UK Steps Up the Search For Alien Life 119
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."
NASA (Score:1, Insightful)
Wrong usage of resources (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:When will we get the STRAIGHT DOPE on ETs/UFOs (Score:5, Insightful)
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