Could there be intelligent aliens 500 years advanced than us? Some where in the galaxy?

[Stuart G]

Just 500 years more advanced than us?...Just 500 years?...Could those aliens have created light travel?
Or some other kind of travel around the town?...Think about it...in any possibility. Give it a thought...
_____________________________________________________________________________________

Then think about us talking to someone about what we have accomplished now-- with someone 500 years ago..

(in the late 1500...say 1595...Would they believe the future?..Who would believe this future?...
If you can picture 1595...what will you see?...Think about that one...Then think about 500 years in the
future....See what you see NOW.

Perhaps somewhere out there, there are intelligent life forms...who are 500 years advanced from us...
What would they say, and what would they do with us?....If you cannot imagine that, and the possibilities of that...then what would you say to someone from 1799. Just 200 years..Would they believe what was going to be in 1999?...How many would believe...electricity, cars, indoor plumbing, medical advances, killing machines, airplanes, TV., computers...etc...Think about that for a moment...

Then and only then..might you accept that aliens have visited us...Maybe or maybe not...
...........ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE......YES.....ANYTHING...!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
____________________________________________________________________________________
OH.....on that point...Anything is possible...40 years ago...1980....I never thought I would own and
operate a computer......Yes, 1980....Did you imagine you would own and operate a computer and
be communicating across the U.S.A. with it and expressing an opinion with others about the
existence of aliens in the universe.?...Somewhat like talking about ...Star Trek someday being real?

[Srkdqltr]

1. Sure why not?

[Stuart G]

4. YES, my answer too..Why Not?...

[TheBlackAdder]

31. There could be races more advanced than us that died off tens of millions of years ago.

[lagomorph777]

35. A living species ten million years ahead of us would find us about as interesting as bugs.

We wouldn't be worth their time. And we wouldn't be able to comprehend them at all.

But, yeah, probably even more likely that every advanced species wipes itself out in short order, as we are doing.

[harumph]

57. Not necesarily.

Their evolutionary process may have stalled at certain points for certain reasons. No way of knowing.
Sharks are pretty much what they were 10 million years ago. Evolution through natural selection
/favorable random mutation, may not even be a factor for
these "hypothetical" aliens. They may have found a process that works and struck with it for
millions of years. They (if such even exists) may be produced in labs by a silicon overlord.
We have only speculation. But even to make the statement "We wouldn't be worth their time" is
anthropocentric.

[lagomorph777]

65. I was assuming a species with ten million years of technological advancement.

Not bacteria or archea, which have been around for over a billion years, and still look pretty much the same.

[RussBLib]

2. of course

imminently conceivable

I hope the defense hawks don't use this kind of stuff as a justification for vast increases in their budgets

[Midnight Writer]

3. Perhaps they are the same age as us but they didn't have conservatives holding them back.

[Srkdqltr]

5. Good one.

[Me.]

11. This

[Mr.Bill]

13. Or no religion

supressing the scientists.

[AZ8theist]

22. Exactly.

[brooklynite]

34. Have conservatives held back the entire planet Earth?

[lastlib]

39. yeah, that's their raison d'etre..... n/t

Think how much the Catholic Church has stifled--Galileo, Copernicus, Darwin, Newton, Kepler.

Reagan killed the Supercollider in the early '80s, killed our adoption of the metric system. Only a few examples.

[kentuck]

6. Maybe their planet is getting so hot, they have to find another place to live?

Unlike us Earthlings, they don't have to settle for the first one they can reach. They have the intelligence and technology to explore different galaxies?

We don't know that they would look like humans on Earth? We tend to think they may have eyes and are about the same height as we, with similar human characteristics, but that may not be the case. They may look like saguaro cactus, we don't know?

[Stuart G]

9. Maybe they have the ability to..."look like Earthlings"..

...Who knows?....If you are open to thought, than anything could be possible..I have seen sci fi films
where the aliens had that ability...If they had the ""intelligence and technology to explore different planets and galaxies"...Who knows?

[Mr.Bill]

12. It is every bit as likely that they are microscopic

on a scale we can't even comprehend or they are 1,000 feet tall.

[kentuck]

45. Or they could travel as a bright light...

...a transference of energy from one place to another.

Anything is possible when we cannot comprehend the possibilities.

[brooklynite]

7. And the point of this is...what?

If the argument is that 1) Aliens COULD exist and 2) Aliens COULD create FTL travel, you still have the issue of 1) how likely is that among the handful of planets within 100 LY and 2) how could they fit on a ship the apparent size of UFOs seen in the past 50 years and 3) why with that incredible technological leap they couldn't obscure themselves from view and 4)why since they can't, there are no clear pictures.

[Stuart G]

14. The point of this is there are clear pictures...Look around.. I think they exist..

....Could they exist?...Maybe or maybe not...When I first read about the number of planets in our
galaxy...50 years ago...The author said, at that time that the number of planets in our Galaxy...would
extend hundreds of zeros to the bottom of this page..That is the number of planets in this galaxy..

Is there any life form advanced farther than ours?...perhaps..Are we the only intelligent planet out there?
....perhaps..maybe not...I don't believe we are the only intelligent planet out there?

[brooklynite]

15. "I think they exist"

Then produce them.

[Dream Girl]

30. We're here. Semi intelligent beings living on a spec. In space. One of billions,heck trillions

Of planets. Are we so special? I would think statistical odd would point to intelligent life and potentially alien civilizations or societies. Why not? Do you think science has complete knowledge of all there is to know about physics, for example. Has human technology reached its zenith?

[brooklynite]

32. 1) The "produce them" was in reference to claimed photographic evidence...

2) i am not disputing the existence of life elsewhere in the galaxy. I am disputing (absent solid evidence) that life from other planets could travel here. Absent the development of technology to travel transcendentally fast in a vessel the apparent size of a 747, the distances are too far for travel to be practical.

[Dream Girl]

52. The distances are "too far" based on our current understanding of physics and technology.

But I would be willing to bet that “we” don’t know all there is to know. Kind of arrogant to take that position in my opinion. Check back in 100 years or so. Maybe the distances won’t seem “too far”.

[Act_of_Reparation]

66. Irrelevant.

If there were aliens traveling here, then they would be here. Instead, we have a bunch of armchair experts analyzing grainy, blurry photographs of shit that looks like it fell out of a fucking Ed Wood film.

[edhopper]

16. That question is completely separate from

Intelligent alien life visiting us

[Stuart G]

17. Yes, I do think intelligent alien life exists in our galaxy..

[edhopper]

18. It's an open question we can just speculate.

Because there is no evidence,
I think there is other life in the universe. Intelligent? I don't know.
Technological intelligence? No idea.
But I don't think there is the evidence to suggest an alien race visited us.

[USALiberal]

27. Based on what? Nt

[brush]

28. Considering how old the universe is, why not 5000 years, or 50,000?

There are billions of stars, trillions of planets and possibilities.

[multigraincracker]

41. Is infinity really the largest number? N/T

[panader0]

46. Chuck Norris counted to infinity--twice!

[multigraincracker]

47. Then Bruce Lee did it 3 times.

[brush]

61. I don't know how that works but we don't know how these UFOs work either.

I mean they can change direction at ninety degrees instantly, accelerate to warp speed in a flash then disappear as if they weren't there at all, while some of our technology dates back to the 19th century and we're speculating her that we're only 500 years behind.

Nah.

[Sneederbunk]

8. That would mean they had Pringles in the early 1500s.

[OAITW r.2.0]

26. Lucky for them.....nt

[Mr.Bill]

10. Actually when you look at the age of the universe,

the odds that another civilization bearing any similarity to us within 500 years of the present over a span of billions of years are a lot smaller.

The time element is often left out of speculation of life on another planet similar to us existing at the present time.

[keithbvadu2]

19. Intelligent aliens lock their doors as they pass by Earth.

Intelligent aliens lock their doors as they pass by Earth.

[AZ8theist]

23. The best analogy of intelligent life interactions this:

Imagine a highway crew putting in a new interstate.
They plow the earth for the the new roadway.
Does any of the crew stop to interact with an ant mound on the side of the road?

Of course not.
Any alien civilization advanced enough for inter or intra galactic travel will not be bothered by the "ant hill" of human exitance on Earth.

[keithbvadu2]

25. 2 space aliens looking down on earth.

2 space aliens looking down on earth.
I see the dominant life form has developed space weapons.
Does this mean they are an emerging intelligence?
I don't think so. They have them aimed at themselves.
.

[Hoyt]

20. Very possible. Doubtful they've visited Earth unless it was 1M+ years ago.

[Goonch]

21. ;-{)

[hunter]

54. I had to look that up.

That's how Ray Harryhausen would have done War of the Worlds in 1949.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Harryhausen

[Oneironaut]

24. My personal theory is the universe is so large and teeming with life that we just aren't special.

I think life and earth-like planets are everywhere in the vastness of space, and we’re just boring. We’re a bunch of angry apes that kill each other and can barely get off our own planet. We must be really boring or pitiful.

[Bucky]

58. So your theory is that my mammaw is a liar?!

She always said I was very special. Not just special, very special.

[andym]

29. Well that's why there's SETI

https://www.seti.org/
A Nonprofit Research Organization
From microbes to alien intelligence, the SETI Institute is America’s only organization wholly dedicated to searching for life in the universe.

So far no definitive signs of life, not to mention intelligent extraterrestrial life discovered. Because electromagnetic radiation travels at the speed of light, SETI researchers can look backwards in time (light from stars 100 light years away was created 100 years ago) to see if they can detect any life forms using EM (radio,light etc) as a medium of communication. So the search is both across space and through time.

[MLAA]

33. Yep, we aren't alone. Hopefully other such civilizations aren't destroying their own planet.

[Bucky]

59. One thing SETI looks for is signs of pollution in the atmosphere of exoplanets.

[lagomorph777]

36. Sir Francis Bacon wrote a detailed description of a 21st century recording studio in 1623.

http://imaginaryinstruments.org/sound-houses/

Sound-Houses
(Francis Bacon, 1627)
We have also sound-houses, where we practice and demonstrate all sounds and their generation. We have harmonies, which you have not, of quarter-sounds and lesser slides of sounds. Divers instruments of music likewise to you unknown, some sweeter than any you have, together with bells and rings that are dainty and sweet. We represent small sounds as great and deep, likewise great sounds extenuate and sharp; we make divers tremblings and warblings of sounds, which in their original are entire. We represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters, and the voices and notes of beasts and birds. We have certain helps which set to the ear do further the hearing greatly. We also have divers strange and artificial echoes, reflecting the voice many times, and as it were tossing it, and some that give back the voice louder than it came, some shriller and some deeper; yea, some rendering the voice differing in the letters or articulate sound from that they receive. We have also means to convey sounds in trunks and pipes, in strange lines and distances.

This passage from Francis Bacon’s groundbreaking technological utopia The New Atlantis foretells with staggering prescience the musical techniques and technologies that would become ubiquitous in the 20th century. But of course, Bacon was not inventing such ideas out of thin air; many of these devices were already in use in the 17th century or earlier. Many of the phenomena dealt with speculatively in Bacon’s “sound houses” were the object of practical experiments in acoustics described in his Sylva Sylvarum, written in 1623 but published (like The New Atlantis) posthumously in 1627.

[Shellback Squid]

37. put the pipe down

[Buckeye_Democrat]

38. There's an inherent problem traveling very fast.

Space is not entirely empty, and colliding with even a tiny particle along the way would be like a massive bomb. Kinetic energy is proportional to mass, but also the velocity squared.

[jalan48]

40. Maybe Jesus lives with them and will return in a spaceship, thus fulfilling a prophecy.

[multigraincracker]

42. No, I think we are at the 18% max.

We are the yeast that has been added to the rich sugary environment. Like yeast, we eat, shit and reproduce until we reach the 18% limit of using up the sugar and then we all die.
I think that is the reason there are no aliens that have made it very much further than that, we are at that limit
Find a wine that made it past the 18% and then I might think there is much of a future.

buy hey, that's just my thinking.

[Kaleva]

43. Traveling very fast compresses time

aliens who left their home planet in Earth year 1500 BC could arrive here in 2021 by traveling near the speed of light and they would have aged a few decades but 3500 hundred years would have passed here on Earth. After observing us for a bit, they zip back to their home planet but it'd be another 3500 Earth years before they can report what they found.

An ide on how big the Universe is is that much of what we see in the night sky is now gone forever as thousand upon thousands of galaxy's have passed over the Observable Universe Boundary during the time it took light emitted from those galaxies to reach Earth.

[Buns_of_Fire]

44. They're there, but they're avoiding us.

They've turned off the porch lights, locked the doors, and are keeping very quiet so we'll think there's no one home and just go away.

[panader0]

48. Only 500 years? Hell, my bass player neighbor in the trailer nearby

has had that many lives. An invisible space ship hovers over his trailer at night while he
and his Indian spirit buddies share a camp fire below. That I can't see it proves to him that
I am not as evolved as he is.
I wish they could make him a better bass player, but he's a lot of fun to talk to anyway.

[RandiFan1290]

49. Yes

They would also be well aware of how disruptive their presence could be.

[HAB911]

50. Feeling like you are being watched?

https://apnews.com/article/entertainment-science-8bb9be2b86e7c0b6d0fa464bf90abfa5

Feeling like you are being watched? It could be from a lot farther away than you think.

Astronomers took a technique used to look for life on other planets and flipped it around — so instead of looking to see what’s out there, they tried to see what places could see us.

There’s a lot.

Astronomers calculated that 1,715 stars in our galactic neighborhood — and hundreds of probable Earth-like planets circling those stars — have had an unobstructed view of Earth during human civilization, according to a study Wednesday in the journal Nature.

[MineralMan]

51. Just 500 years? Why not a million years?

You're thinking in human terms, rather than universe-based terms. It's certainly possible that populated planets have come and gone millions of times in the universe. I wonder if the human race will still be here in 500 years. I'm quite certain it won't in a million years.

As for 1980, I already had a computer with a modem and was communicating with other computer users. Not a very good computer, but a computer. I could certainly imagine everything that has happened. Once the IBM PC emerged, I moved in that direction.

500 years is nothing in universal time.

[Politicub]

53. Civilization is a human construct. A year is relative to the speed at

which our planet makes a revolution around the sun.

Star Trek is a work of utopian fiction.

If there are other forms of life out there, it would be highly unlikely they would have any resemblance to how humans have organized themselves and pursued technological innovation.

[ProfessorGAC]

55. I Say Yes

And it is likely to be far more than 500 years more advanced.
There's a few billion stable stars in the Milky Way that are as much as a billion years older than the sun.
So, sure.
That doesn't mean, however, I am sold on extraterrestrial visitation.
My take is that a highly advanced civilization that learned long ago how to break the light barrier would have the tech to stealthily observe a planet from a few hundred thousand kilometers away.
And, I'd expect their imaging tech to allow for highly detailed analysis from that distance.
And since they'd only be around a light-second out, they could monitor broadcasts, use algorithms to translate and do anthropology about earth at a great distance.
But, is it possible? Sure. In fact, no matter how we apply the Drake equation, we don't come to zero probability.
So, I say it's likely.

[triron]

56. Could be more like 500,000 years or even more.

There are much older stars and probably systems of planets in our galaxy.
Also what if the great reptiles (dinosaurs) had become an advanced species?

[Voltaire2]

60. The last 500 years are unusual.

But the world of the early 1500’s was not that different than the world of the 1000’s or the 500’s or the 0’s.

Progress is not linear.

“Anything is possible” - no really many things are impossible, not because we don’t have the tech, but because they violate fundamental physics.

So back to aliens: where are they?

[lunatica]

62. Anything is possible is

My favorite phrase. Because it’s true! I love your argument!

[roamer65]

63. I would hope so.

It would be pretty sad if we were the best the universe could do.

[scarytomcat]

64. of course there could be intelligent aliens

but the question is could they cover the distance between us. Robots in flying machines could make it but by the time they get here their civilization could be gone. I don't think we will be able to get to their planet because we can't even join together to save our own planet and another civilization would face the same problems. I am wondering if another civilization would even want to make contact with us because of our violent actions and warring. So the whole thing seems very improbable.

[Paladin]

67. I'm 500 years more advanced than most trump supporters, right now.

I'll be 1000 years ahead of them, in a few months.