New answers tagged aliens
0
I think you might want to think more in terms of ecological niches - usually an organism evolves into a certain form because it is profitable to do so. There is space in the ecosystem for it, and so fitting into that role will be rewarding.
If you want there to be no trees on your world, you'd want there to be a reason why trees don't exist. Perhaps large ...
9
Every organism needs energy of some sort to survive. There are two basic strategies: go to where the energy is or wait for it to come to you, in particular depending on how plentiful and mobile said energy source is. Both have advantages, especially when you consider competition and predation, so it's reasonable to assume you'd find both.
Keep in mind that ...
2
No, it’s not improbable at all. Evolution is driven by selective pressures, such as access to energy. Trees evolved to get tall so that way they could get more sunlight than their competitors, there is no particular reason why chemeotrophs would have selective pressure to grow tall like a tree. After all, the chemeotroph’s food is probably on the ground or ...
1
The amount of signal coming off our planet would light it up like a christmas tree compared to the rest of the solar system. So, they'd probably be attracted to our planet for the unprecedented amount of white noise coming off the planet in the first place.
Once they got here, they'd isolate bands... we have various bands we communicate on via FCC and ...
4
The scenario is fundamentally flawed in that it suggests a great excess of apex predators. In the film the creatures are extremely efficient and lethal hunters. Once night fell the creatures came out in huge numbers, to the point where they devoured any other creature they found almost instantly. In reality, the population of such a species would be self-...
4
The worst impact this creatures would do on the society would not be direct manhunt, but the destruction of normal Earth biosphere.
Night terror would not be the most awfull thing. Wolfs at nights in villages (and even some cities) were not uncommon event in 1800 and people already were consern about keeping their familes and stock safe from wildlife far ...
5
In the early days these night creatures might well be a deadly menace, but assuming a village society is able to keep them out at night the creatures are ultimately doomed. The story would be vaguely similar to that of the wolf.
Wolves have generally been pushed further and further back by the advance of civilization and these creatures would be no ...
6
To be frank about it, you have already answered your own question...
(kind of like vampires I guess)
The material facts are EXACTLY like vampires for the purposes of your question. They go after animals and humans - whether it is to drink their blood or eat them directly doesn't have any real impact on the threat assessment they represent. The fact that ...
0
Scientists have tried contacting extraterrestrials with a number of bespoke linguistic systems. But we might be better off using our own languages.
This custom symbolic system begins by introducing ET to numerals, and then progresses to more complex topics like human biology and the planets in our solar system. An earlier version of the language was first ...
1
Let's play devil's advocate.
For many of the arguments in other answers, one can substitute "aliens" for "animals". We live all in the same planet, and yet with most animals (and plants) we cannot communicate. And aliens come from another planet (or gas cloud). So expecting communication is a bit hasty.
On the other hand, we can communicate with some ...
2
I think we need to find a common ground for communication. That means we have to watch a "thing" from the same perspective. e.g Food to us, human beings, might be very different from theirs, and the way we consume food as we know it, might be also different for them. One would eat the food through his mouth, but species that consume energy in some other ...
0
Our brain is wired to use languages like those on Earth. Even completely unrelated languages like Arab and English are built upon the same elements: nouns, verbs, conjunctions, etc. These cultures were isolated during their evolution and the only point in common is the brain that gave rise to them, proving that language structure is heavily dependent on ...
3
Many point to various sci-fi stories of aliens being so alien that we would be completely unable to communicate with them. I would argue that those are highly pessimistic views. We have many senses and some of the senses are so good, that they evolved independently multiple times. The aliens would also inhabit same physical world as we and we are currently ...
10
Pretty much the same way that explorers talked to people from faraway lands: Use a bunch of easily identifiable objects as a base, with both species telling the other their word for that thing, then use that as a base for further communication.
15
Communication is universal so long as you are using universal concepts
Communication, when you boil it down, is merely the exchange of information. And all species exchange information in some fashion, and the question just is how. So the first step to communicating with aliens is to figure out how they exchange information. It may not be verbally, it may ...
11
Even if the alien does not create a perfect copy of the quantum state, we will not know.
First, 99.99% of all people (possibly more) couldn't tell anyway if the copy wasn't quantum perfect. As long as the copy is perfect within maybe millimeter scale or so (say pico if you will), few will observe it at all, of those only few will notice, and of those who do,...
2
Perhaps this helps?
In one of the Star Trek (TOS) novels (I forget which one: either Spock Must Die, or The Price of the Phoenix), they make reference to an organization within the Federation vehemently against the use of transporters for people.
The point was that transporters never technically "move" anything; they operate by destroying the item and ...
76
Even the satellites and every sensors on Earth were returned to that exact moment and this only affects the entire region of space up to orbit of moon (...)
Everything above the Moon will seem to have changed position instantaneously in a very weird manner. All the signals picked up by the Deep Space Network will be coming from the wrong places. Solstices ...
10
You can't.
Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher born in 544 b.c. said, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.”
Though the Nile is never the same Nile Ramses saw, we still call it the Nile.
Replacement of molecules happens in every moment in almost every system, and we don't tell any difference.
answered Jan 5 at 9:00
3
I'm going to have to challenge this question a bit, or at least most of the other answers.
When people ask these kinds of things, we are automatically assuming the alien technology and cultures are paralleling our own, in that they see in what we call the visible spectrum, they use what we call radio frequencies, that they form cities, they live above ...
0
If they are monitoring X and Gamma radiation they will probably (depending on the orientation of the Earth at the relevant times) notice some pulses from atmospheric nuclear explosions. Hopefully they will also notice that these stopped after about 1990.
You might also want to read "Contact" by Carl Sagan, which explores this question in some detail. He ...
12
We believe that in the next 50 years or so, we'll be able to resolve continents on extrasolar planets through a variety of new telescope technology (the bulk of which is just putting those telescopes into space, and stitching together imagery from multiple ones that sit at great distances to each other).
If this were used on us, they would definitely see ...
12
A civilization doing exoplanet analysis using a level of technology similar to our own would be able to detect CFC's in our atmosphere. CFC's do not occur naturally, so their presence would be a strong confirmation of industrial activity.
We have detected exoplanets up to 2500 light years away, so that would be the current practical distance limit.
...
23
Not really an answer but a fun fact: There is a thin layer of high-power transmissions in the longwave and various other AM and FM bands, around 100 LY away and a few dozen LY 'thick'.
In the early twentieth century most long range communication was done through massive transmittters and equally massive antennas. Directional broadcasting was still high-tech ...
-1
Something around 50 light years away
We spread bobble around us of radiowaves transmissions. In theory we've stared using radios in late XIX century, I don't think that those were strong enough to be heard from space, another thing when we stared using it to connect to vessels on orbit.
15
There's a few ways this can be done, but all of them require the aliens to have very high-precision high-accuracy equipment:
Light: You were on the right track with E&M emissions. We've been radiating 'noticeable' amounts of it for less than a hundred years. That being said, with our own equipment if we noticed such light on a foreign body we would most ...
3
They can easily see our cities from the orbit of Mars. They might be able todetect our radio noise from the orbit of Pluto. Basically, once their scout ship is in our Solar System they will notice something's strange with Earth. From 10 ly away, not so much and not so easily.
1
Let me put here a rough estimate which should give you some idea of how much work it might take to conquer a galaxy, planet by planet. The Milky Way is about 100,000 light years in diameter. Suppose you have about N many planets with intelligent life in a typical 1 x 1 x 1 light-year region somewhere in the Milky Way, and these are evenly distributed across ...
-1
If they were to conquer and spread in a similar way to humans, it should take somewhere between a century and a Millenium.
6
Galaxies are big. Let’s say it takes 100 Earth years to conquer one planet. Let’s say that in the entire Milky Way, there are only two sentient races: humans and The Others, on the opposite side of the galaxy. Your aliens arrive at one edge and spend 100 years conquering Earth. Then they fly to the other side and spend another 100 years on The Others. In ...
0
We do not know what is outside of the universe. If we could say nothing is out there, then we would have a strong indication that heat death will be the end. BUT, our Universe and everything within it is the Universe with every law and particle we know. So if there was something outside of it...we would not know. Point is, we have no real proof rather we ...
Top 50 recent answers are included
