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Have the aliens landed?; Have the little green men made contact, or is it a figment of our imagination?
Topic Started: Mar 12 2010, 02:42 PM (5,495 Views)
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Even adults can look pretty darn weird. Ever see a hydrocephalic (or is it hypercephalic?)? The skeleton doesn't look wholly human.

Assuming these things are real, who wants to bet they're time travellers and not aliens?
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T.Neo
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If they were to be real (which they aren't :ermm: )...

Time travellers. It would be an explanation for the absurd forms that they take.

I actually find time travellers to be more plausible then "Greys" that evolved on a different planet. :P
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Ddraig Goch
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What about the strange-shaped skulls unearthed in Peru? I know that the Incas practised head-binding of infants, but that doesn't explain some of the skull shapes that have been found, including one with enough space inside for a brain twice the size of that of normal humans.
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T Neo, that's where I got the idea. :)

Goch, that's why I brough up Hydrocephaly, it's a deformity (or maybe it was a genetic disorder) that can seriously give you a massive head.
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lamna
Mar 13 2010, 08:23 AM
No I'm sure I made another one. Maybe I didn't.
Are the aliens manipulating your memories Lamna?

I'm pretty sure that, if such encounters did happen, they will basically be just a load of ETs jerking around. Space Jock if you will.
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politics, changes in dominate culture, religious conflicts, loss of interest, destruction of scientific knowledge, massive wars and so on can all be possible reasons that "Them Alien Guys" visited Earth for a little bit and then stopped without having any serious impact on modern day civilization. Or maybe they did have major impacts but they did it so long ago that we can't tell.

personally i don't think anything visited us.
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T.Neo
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I don't see alien space jocks messing around. Even with convenient space travel, and even with FTL, it just isn't that easy. It would be like chartering a plane to kwajelein atoll just to short sheet a few beds...

There are plenty of reasons why there could have been alien presence here before, that has ceased. I don't think any "ancient astronaut" theories give a reason for this...

My personal favourite alien visitation idea? Extraterrestrials landed here some 65 million years ago, took some samples with them to a newly terraformed world, and left them to evolve. Their civilisation disappeared, and out there somewhere, is a nice little planet with a big surprise waiting for us. :P
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lamna
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A popular Science fiction trope, I'm reading a books abotu that at the moment by coincidence.

I suppose there are lot of reason aliens would visit and not come back. The best I can think of it that we are not worth it. Perhaps we are to smart for them to legally claim the system, perhaps they don't want the hassle.
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Funny. One of my friends (Metalraptor) is writing a book in which sapient dinosaurs escaped the K-T asteroid and took some other Mesozoic animals with them. Then, sixty-five million years later, these sapient dinos come back to Earth and find it ruled by the rats they had so long stomped on. These sapient dinos engage humanity in a massive war. Well, actually, it's not a war: it's a massacre! 10,000 humans dead for every sapient dino dead. These sapient dinos take over the rest of humanity and introduce some other Mesozoic animals to the present day Earth ecology. Basically, the book is about humans trying to gain equal rights under the dinosaurian regime. Sort of an interspecies civil rights movement.






While I do like the thought, I honestly doubt aliens have ever visited Earth. First off, why visit us? If an alien race has the capacity to travel across the universe, why visit a sapient race which only has the capacity to travel to our moon (I realize we've sent probes to various places in the solar system, but I'm measuring travel capacity as manned missions). True, the alien race might take pity on us humans and give us some tech. Or the aliens might see us as cockroaches and an easy war (sort of like the way my Braenerks see us).

But, since there have been no major and inconcievable developments throughout human history, I doubt aliens have visited us.

That does not mean they won't though. There are plenty of scientists who say "Yes, sapient life exists beyond Earth. We just don't have conclusive proof yet." And most of these scientists also say "An alien invasion is likely. And if it occurred, we would get creamed."
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T.Neo
Mar 14 2010, 02:20 PM
I don't see alien space jocks messing around. Even with convenient space travel, and even with FTL, it just isn't that easy. It would be like chartering a plane to kwajelein atoll just to short sheet a few beds...

There are plenty of reasons why there could have been alien presence here before, that has ceased. I don't think any "ancient astronaut" theories give a reason for this...

My personal favourite alien visitation idea? Extraterrestrials landed here some 65 million years ago, took some samples with them to a newly terraformed world, and left them to evolve. Their civilisation disappeared, and out there somewhere, is a nice little planet with a big surprise waiting for us. :P
Well, isn't that just what happened in All Tomorrows with Panderavis?
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T.Neo
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Panderavis was a single species on a planet full of life; I'm talking about terraforming a perhaps young planet (with high potential for habitability but a toxic primordial atmosphere and little cellular to no life) and introducing a whole plethora of late Cretaceous organisms.

I think a good way to look at it would be to look at they way primitive cultures are viewed within our own species.

We have a general ethic of non-intervention when it comes to uncontacted tribes. Contacted tribes, we make documentaries about. Earlier in history, things didn't go so good...

I think a species capable of spaceflight (and interstellar flight) will have had their own fair share of intraspecies inequalities; they should at least be better than 16th century explorers.

I also don't see why we should be particularly entitled to our system resources; the rest of the system is dead, and those spear-throwing sophonts (ok, perhaps we were doing a bit of menhir carving as well) aren't going to reach space for thousands of years, if at all. The very concept of utilizing resources in the system does not make sense; going light years for resources abundant in their home system is somewhat illogical.

As for alien invasion, the circumstances vary but without widespread FTL travel I just don't see it happening. Modern military forces are also quite advanced, so I think we would fare better than one might expect.



Edited by T.Neo, Mar 15 2010, 11:04 AM.
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Possibly, though long before human civlization existed. I read about these enormous (as in long) metal tubes in this solid-rock mountain in China that were dated to before humans had even left Africa. So I figure if metal tubes are the only thing left, then maybe some extraterrestrials set up a temporary base here or something. But there is also a lot I don't know about these tubes, so I'm not going to claim that all the information above is entirely accurate.

And I have to agree with Lamna; if you go to a planet you know to be inhabited by intelligent beings it makes sense that you would try to make contact with whichever group looks most superior in the world. Or at least make contact at the largest population center first. Not only that, but if there had been aliens, wouldn't they have left their own records along with human records? I mean, surely they understand the disbelief a species as isolated as our selves would have towards believing in extraterrestrial visitation.
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We can't really know, if aliens landed on Earth or not, since we don't even know whether they exist or don't. I think claiming that there's no life on other planets isn't a very scientific idea, since there is no scientific law that claims that "Life can only evolve on Earth", however we must also note, that this hypothetical alien life is presumably very different from anyting humanoid, or even eukaryote-like.

For me, the only sign that MIGHT be plausible as an alien sign is the "WOW! Signal" received in the 70's, which might have originated from an alien spaceship.
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Ddraig Goch
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One also has to look at similarities between the deities of primitive and ancient cultures. For example, the Dogon people of Mali say that the alien race that contated them were amphibious - nearby Greece has many stories of nymphs and mermaids, and similar aquatic sophonts. And the Babylonions spoke of the "Annedoti" ("the repulsive ones") who were, again, amphibious.
Of course, this is probably all just concidence. But still...
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Talking snakes, dragons, Two-Hearts, Reptoids, e.t.c. all talk about a reptillian life form with human like intelligence. Also, who else finds it odd that serpents are considered wise by both, Middle Eastern and Central American cultures before they met?

I'm not saying alien lizards are real. I am merely saying that maybe these ideas exist as some byproduct of how our mind works to begin with. A sort of species wide imagination, like flying dreams. Same goes for amphibious humanoids.

As for the idea that aliens would leave any records behind, wtf? Why? If you are studying a species you want to do it in it's natural habitat, unchanged. If they are planning to come back, they would do everything possible not to damage our natural environment. The MOST they would do is drug an organism and take a DNA sample.

Wait, abductions, cue X-Files music.
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