Contact with Space Aliens

Yes, great movie.

Can you imagine the FEAR, PANIC, SHOCK, CHAOS, LOOTING(?) if we were ever really "visited"? And how would the military respond... Shoot first; Ask questions later?

Our government can't even handle aliens coming over the border... How we gonna deal with "aliens" from space?!? Maybe they will just destroy Earth, and put us out of our misery.

"It's a cook book!!"

 

that was a great twilight zone. 'to serve man'. genius, really.

 

A wide range of body plans has been trialed by Earth Evolution.

What do aliens look like? The clue is in evolution

 

And it even has "Tall White Men."

 

my parents loved michael rennie, i remember begging to stay up to watch 'the day the earth stood still.' 1962, saturday night at the movies, i was 8.

 

Saucer door that disappeared when it closed was pretty crafty special effects for the day.

 

never thought about the special effects, must have been interesting production in 1951. i remember watching how crude star wars was in the seventies.

 

I'm convinced that fancy special effects are now resulting in fairly thoughtless plots.

 

Robert Bob Dean worked in the SHAPE war room in Europe during the mid 60s. Saucers were flying from Russia across Europe, disappearing off the coast of Norway. The Russians thought they were ours, and we thought they could be Russian. Eventually both sides determined that the demonstrated technology exceeded anything available by either side. The military assessment eventually identified four different species involved. One of the species looked exactly like us, a rather alarming fact for anyone concerned with security. But I'll let Robert Dean tell his story.

 

Fungi are tremendously important to human society and the planet we live on. They provide fundamental products including foods, medicines, and enzymes important to industry. They are also the unsung heroes of nearly all terrestrial ecosystems, hidden from view but inseparable from the processes that sustain life on the planet.

 

someone needs to lay off the hallucinogenic mushrooms.

 

agreed, the latest iteration of star wars was so lame, yet so well received.

 

Either that or keep a further distance away from his lava lamp

 

Mushrooms come in 4 'chemistries': Taste horrible, taste great, poisonous*, or hallucinogenic. With few patterns related to phylogeny or anything else obvious to biologists. It really is a 'we have not the faintest idea' situation.

Meanwhile, here in Yunnan Province it 'is the season' and the corner markets offer many ways to take one's chances. Y'all who think there are one (or 4) types of edible mushrooms, not even close.

If ET comes here to eat I suspect it will not be for 'long pig'. Lots of variety on this planet's menu.

*Poisonous includes some that become delicious with proper preparation. Sort of a fugu-thing.

 

As the go-to person for all issues relating to East Asian forest and soil things......

A couple of years ago, a load of Chinese people died in Canberra after going mushroom picking and cooking up the mushrooms for a New Year dinner. A few of my friends were involved in the repatriation of the bodies.

Anyway.... There were stories in the press at the time that the problem was that there are loads of poisonous mushrooms in Australia (this I know to be true: all aspects of our wildlife want to kill us, even the cute ones - Woman attacked by wombat thought she was going to die | Australia news | The Guardian), but none in East Asia. So this meant that these Chinese tourists and new residents didn't know that they had to be careful about mushrooms here. Is this true? Are there no poisonous mushrooms there? If it's true, it seems surprising.

 

You lot might be boring. I am not.

There's a lovely story in Escape Pod - but I'm buggered if I can find it now - that had the theory that the creators of the universe surrounded each solar system with a shell that could only be broken from within, so that civilisations would be protected from external influence until they'd reached a stage where they could travel outside of their own solar systems. Nonsense, obviously, but an excellent basis for a story.

 

One of my friends is very tall and white.

I thought he was just Dutch.

Perhaps I was wrong.

 

I grieve to hear that story. The truth is that there are toxic mushrooms everywhere (including some that can't be cooked out). Restating my earlier, no distinguishing features can be applied across regions. So, what looks fine to you, a thousand km away, may very well not be fine at all.

Local knowledge is crucial. Were I plunked down in Terra Incognita and surrounded by mushrooms I would not eat any of them. (Well, maybe could follow pigs' lead)

I have been at hospital bedside here, working with survivor of 'almost correct' mushroom identification. That resolved well, but it might not have if the person in question brought any medical shortcomings to the table.

I suppose the net effect here will be to scare people off and that is probably not a bad outcome. But the tastes...man oh man.

 

Here's a thing....

First Contact (Star Trek: The Next Generation) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It's one of my favourite TNG episodes, because of the brilliant fantasy of being in the position of the Malcorian Science Minister. It would be so much fun if some aliens turned up and took you to the pub on their spaceship.

I do hope we get to meet civilisations from other planets in my lifetime, although there is no more reason to think they'd turn up now than at any other point in history or in the future. I've always been interested in foreign cultures, and it would be fantastic to find out about cultures from other planets. I can imagine few things that I'd be more fascinated by.