Aliens may destroy humanity to protect other civilisations, say scientists

Interesting. However this isn't new. They made a movie about it in the 1950s called "The Day the Earth Stood Still". Michael Rennie was good as an elegant alien.

 

Aliens, eh?
Heck I didn't know the folks up from Tijuana has such power. Isn't their lack of power the reason they emigrate? When did NASA start worrying about border patrols??


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And "Plan 9 From Outer Space".

 

Yup, just like cigarettes were perfectly healthy (and even doctor recommended) then.

I just hope the aliens look like the ones from Mars Attacks. I am going to have to pick up a phonograph to fend them off.

 

Report was not for NASA, and not funded by tax dollars (or from any source, based on what's in the paper.)

" This article was amended on 19 August 2011. The subhead said the report was "for Nasa". This has been corrected."

If you are going to spread silliness, at least try to do it accurately.

But even in the compost heap, one can find a useful nugget:

"One resolution to the Fermi paradox is that life, or at least intelligence, is rare and thus sparsely distributed throughout the galaxy. This rarity could be because few intelligent civilizations form [13] or because intelligent civilizations tend to have short lifetimes, perhaps because they quickly destroy themselves [14-15]."

Actually, it's not a bad paper. The Fermi paradox (aka the Drake equation) discussion is extensive, and sort of central to their thinking. Which, when you think about it a second, pretty much has to be true. The characteristics that allow a technological civilization to survive for the long haul are going to determine the likely attitudes of any ET visitors. Their answer is more-or-less that since exponential growth in a limited space is suicidal, we're unlikely to have visits from civilizations arranged along those lines.

So does the Drake equation tell us that, maybe, either we deal with the limits to growth or they deal with us? Maybe.

The part about "protect other civilizations" is also not part of the paper. Near as I can tell, the newspaper just made that up.

 

Golly, that's a new low for logic. In the 40's there was no vaccine for polio, now there is. Clearly polio is a made-up disease. In the 20's there was no nylon or teflon. Clearly that's a conspiracy too. In the 1950s, plate tectonics had scarcely been heard of, now essentially every geologist believes in it. Scientists say so. There may be a consensus.

How about this: As late as the 1970s, while the theory of GHG-caused global warming was well known, there was scant systematic data available on temperature trends, and the data available were insufficient to show whether or not trends lay outside the range of natural variation. It was not until the late 1980s, with both improved data and analysis, that some scientists claimed that temperature changes began to fall outside the range of natural variation. In 2007, the IPCC report concluded that there appeared to be less than a 10% chance that the observed temperature trend was due to natural variation, and that man-made changes in the composition of the atmosphere did explain the aggregate trend and spatial variation in trends of temperatures.

 

Given the vast distances of space and the limits of physics, by the time aliens get the warning and arrive to destroy us, we will have done the job ourselves.

Tom

 

And everyone thought Alfred Wegener was a loony tune with his hypothesis on continental drift. Now look where we are. Will James Hansen be another Alfred Wegener?

 

But all this discussion really misses the main point.

So here we have a paper, not funded by NASA, with no official link to NASA whatsoever. The third author on the paper works for NASA. But not for the section that has anything to do with analysis of global warming. And the paper references global warming, as an illustration.

And this makes the news, as a kind of ha-ha-look-at-those-NASA-global-warming-idiots story? When, to repeat, it wasn't done for NASA, wasn't funded by NASA, and the NASA employee who was third author has nothing to do with the parts of NASA GISS?

Now, what does that tell us? I see this as just another bit of evidence that anything that can remotely be construed as mocking global warming or smearing scientists who study global warming will be instantly picked up and touted by the denialists, no matter how thin the connection. Which shows how little denialists have in the way of logic or reason on their side. When you have to scrape the bottom of the barrel, that's pretty good evidence that the barrel is empty.

And they wouldn't do this if it weren't effective. So this also shows you how deeply their typical target audience member will think about this. For them, this is an effective communication strategy.

To me, that's the real lesson here.

 

Control the media, slash education funding, teach the controversy, and push the fear. Yeah, it seems to be working. Sad, really. It used to be such a good country.

 

It worked for Pol Pot, Kim Jong-ll, Rafael Trijullo, Papa Doc Duvalier, and Joaquin Balaguer, Hilter, Stalin, Saddam Hussein and the list goes one and on...

 

If faster-than-light travel is not possible, I think the question of ETI visitation is moot.

If it is possible, then I think it would be the incipient development of that technology that would draw ETI to "make some decision" about the future of humans. The ability to change one planet's atmospheric chemistry seems irrelevant to the discussion. Simply put, humans can have no effect on any other planet or civilization without FTL travel. Except, perhaps as a bad example?

One possible significance of changing the earth's atmosphere from biologically dominated to industrially dominated, is the possibility that it could limit human's progress towards FTL travel. But this was outside of Baum et al's analysis. Which is the thing we are talking about here.

 

. . . . . . providing we haven't turned the globe into Mel Gibson's "Road Warrior" scenario. If that's the case, they'll just go back saying, "dang ... they beat us to it".

 

Those in the know, realize humanity was created by aliens as an intergalactic joke. They visit for the laughs.

Why would they erase one of the greatest punchlines in the galaxy?

 

If FTL transport is possible, the question of ETI visitation is still moot. They either haven't gotten around to dropping by, or....if the crop circle/Ken Noory crowd is right, they're awfully big on not bugging is about it.
If there is advanced OTH life out there, they're not reaching out to us, good or bad.

WADR, Education budgets have never been 'slashed' in this country. IIRC, there's never been a year where we've collectively spent less than the previous year. IMHO, the radicals on both sides of this issue are guilty of FUD.

Oh really? When??
I'm still pretty young, but I don't care to go back to that carefree 1960's lifestyle, with its race riots, pre-EPA, pre Medicare/Medicaid, and I would think that the GLBT community wouldn't want to go back either.
The human animal has a funny memory. We tend to edit out some of the bad things in our past.
Personally? I think that we have a long way to go as a society, but we're moving in the right direction...climate change notwithstanding.

JMHO...

 

When adjusted for costs and unfunded mandates, educational budgets have indeed been slashed for many areas of the country. In Michigan the school funding crisis is particularly grim. A couple of decades ago we amended our state constitution to limit school taxes and eliminate local control of said taxes. The full effect of that is now being felt, or in other words, the chickens have come home to roost.

Tom

 

Anyone have a link to back their claims? I'm thinking a 58% increase is more than adequate to keep up with costs and unfunded mandates if that is even a valid supposition. I'm also thinking a singular local example is hardly convincing evidence of any sort of trend. Comforting to know I'm among the paragon's of accuracy and factual truth here.

 

If the seeds of life on Earth really were sewn by passing comets, then we *are* aliens.