable, and certainly not worth the enormous effort and expense of interstellar travel, just to get some food.

Of course, it's a scifi trope, but like the idea that Ming the Merciless might want to marry Dale Arden it is simply a thinly-veiled racist exaggeration of the threat posed to "us" by "them", in a context where both us and them are humans.

I mean, humans will engage in beastiality, but even that is usually limited to mammalia, and rarely is marriage considered. Beastiality across not just classes, phyla, or kingdoms, but between life forms from entirely different evolutionary histories is truly absurd.

As usual, it turns out that scifi is all about human relationships with each other, and has nothing to say about aliens at all. Scifi aliens are just an analogy for humans that the author doesn't want to explicitly name.

I was more focused on the idea that we are more alienated from each other than we are from other species, even species here on earth. The 2nd sentence of mine was just an off-target and bizarre half-humorous afterthought, which could well been omitted.

 

[steve_bank]

Hi, my name is Zork from the planet Dongle. I like sunsets and long walks on the beach.

Or a race of ET Mr Rogers.

One of the best scifi stories is still To Serve Man on Twilight Zone.

ET shows up curing disease and improving agriculture. Population grows and people stat moving to the ET home world.

The head ET carried a book. A cryptologist figured out the title To Serve Man.

As he is getting on a spaceship his assistant comes running up saying 'Don't get on the ship, To Serve Man, its a cookbook'.

ET lands on the White House lawn,pops open the door, pisses out on the lawn, throws out empty beer cans, and flies away.

Possibilities are endless.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

No, I did not say that. Stop shoving words into my mouth in your petty and argumentative way.

I am not arguing for magic fairies. I am saying that different life forms, under different conditions, might develop in different naturalistic ways, perhaps some that we have never thought of because we have never experienced them. Again, please stop shoving words into my mouth in your petty and argumentative way.

If you want to claim that life exists on other worlds and natural selection works on them exactly as it does here, the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate both claims. I have made no claims but put out ideas that I admitted are speculative for the purpose of stimulating discussion, and not to incur petty personal attacks and hissy fits.

The problem here is that evolution is emergent, basically independent of the reproductive and genetic processes. And we can manipulate it to make things go faster but it's still the same thing. Your argument sounds an awful lot like there might be planets where 2 + 2 = 5.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Medieval technologists wasted a lot of time and effort trying to build perpetual motion machines, or to use chemistry to turn lead into gold. Modern science tells us that these things are futile; If we want cheap energy, we need to get it from somewhere else, and if we want to turn lead into gold, we need nuclear reactions, not chemical ones.

Science doesn't make more things possible, and it never did. It makes fewer things possible, thereby allowing technologists to see the wood for the trees.

Well, there's a company investigating turning mercury into gold. The basic idea is doubling fusion value by breeding gold as well as tritium. I do wonder at the reaction sequence that somehow causes the loss of a neutron from neutron bombardment, though...

 

[excreationist]

The head ET carried a book. A cryptologist figured out the title To Serve Man.

As he is getting on a spaceship his assistant comes running up saying 'Don't get on the ship, To Serve Man, its a cookbook'.

A Simpsons reference:

 

[Loren Pechtel]

And we might find more in common with some aliens than we do with our own species. Even if they came to eat us.

The idea that aliens might want to eat us is bizarre. I mean, even if we are sufficiently similar biochemically not to poison them outright, we are very unlikely to be palatable, and certainly not worth the enormous effort and expense of interstellar travel, just to get some food.

Of course, it's a scifi trope, but like the idea that Ming the Merciless might want to marry Dale Arden it is simply a thinly-veiled racist exaggeration of the threat posed to "us" by "them", in a context where both us and them are humans.

I mean, humans will engage in beastiality, but even that is usually limited to mammalia, and rarely is marriage considered. Beastiality across not just classes, phyla, or kingdoms, but between life forms from entirely different evolutionary histories is truly absurd.

As usual, it turns out that scifi is all about human relationships with each other, and has nothing to say about aliens at all. Scifi aliens are just an analogy for humans that the author doesn't want to explicitly name.

Disagree. Bestiality is basically using the animal as a sex toy, marriage makes no sense because a marriage is between minds. No interspecies relationships are possible because there are no other sapients on the planet. But if there were I do not think attraction would be inherently impossible. Lust at first sight is obviously out of the question but I do not think pair-bonding is out of the question assuming both individuals are from pair-bonding species.

 

[bilby]

Yeah, but why would they be destroyed at that instant?

Meteorite strike? Super volcanic eruption? Tsunami? There are lots of ways a species can suddenly go extinct.

But they were around for a hundred million years.

Who is "they?"

Dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs are not a species. As I go on to say, mammals had been around for a while before one developed intelligence.

Mammals have been around for a lot more than a hundred million years (about 225 million is the current oldest mammal fossil). What are the odds that they would start building cities just in the last few thousand?

Humans, of course, have been around for far less time - as, presumably, would have been any hypothetical intelligent dinosaur.

Something takes them out less than ten thousand years before they could leave recognizable traces? The odds are 1 in 10,000 of this happening.

What is a recognisable trace, that will still be findable after seventy million years?

The coal wasn't mined.

Most of coal wasn't mined on Earth until the 1850s; Was there no intelligent life on Earth prior to that date?

 

[steve_bank]

Iexpect to her dismay Jane Goodall discovered chipos form one troop would hunt down a chimp from another troop, kill it, and eat it.

Chimpanzee cannibalism is a documented, though relatively uncommon, behavior in wild chimpanzee populations that typically occurs in the context of infanticide or intra-community violence, often motivated by reproductive competition or the acquisition of nutritional resources.

Expecting an ET to have our kinds of modern morality does not make sense.

I did not read the entire link. Hawking did caution about m,aking our existence known to an ET.

Stephen Hawking’s Warning on Contacting Aliens: A Physics Perspective on the Intelligence Trap - PMC

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a fascinating and important endeavor, but it raises significant ethical and safety concerns. In the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, scientists use knowledge of physics to identify potential ...

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Stephen Hawking’s Warning on Contacting Aliens: A Physics Perspective on the Intelligence Trap

The late Stephen Hawking believed that direct contact with advanced alien civilizations would inevitably lead to the colonization of Earth by aliens. However, while he was undoubtedly a brilliant mind, his predictions of the unfortunate outcome of contact with extraterrestrial life may not necessarily hold true. It is crucial to consider important questions such as whether aliens share goals similar to ours, whether they have resource and territorial expansion motivations, and what their intentions might be. Therefore, we must approach the search for intelligent extraterrestrial life with a balance of scientific curiosity and caution.

If ET has the technology to get here then they probably have advanced weapons.

We call ourselves an intelligent species, but look at the world as it is.

The last thing we would want is to have is an ET show up who are like us with Star Trek scale technology.

 

[bilby]

If ET has the technology to get here then they probably have advanced weapons.

Any space propulsion system is an advanced weapon, if you choose to use it as such.

 

[Spacetime Inhabitant]

If ET has the technology to get here then they probably have advanced weapons.

Any space propulsion system is an advanced weapon, if you choose to use it as such.

The famous 'Kzinti Lesson'.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

If ET has the technology to get here then they probably have advanced weapons.

Any space propulsion system is an advanced weapon, if you choose to use it as such.

The famous 'Kzinti Lesson'.

Yeah, although some realms use pseudovelocity drives which by themselves are not weapons. Lensman series is the first that I'm aware of--but note that even there the driver is weaponized by grabbing asteroids and planets, putting a drive on them and maneuvering them so their base velocity will cause them to hit whatever you really want destroyed. Likewise, the Starfire universe and the Armageddon Inheritance use have pseudovelocity drives, but in both of them reaction drives are mounted on sub-planetary bodies to weaponize them.

 

[steve_bank]

If ET has the technology to get here then they probably have advanced weapons.

Any space propulsion system is an advanced weapon, if you choose to use it as such.

The famous 'Kzinti Lesson'.

It can't be too famous, I never heard of it.

 

[bilby]

If ET has the technology to get here then they probably have advanced weapons.

Any space propulsion system is an advanced weapon, if you choose to use it as such.

The famous 'Kzinti Lesson'.

Yeah, although some realms use pseudovelocity drives which by themselves are not weapons. Lensman series is the first that I'm aware of--but note that even there the driver is weaponized by grabbing asteroids and planets, putting a drive on them and maneuvering them so their base velocity will cause them to hit whatever you really want destroyed. Likewise, the Starfire universe and the Armageddon Inheritance use have pseudovelocity drives, but in both of them reaction drives are mounted on sub-planetary bodies to weaponize them.

Any system capable of accelerating mass can be a weapon.

A propulsion system that can't accelerate mass is not a propulsion system.

 

[Spacetime Inhabitant]

If ET has the technology to get here then they probably have advanced weapons.

Any space propulsion system is an advanced weapon, if you choose to use it as such.

The famous 'Kzinti Lesson'.

It can't be too famous, I never heard of it.

Well there are many things that are famous in one sphere of knowledge or to certain groups that are unknown to many others. For instance, many TV series have actors that have apparently been made famous by that series, yet when they get mentioned where I hear about them I don't know who they are.
The Kzinti Lesson comes from SF author Larry Niven, and is based on a story he wrote where the Kzinti, a species that was at the time more technologically advanced than humans invaded a human planetary system with warships and were defeated by mining ships with reaction drives.
The Kzinti Lesson states simply that 'A reaction drive's efficiency as a weapon is in direct proportion to its efficiency as a drive'.

 

[steve_bank]

Photors and photon torpedo.....

If they have a drive that goes to a high percent of C all it would take is to accurate an asteroid and run it into the Earth. Or rapidly decelerate an object vaporizing the planet.

We have kinetic energy weapons. The Navy has experimented with rail gun mag launched inert masses instead of explosives.

If ET is really here and can easily go back and forth between here and home they have a technology of which we have no clue.

 

[Kylie]

So, support the claims you make.

You are the one making unsupported claims, not me.

Please support them.

What unsupported claims did I make?

That evolution must work the same on any life forms on other planets. Duh.

Perhaps that is true. But, as I have repeatedly explained, we have one data point, earth, and we have no idea how to extrapolate our experience to hypothetical living things on other worlds, living things which might be radically different from us and arise and develop in different ways. In no way have I suggested that “magical fairies” might account for the development of life or life-like structures on other planets, one of your usual baseless claims in this alleged discussion. Did you read the links I provided or are you just going to spout off more of your petulant, argumentative, and pointless bullshit?

Where did I make that claim?

I said that there's nothing to indicate that the process of evolution would not also be in effect on other planets.

Oh, and it's a bit rich that you accuse me of posting "petulant, argumentative, and pointless bullshit" when you use words like "duh" and base your entire argument on pure supposition.

Namely, the supposition that the way self-replicating things are influenced by the environment would for some reason (which you've never explained) be different on another planet.

 

[Kylie]

What unsupported claims did I make?

That evolution must work the same on any life forms on other planets. Duh.

Perhaps that is true. But, as I have repeatedly explained, we have one data point, earth, and we have no idea how to extrapolate our experience to hypothetical living things on other worlds, living things which might be radically different from us and arise and develop in different ways. In no way have I suggested that “magical fairies” might account for the development of life or life-like structures on other planets, one of your usual baseless claims in this alleged discussion. Did you read the links I provided or are you just going to spout off more of your petulant, argumentative, and pointless bullshit?

"Duh" and "pointless b*llshit"? Sounds like being "petulant, argumentative".

This in response to his/her/their responses to me, when I tried to conduct a civil and intellectual discussion and in return got charged with saying that “magical fairies” were equally likely as Darwinian evolution to explain how life arises and develops on other planets. I, obviously, said nothing of the kind.

Now, could you perhaps kindly explain, for the first time, your evidence for your claim that we live in a simulation but you are the only one conscious in it?

Are you confused as to my gender?

Tell me, what's my name?

Do you think that's a boy name or do you think that's a girl name?

 

[Kylie]

So you think that if we can't rule something out, it must be equally likely?

No, I did not say that. This would mean that everything is 50/50, so far as I can tell from your comment.

I am saying that with one example of anything, we cannot estimate probabilities at all.

That doesn't mean that Lamarckian evolution is as plausible an explanation as natural selection though, does it?

I don’t know. Nor do you.

In my personal opinion, natural selection is likely the default mechanism for any kind of life anywhere. However, my personal opinion doesn’t mean shit without data, which we do not have except for ONE example, here on earth. And, as noted, you cannot reliably extrapolate from one example to make generalizations.

Yes, neither of us know

In my personal opinion, magical fairies are probably NOT the default mechanism for any kind of life anywhere. However, my personal opinion doesn’t mean shit without data, which we do not have except for ONE example, here on earth. And, as noted, you cannot reliably extrapolate from one example to make generalizations.

Therefore, we must remain open to the possibility that magical fairies are present on other planets.

This is a ridiculous non sequitur that proves you are only interested in stirring up a fight and not in having a discussion.

I have never said that any old explanation at all is equally valid for how life might arise or develop on other planets, I certainly have never suggested the possibility of magic fairies. Your tripe is getting quite tiresome.

Epigenetics, a mild and largely non-influential form of Lamarckism, is observed here on earth. It is a fact. It is not “magic fairies.” Who is to say it may not play a larger role on other planets if they are inhabited? Certainly not you.

So if you agree that it is largely non-influential, why do you propose that it may be important on other planets?

Because it may be important on other planets even if not largely important here. I don’t know. Nor do you. What is hard for you to understand about this?

Do you have any evidence that it is more important on other planets than it is here? YES or NO only please.

I'm guess that it's gonna be a NO.

So you don't know if it is the case.

If it is, conditions on other planets would have to be different to what they are here on Earth. Can you say what differences would be required? Because I've asked you many times, and you have refused to answer.

I don’t know. I have already said that. Is this hard to understand?

So you have no evidence to suggest it may be more important on other planets than it is here on Earth, and you can't even tell me what could cause it to be more important on other planets than it is here.

So you don't know if it is the case, and you can't say what would cause it to be the case.

Let’s recap: we have one example, life on earth. We cannot logically generalize this to life or life-like structures on other planets. As noted, we do not even have a clear definition of life on earth. Is a virus alive? There is disagreement. Do you know, in your monumental self-imagined wisdom?

Irrelevant. We do not need to be able to define "life" in order to explain how evolution works.

So you are just claiming that MAYBE things on other planets are different and MAYBE those differences mean that a process which is largely uninfluential here has a greater effect on these other planets, but you CAN'T tell us anything about what sort of differences would be required.

Why would I be able to tell you that? I already said I DON’T KNOW, and neither do you. The point, once again, is that we have ONE EXAMPLE of life or life-like structures, here on earth, and from that you cannot extrapolate or generalize to life or life-like structures on other worlds. AS I HAVE SAID, it MAY BE THE CASE that some form of neo-Darwinian evolution pertains everywhere, but we do not KNOW that, and, to reiterate, I have never suggested “magic fairies” are equally likely to explain life or life-like structures on other worlds as neo-Darwinian evolution. Can you finally grasp this point?

I grasp the point that YOU DON'T KNOW IF IT IS THE CASE, AND YOU DON'T KNOW HOW IT COULD POSSIBLY BE THE CASE.

What I DON'T grasp is why you think that, given your totally inability to justify that it could be the case, why we should entertain your supposition.

In other words, you are making vague claims and offering no support for those claims.

The burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that neo-Darwinian evolution operates the same way everywhere, even assuming there is life anywhere but here.

You are the one claiming that things could be different, it's up to you to support it.

Don't try and pass the burden of proof just because you've proposed a position you can't possibly support.

And you wonder why I don't take you seriously?

No, I don’t wonder, nor do I care. It is I who don’t take you seriously.

Because if you did, you'd have to support your position.

Which you can't.

Do you even know what “agnostic” means?

Yes.

Really? Explain it.

To hold the position that we can't be certain about something. Usually used in relation to the existence of God, but you are clearly using it here to say we can't be certain of how life may be affected by conditions on other planets, and the evolutionary forces there may be different to what they are here.

Did I get it right?

BTW, you asked me for links to scholarly science articles concerning whether all mutations are random with respect to to environment and whether some form of Lamarckism might hold on other worlds or even universally. I provided you what you asked for.

Did you read them?

My guess:

NO.

Yes I did.

I responded to it in post 982.

Where I said:

"I did a search for the term "Lamarck" in that link, and found it was mentioned only twice. Let me give you the context for those instances:

"Furthermore, to explain the fact that the gene fusion effect applies to both germline and somatic genes (72) without resorting to Lamarckism, it has been proposed that the transcriptional promiscuity of the germline (78–80)—the fact that somatic genes are regularly transcribed in the germline—exposes close regulatory somatic connections, allowing somatic as well as germline genes to participate in mutational mechanisms such as the one described in a heritable mode (65, 71, 72, 76)."

And

"According to this view, the causes and consequences of individual mutations are meaningfully related without involving Lamarckism: The internal information affecting mutation probabilities itself has accumulated under past selection pressures and reflects current structures and functions, and therefore the distribution of individual mutation rates across the genome at any one time in evolution is specifically relevant to the adaptations evolving at that time (65, 71, 99)."

Neither of those shows any support for Lamarckian evolution.

So, please tell me: What claim of yours do you say is being supported by that article, and what part of the article specifically supports said claim?"

You have completely FAILED to respond to those points.