Alien Contact And Religion

[CraigD]

If they are already here and living in artificial colonies in the suns Kuiper Belt or Ort cloud visiting the earth isn't the huge investment in resources it would appear to be. In fact the Earths only interesting quality would be the possibility of collecting elements that are more concentrated in small areas on a planet like Gold or Copper.

:thumbs_up This is, IMHO, one of the best and most overlooked ideas in the realm of Fermi’s paradox and UFOology. I either never thought of it or never gave it much though until reading Greg Binford’s 1979 short story Dark Sanctuary (now available free online courtesy of LightSpeed magazine, one of my favorite SF periodicals :))

 

Benford put the unnoticed alien space colony ships much closer than the Kuiper belt, in the asteroid belt, which makes more sense, I think, as one of the greatest resources our (or any) solar system has is light, which is many times (on the order of 10000) more intense at the asteroid belt’s 2 AU than Kuiper’s 30 to 50. It also makes for more dramatic near-future fiction, as, following Benford’s reasonable future timeline, mid to late 21st century humans beginning to mine the asteroids would almost certainly discover them, with all the drama that entails.

 

An infrared telescope with the proper sensitivity should be able to detect such colonies with ease since getting rid of waste heat would be more of a problem than staying warm in the vacuum of space...

Unless our shy ETs chose to face their radiators away from the inner solar system, which, if they’re aware of and keeping much of an eye on us, and want to keep their whereabouts secret, they’d almost certainly do.

 

The main argument I can think of against the possibility of undiscovered spacefaring ETs having been in the Solar System for a very long time – thousands of years – is that, if they’re socially very much like us, I think that over such a long time, some individual or minority of them would chose to reveal themselves to us Earthlings in an clear, un-mysterious way. It they are out there, and have been for a long time, either they have a very non-human lack of disagreement with social consensus, perhaps a lack of individual identities altogether (a group/hive mind), or a tremendous police apparatus that foolproofly thwarts any dissident attempt to defy it – perhaps by keeping our existence secret from most of their people.

 

Carrying one of these scenarios to a speculative fiction conclusion, we might be their saviors, bringing them the seeds of anti-authoritarian, democratic revolution.

 

This story gives me a greater feeling of pride in humankind than an ET-human war story.

[belovelife]

kinda like rebels that make physical contact instead of following procedure

 

i like it

[belovelife]

You do know that the Oregon vortex is nothing but over hyped horse feathers don't you?

 

http://www.randi.org/jr/101003.html

 

 

i've heard that, i heard that it was an x-files episode, i heard it had been investigated

read the story of the gold mine town and about when the building collapsed

 

the story of the stone

 

etc.

 

it just , as explained, describes what i see as the potential, so its a good representation of the idea that

 

i am trying to explain

 

i apologize if i am wrong

[Guest MacPhee]

 

This story gives me a greater feeling of pride in humankind than an ET-human war story.

 

It's so nice to see someone saying "SF" instead of the abominable "sci-fi"!

 

But I can't agree with the last sentence of your interesting post. I think, what humans need, is a war with some ET's - a war which we win. That would hugely boost our pride.

 

Our pride used to come from winning wars against each other. Like when the US beat Japan in WWII. And Britain (with some US and Soviet assistance) beat Nazi Germany in that war. How proud we felt, on VE and VJ Day! To have won a victory which crushed the bad guys!

 

But nowadays, massive internecine World Wars are ruled out - because of nuclear weapons. These weapons are too destructive for large-scale use on Earth. Their excessive power frustrates us from having a good rousing WWIII among ourselves.

 

However, such powerful weapons would be ideal for use against aliens, in an interplanetary war. Unfortunately this isn't possible in our solar system, as all the other planets apart from Earth, are already dead. Hence, no "War of the Worlds", in which the Martians get thrashed.

 

To find adversaries, we have to look beyond the Solar System, into interstellar space. And that I think, is why we are conducting the SETI searches - we want some aliens to fight. If we found some aliens living on a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri, or Sirius, I bet we'd soon be at war with them. Such a war would unite the Earth, like nothing else could. We modern humans deeply need an external enemy.

 

And wouldn't our priests (following precedent) bless the Terran B-299 interstellar bomber "Alone Yag" as it set out on its mission?

[Deepwater6]

If all the blood-stained religions that we humans are afflicted with, were really caused by prehistoric contact with meddling aliens, I think the aliens have a lot to answer for. Perhaps that's why our SETI searches find only silence - the aliens are keeping quiet, guiltily aware of what they did to us...and fearing pay-back time.

 

I don't think we could blame the aliens because our race either refuses to adhere to religious laws or twist the meaning of the laws with extremism. I don't belong to any organised religion, but it seems to me that the basic message of the 3 biggest faiths is don't steal from one another, don't kill one another etc. Because some humans decide to ignore these rules can we blame the aliens? Can you imagine a world with no rules?

[belovelife]

have a friend, he said he was makeing a religion called religionism

 

where you can change religion at any time

 

and when you got to heaven, you can change wich heaven you got to

even athiest can change to another religion

 

( so noone is left out )

 

pretty funny, and good idea i thought

 

 

i'll get my aluminum foil hat next week