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UK Steps Up the Search For Alien Life
An anonymous reader writes "If aliens are out there, the United Kingdom is determined to find them, as seen in the recent launch of a network called the UK Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (UKSETI), which combines the efforts and know-how of academics from 11 institutions from across the country."
Why doesn't NASA try to find alien life? Finding alien life could lead to huge technological advances.
When they could just watch The Jeremy Kyle Show and find conclusive proof that aliens do exist.
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
As I am typing this, hundreds of thousands of people around the world are hanging out at UFO-related sites. Some believe firmly in the existence of UFOs. Others are more sceptical but fascinated nevertheless. There are millions of people who would LOVE to find out "what the truth on UFOs/ETs is". ------- Except that no government with the necessary facts/knowledge ever comes forward and says "Yes, there genuinely are UFOs visiting earth" or "Sorry to disappoint, but none of the UFO sightings on record have anything to do with genuine UFOs/ETs". ------- It doesn't matter that the UK now wants to "hunt for other life in the universe". As long as nobody steps forward and gives people the straight dope on UFOs/ETs, a tech project like this is pointless. ---- I sometimes wonder: How can it be THIS DIFFICULT for a government to address ordinary people and give them REAL FACTS on UFOs? A simple YES or NO answer would suffice - are there real UFOs? YES or NO? ------ My 2 Cents
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
If the British used all the available computing and storage power of its secret data snorkeling, they might actually put the equipment to a more promising use than illegally spying on the rest of Europe.
History is dominated with stories of more advanced civilizations destroying less advanced civilizations.
The question has been answered many times by several governments, NO there is no credible evidence of alien UFOs. You just don't want to hear the answer, instead listening to wingnuts.
If they want to see evidence of an "alien invasion", one might look to the people that are coming from outside the UK - especially Africa and the Middle East.
It's not politically correct, but it is the truth.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
A simple YES or NO answer would suffice - are there real UFOs? YES or NO?
The answer is NO. This question has already been answered thousands of times, but people refuse to accept the answer.
You want the truth? Here's the truth. No aliens have visited the earth, and they never will. Not ever.
The idea of aliens coming to earth has been the subject of countless novels, movies and televison shows. Even though those stories are entirely fictional, they have greatly influenced the way we think about the idea of someday encountering beings from another world. Unfortunately, all of these stories illustrate just how small our thinking is on this subject, and we should be thinking bigger. Big enough to consider that if there really are any aliens with the ability to come visit us, they almost certainly would not care to.
Stephen Hawking once said that aliens visiting us would be similar to Christopher Columbus first landing on North America (not good for the inhabitants). His idea being that they would come for our resources, not with any particular purpose of friendship. Whether or not he is right is irrelevant because I don't think the aliens are coming. Ever.
Sci-fi stories can ignore the bits that aren't very interesting. Movie aliens rarely get sick or worry about eating. Movies don't mention artificial gravity much because given our limited view, we pretty much expect gravity to just work and shooting a movie without it would be a pain. So, screw it, all movie aliens have invented artificial gravity. After all, lasers, phasers, and pew-pew energy-blasters are much more fun to think about.
In the real world, however, science tends to advance in all directions because advances in one field often accelerate many others (much like the invention of the computer accelerated all other fields of human science).
If Stephen Hawking is right, then he is saying a race of aliens has, at a minimum, perfected faster-than-light travel (or perfected a way to travel for thousands of years at sub-light), conquered the long term biological effects of space radiation, and mastered extreme long distance space navigation, just so they can come to earth and steal our water.
So why *WOULD* aliens come to earth?
Do they really want our water (or minerals or whatever)? That implies an economic model in their decision. By definition, they must need and value those resources and coming here to get them must be their most economical choice. Getting them somewhere closer to home or manufacturing them must be more "expensive" (in some sense of the word) than the cost of traveling all the way here, gathering our resources and flying them home.
While not impossible, that seems unlikely - both technologically and economically. Even we have (expensively) already mastered alchemy. We have the tech to create matter from energy. Imagine that tech in a few hundred years, or whenever it is you think we'll be able to travel several light years for a mining expedition. What would be cheaper and better, forging the plutonium at home or sending a fleet of galactic warships (with thousands or soldiers and miners) to some far off planet?
Currently, we're not even able to get to Proxima Centauri (the closest star to us besides the sun) much less a place where we think there's an actual planet. Getting us to Proxima Centauri in less than a few hundred years would require technolgy that is orders of magnitude beyond what we have now. If getting humans to another star system is a 100 on some "technology ability scale", then we're currently at about 2, which is not far ahead of poodles - who are probably at 1.
What about the idea that aliens might come to Earth to colonize the planet (and maybe vaporize us in the process)? You could argue that terraforming (or maybe they would call it xenoforming) could be a technology more advanced than FTL travel. With that assumption, you could imagine an alien race that can travel across the galaxy but not al
One has to wonder how much panic and disruption to existing institutions, religions, power structures, and other damage conclusive proof of alien life might cause. Wouldn't the status-quo override any compelling proof?
So, what parts of the UK are believed to have the highest probability of harboring those ETs?
There's the joke about the British being proud of their accomplishment of being the first nation to land a man on the surface of the Earth.
There are now six systems with of known exoplanets within 10 light years. It's quite feasible to send messages in their direction on a regular basis. Should this be done?
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/12/muscovy-duck-sex/
sudo mod 6 logic
Unfortunately the uneducated masses have little interest in 'actual' alien concepts.
I'd also point out that DNA is essentially the only thing they could possibly want that we have.
And some concepts *are* required as per the laws of physics to pertain to life forms.
If an organism achieves the complexity and is lucky enough to be in an environment where intelligence is fostered, it will eventually, granting consciousnesses, observe that it needs to take in energy, or resources, to continue to survive.
So aliens will probably "want" things, assuming they evolved according to our laws of physics.
But resources? no. slaves? lolno.
Another unique self replicating molecule to add to your computation banks?
bingo.
...build a real Hogwarts and spend time/money on researching wizards/witchery until Dumbledore emerges.
The G
The UK has recorded all of Earth's communications now they want to listen in on E.T.
If however, we were 1000 times smarter and had spent the last 1000 years finding fish-like creatures across the galaxy, and could predict the existence of such creatures from light-years away, it probably wouldn't be all that interesting to go study another one.
I'm not sure about that; human scientists never get tired of biodiversity, of finding some strange and novel biochemical mechanism in newly discovered microbes from hellish (terrestrial) environments. And anthropologists still study remote stone-age tribes in places like the Amazon rain forest or Papua New Guinea, partly just out of intrinsic curiosity, but also because of what we can learn about human society in general from observing different paths of development. If we assume (not unreasonably) that intelligent, socialized life is relatively rare in the galaxy, then if a race becomes advanced enough to make interstellar travel economically viable, surely many generations of alien PhD students would be eager to study humans and write theses on alien mating rituals.
The bottom line is that if an alien race is capable of getting here, all the other technology they've developed in the meantime would make the trip unnecessary, and more than likely, simply meaningless.
I generally agree with most of your rant, but I think you've failed to take one factor into account: pure desperation. We have no incentive to rush into interstellar travel because Earth is such a remarkably habitable environment, and we'd need to engage in truly heroic levels of pollution to fuck that up. At our current level of technology, attempting to leave the planet would require converting the entire global economy to a spacecraft development program, with all of the disruption and coercion that implies. But what if an alien race with roughly terrestrial biology, of approximately the same technology level (or maybe a few centuries more advanced) and population, discovers that its sun is going to burn out or blow up, or some other planetary catastrophe destroys conventional agriculture and makes the surface nearly uninhabitable? And what if there are no nearby planets which could be terraformed? In that case, they'd suddenly have plenty of motivation to seek out another habitable planet, while lacking any of the other technology that might make this irrelevant. Perhaps it is still easier to support several billion humanoids in orbiting colonies than to transport them in hibernation to another planet, but I'm not convinced.
The good news is that if they're motivated by desperation, their level of technology probably isn't so far advanced that we couldn't kick their asses if and when they try to invade. So I'm sleeping soundly (for now).
If it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, and fucks like a duck, it might still be an alien.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Anytime this subject matter of alien life is posted to slashdot it results in a majority of posts expressing a lack of intelligence.
So for those who could use some educating - http://www.citizenhearing.org/
This does however cause me to wonder what they are really looking for.
I think it is pretty clear that none of these people care about any kindof truth or evidence. Many people, governments, organizations the world over have conducted experiments, given full disclosure, and performed thought experiences, and they are not interested at all in anything other that saying that Napoleon was abducted by aliens, or the US is involved in secret wars with subsurface dwelling Aliens.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
The headline as presented is about as worthless as the UK project.
First, is there non-terrestrial life? Almost certainly, given the number of planets that we are seeing just in the nearby stars in our own galaxy.
Second, is any of this life intelligent? I would speculate that somewhere, there is what could be termed intelligent life, just on a statistical basis.
Third, can we contact that intelligent life in any way? This I have grave doubts about, since even in the best case, it lies many light years distance from our solar system, and the amount of effort required to transmit a detectable signal is huge... even if you know exactly what direction to point your signaling device.
Is the project worth doing? Perhaps, but only for entertainment value, and perhaps to generate some spinoff tech that can be used for something useful.
âoeAny society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
Nice essay.
You make a few leaps of logic, but the overall direction is mostly logical.
I have a completely different, and similarly "logical leap" filled argument on never meeting other Aliens as well.
But before I copy paste it here, I wanted to address one of your points.
"Getting us to Proxima Centauri in less than a few hundred years would require technology that is orders of magnitude beyond what we have now."
I am not sure I agree. Within 10-15 lightyears even their are life-habitable planets. Right now we have the probe Voyager that travels at something like 15% of the speed of light.
Really, given enough money and mostly today's tech I think it is plausible to imagine shipping off some sensor equipment on a 80 year journey to our best guess of a Earth-like planet. It would probably only have a 50% chance of succeeding at best, as it would necessarily have to be 100% automated, as input lag would be 20-30 years. And just getting a probe to the general area of the closest star would be very doable, given unlimited resources. Really, all you need to do is launch it pretty fast in the right direction and have a power source or a battery that lasts a century.
A thought experiment against Alien life, as depicted in Star Trek and popular belief.
Some people dream about colonizing the stars, some people draw up formulas calculating the possible billions of life filled planets, some people warn of future alien invasions.
For the purposes of this experiment, the ability to travel past the speed of light, or even just close to it is unnecessary.
I am here to tell you that these ideas are self contradictory.
The oldest solar system (potentially life bearing planets) in our incredibly small neighbourhood is calculated as being about 13 billion year old. That leaves about 10 billion years of progress above and beyond Earth. That means that they were almost certainly driving around using petroleum based fuels, and launching themselves into space similarly, 10 billion years ago.
Even if the only other life in the universe was from a single planet on the far side of the Andromeda Galaxy, or any other galaxy even 100 times further away, if it was even slightly like the culture shown in film, TV, or how we imagine ourselves, it would have already colonised Earth, Billions of years ago. (note: In a billion years even conventional human manned spacecraft could make it to another Galaxy. Space is actually quite small compared to the vastness of time)
Ignoring the incredibly small chance that our situation is special in some way.
That leaves us with few possibilities.
Life in general, or Human-like life specifically, necessarily destroys itself in short order.
Human-like life necessarily changes to become non Human-like in incredibly short order.
Colonizing planets is impossible.
The reason why we have not, and never will, discover any other alien life that we relate to is that it flashes into existence and vanishes in a blank of the cosmic eye. This is not just my opinion, this has 10 billion years of evidence to back it up. This would be like seeing a vast range of old rock that contains no fossils, and the explanation for this was that no fish or bacteria ever swam over that way in the billions of years that they could of done so.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Explaining_the_paradox_hypothetically
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
So NSA wants to spy on ET also.
"ET phoned home at 11:34.47am and talked to Phlooog for 17.387 minutes."
Table-ized A.I.
Aliens? Like from other parts of Europe and Asia? I am sorry, living the US, I must be confused.
Your argument requires the implication that DNA cannot be designed. Even if this were the case, surely the could more easily find what they need by running models and simulations through evolutionary algorithms. There's nothing particularly interesting about Earth DNA.
I'm willing to accept their is *some* information they want from the solar system, but they wouldn't even need to come here to get it. At best, they'd send a probe.
I used to read up extensively on the subject, and am still not settled with a conclusion. If otherwise sane and reliable pilots and cops are hallucinating metallic objects hovering in front of their faces in broad daylight due to the "power of media suggestion", then we AT LEAST have a giant unsolved psychological mystery.
Whether the mystery is "up there", or in our heads, it's still an unsolved mystery.
Governments will generally not acknowledge a mystery because it invites questions and attention that they don't know how to deal with. "No, now get off my lawn" is the easier response.
Table-ized A.I.
You are assuming that unique civilizations are common. They might not be, as the Fermi Paradox suggests. The "study hypothesis" is still quite valid.
In fact, the study hypothesis fits with the UFO observations: usually stealth studies, but every now and then flubbing their stealth because they consider 99.9% reliable stealth "good enough" for their purposes without excess expenditures of their resources.
Table-ized A.I.
If you consider the Earth as a giant planetary scale simulation for DNA evolution, then you'd entertain the possibility that building a machine to run the model simulations might be computationally expensive enough for them to actually hop around planets to get what they'd need.
Don't quote me on this.
You are wrong by several orders of magnitude.
Right now we have the probe Voyager that travels at something like 0.00015% of the speed of light.
Thirty four characters live here.
What you are saying is really just pointless speculation. There is no more reason to think aliens would not want to visit us than there is that they want to. Aliens who have the ability to do so could come to earth for a thousands of reasons, from religious ones over just having fun, scaring local inhabitants, trading goods with us (e.g. they could just happen to really like paintings of Belgian seasides), curiosity, etc. We simply don't know and it's pointless speculating about motives for trying or not trying. (Notice, however, that we're exploring the deep sea with special, extremely expensive ships although we're 1000 times smarter than the fish living there. So at least we do such things.)
Worse, though, your speculations are highly implausible. A space-traveling species need not be 1000 times more advanced than us. Just look at our own technological and scientific development over the past 300 years or so and you'll find that they might be no more than the equivalent of (our own) 100 years of development ahead of us in order to have the ability to visit earth. Moreover, you're mixing up intelligence with culture. Scientific advance doesn't imply an increase in intelligence - perhaps it's possible to enhance intelligence with genetic modifications, but there could be a miriad of reasons why a space-travelling species might not want to do that. There is no reason to think that a aliens capable of visiting us had to be more intelligent than we are. For all we know, they could even be dumber than us and just a little bit ahead in terms of scientific discoveries. Columbus and his crews were also not inherently more intelligent than the Indian natives they first met. Aliens could also very well be interested in meeting other species that evolved traits of 'intelligence' (including complex cultures, creativity, etc.) and seek out systems that look promising. Or not. They could be like us or very different, more or less intelligent than us, find us highly interesting or not at all or something in between, come for fun, science, establishing an unimportant forward base in some intergalactic war, or something else. They could be more or less aggressive than humans.
It's just not very likely that they'd pick earth, because we're in a relatively remote part of the Milky Way and it's quite possible, though we don't know for sure yet, that there could be tens of thousands or even millions of habitable planets with intelligent life on them. But even that would depend on their priorities, which we don't know.
You are right, I do not know where I got my info. .006% = (17.26 / 299792.458) km/s. Which is like an order of magnitude different than yours.
But you also seem off.
By my calculations I get
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
The straight dope is ...
If you believe in UFOs, then you are the dope.
People want to believe in something. Anything. They want to devote themselves to it in the hope that it in turn will devote itself back.
When you talk with UFO nuts, and listen to the things they say and the way they say those things, it becomes obvious that the UFO culture is just another form of religion, with the same faith-based sense of longing, and the same willful ignorance.
For them, aliens and Men In Black fill the same need others have for gods and demons, good and evil, and all the rest.
Oh yeah, explain Madonna then. Surely she is evidence of alien life.
Once again, the godless scientist will throw away millions and billions of tax payer dollars on the completely worthless pursuit of trying to prove that there is no God. The scripture tells us that God created the heavens and the earth. And upon earth and earth alone, He created man. But then you don;t believe that or even care about it, that is until you end up in hell wondering how stupid you had been.
Yes, trust the gov and what they tell us. I remember not so long back when asked the gov said, well of course we're not spying on U.S. citizens, really would we lie???
They would observe only, any contact would be highly unethical...alien tech in the hands of man...lol half a billion years of unique evolution would be obliterated in a day if religious extremists got a hold of an alien flashlight
If aliens are out there, the United Kingdom is determined to find them... ...not to mention import them, naturalize them, put them on the dole and give them the best council houses, and sic the police on any native Brits who might object.
Google has already found it. Just look at today's doodle. (Roswell being 66 years old, that is.)
Getting us to Proxima Centauri in less than a few hundred years would require technolgy that is orders of magnitude beyond what we have now.
Getting to the moon requires technology orders of magnitude beyond what humanity had 500 years ago. 500 years is a blink of an eye in galactic terms.
We already have now ideas about how it would be possible to travel to other star systems... given enough impetus, we could start a project now. The likelihood of success would be near zero, it'd take hundreds or thousands of years, but we know it could be possible. 500 years ago, no one even had a clue how to get to the moon.
500 years is insignificant in terms of the timescale of the universe, galaxy, solar system, and even humanity.
We should hope aliens never find us. Because, they're certainly not less developed than we are, or how would they find us or we them? Then, the chance that they are exactly in the same stage of development as we are is next to zero. Most probably, they are a million years ahead of us, and we would be to them what cockroaches are to us. Please don't let them find us.
no, I don't have a sig
If zoo hypothesis is the case, the aliens themselves don't want us none-the-wiser either. It makes it hard to watch and learn about monkey behavior in the monkey environment if all the subjects of observation are startled and now going apeshit. (And humans being social primates are no exception to that rule.) For as long as we're stuck in Sol's gravity well, were just another bunch of animals and not the peers of any potential space-faring species. It doesn't rule out interaction, but for purposes of observation and following a scientific process, it's kept to a minimum.
And if you take a chance in considering the stories about abductees and some sightings to not be made up, then it sounds very much like being on the wrong end of a mark and recapture study done by some biologists or naturalists performing the duties of some wildlife assay program. We do the same to other animals on this planet, so with logical reasoning anybody else with more tech than us in the galaxy would have few qualms about doing it to us.
It is not a simple YES or NO answer. It is BOTH. YES, there are UFOs, as in Unidentified Flying Objects and NO, these UFOs are not extraterrestrial life forms coming to visit us. They are merely airplanes, helicopters, atmospheric effects, shadows, and other natural and manmade phenomena that the observer at the time is unable to identify.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
I agree the question has been answered many times by several governments - but the answer, in several ocasions is: there are UFO, and ther eare humanoid-non homo sapiens being piloting some of them. It just depends on which persons of which governments you look at.
You can search for "disclosure project' and watch some of their videos - and decide for yourself which side is lying - and wetehr "terhe are no aliens" is the truth, or just the most comfortable position on the game. ( http://www.disclosureproject.org/ )
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/12/muscovy-duck-sex/
One wonders: was Todd Akin extrapolating from his experiences to the females of human species?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Not sure why we have to wait months in the US.
Exporting PRISM out of solar system
I can think of one reason for a civilization to "go inter-stellar"; Survival. If that civilisation is capable of inter planetary space travel, they will also know they have limited time before their own solar system becomes hostile. Also, side point, but I'd argue that terraforming is probably more achievable than FTL flight, or any of the other technologies required for sub-light interstellar travel. Assuming climate change is at least partially athropogenic, we're already part of the way there.
Have they looked in London's Stratford? Plenty of aliens there. Oh... they meant extraterrestrials, didn't they?
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Well, why would we visit alien planets? Yes, we might go out into space to colonize or gain resources, but at some point in time you're probably going to hit a point where we've mined plenty of rocks and terraformed plenty of space.
Now if along the way we happen to pick up a radio transmission from "Alpha Xenogaph X", is our first thought going to be "let's go steal all their resources" or "hey, alien life, let's go check it out!"
While there may be some on the planet that would go for the former, I'd say that most people would go for the latter. Even from a corporate standpoint, the payoff/fame/etc for being the first corp to discover sentient alien life would probably be pretty damn good.
+5 Logical.
With all of the energy it takes to move around I cant ever see us or anyone else being able to feasibly leave their own solar system. If FTL is possible, and physics points to NO, then what would an alien race want with us? the only thing I can think of is study or resources. But as you mentioned at the point where an intelligent race comfortably move around the galaxy/universe then I think their resource problems were solved a long time ago.
My future prediction for the human race and probably any other intelligent race is eventually we will have such advanced computer technology that we will build a matrix like system. The robots wont take us over, we will do it to our selves as people realize that life inside of a virtual world where you can live any fantasy while being invulnerable is much more preferable to real life. We see it today with people addicted to MMORPG's and living vicariously through others via social media. The addiction will spread and eventually we will have automated systems including robots maintaining this system while people live out their lives in a fantasy. Who knows.
Well, I'm on the fence whether or not aliens exist, to be honest. (I often joke that aliens came here, didn't find any intelligent life and left...) The probability for them existing goes up with every exoplanet we find. If by some weird joke of nature that we are literally the only intelligent life form in the Universe, UKSETI is a crucial step in proving or disproving that in a scientific manner.
Why can't I ever find posts like yours on days when I have mod rights? +1 Insightful
We will have to go interstellar if we wish to survive as a species. We should be putting as many resources as possible into our own FTL drives now, aliens or not. The Sun is set to become a red giant around 120 mil years from now. If that doesn't burn us to a crisp, but instead pushes our orbit out like some models suggest, we will still have to contend with Andromeda in 4 bil years time. From all the models I've seen, there is a high chance we will be flung out into interstellar space.
Hear Yea, Hear Yea! Some Arrogant Cunt on /. makes a baseless claim with ZERO evidence and this stupid shit gets modded up?? It is on the Internet so it must be true!! Riiiight. *face palm*
How about looking at NASA's own evidence of the STS missions before going off half-cocked and looking like an total idiot.
* Evidence: The Case For NASA UFO's
http://www.disclose.tv/action/viewvideo/117264/Evidence_The_Case_For_NASA_UFOs__Full/
* The URZI UFO Case - The Full Story - Authentic & Complete
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_09AQClOIQ
Note: @54:12 - 54:28 has some great hi-res shots. The craft(s) definitely looks Pleiadian. e.g. http://aquariuschannelings.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/smogmeinichols.jpg
> Here's the truth. No aliens have visited the earth, and they never will. Not ever.
[[citation required]] from the self claimed armchair expert.
> If Stephen Hawking is right,
So he is an expert in Xenology now?? Based on what _experience_ ??
Here's a news flash. He's a BRILLIANT physicists HOWEVER he's a total idiot about Xenology. He has ZERO knowledge, only beliefs. That's like going to the Doctor and asking the best way to understand "The Source." An Expert in the WRONG frield.
> Maybe they want to trade with us. Yeah, right. :-( Here's a joke for you: Boy, are you ever in for a rude surprise in ~ 10 years.
You must be the life of the party. Apparently you don't understand the value of humor: Namely the gift of being able to create it, give it, and receive it. It is so sad to see "you don't get it."
> The question of why aliens might "want to come here" is fundamentally flawed because we are forming that question from our current (tiny) viewpoint.
You are absolutely correct on one thing: Your own myopic view is completely unable to see the bigger picture:
NAMELY: Do you even understand the concept of being able to visit how your great^N--grandchildren are doing?
FOR THE RECORD: Earth is the ONLY planet with Free Will. Aliens* have as much as to learn from us as we from them.
Specifically: How we are [slowly] working on transformering ourselves from being extreme negativity & limitations to one of positiveness and abundance. The Earth (and all the many life forms it hosts) is much more an experiment in the evolution of Consciousness. We celebrated passing the "marker" back in 2012 that "Yes, Humans are able to spiritually grow up and not be total idiots like we used to be in the past by over-developing our Male Science mind and completely ignore our Female Spiritual Side and destroying ourselves in the process."
* NOTE: Technically there is no such thing as aliens when we share the same DNA - both physically and spiritually.
> We're just not as advanced or as important as we like to think. In the end, there's no compelling reason to think they'd be interested in meeting us. ;-( I hear they have this thing called self-esteem now a days. You may want to check it out.
The perfect example of the average human: No self-worth, places artificial limitations on themselves, unable to grok the bigger picture. Sad.
Humans are one of the greatest experiments ever designed. You want to try embracing your heritage sometime. When you meet an alien ask him who his/her "parents are", and who their "children" are, and "your importance." You might be shocked at the self respect they give you.
--
Before you can learn, you must first unlearn. That is, stop your ego from being delusional in that "you think you already know when you don't."
>One wonders: was Todd Akin [wikipedia.org] extrapolating from his experiences to the females of human species?
Most likely. The guy must be pretty nuts.
I know that this is getting orders of magnitude OT.
But..the following note in the link that you gave, seems to suggest that it might improve your wife's chances of carrying a baby, if you dress up like a stranger and rape here in the local park on here way home from work/shopping?
>A separate 2003 article in the journal Human Nature estimated that rapes are twice as likely to result in pregnancies as consensual sex.[68] (See also pregnancy from rape.)
and you want to check the heavens for more?