Reuters: Scientists find Earth-like planet circling sun's nearest neighbor

[Springfield]

I think that the science needed to discover a faster mode of transportation to reach these planets, light years away, cannot be discovered here on earth.  I think that creating light speed travel, opening up a worm hole, bending space and time, things like that, will need to involve great amounts of resources (at first) that won't be possible due to earth's constraints.

[Renegade7]

Curiosity, seeing our positive potential, or seeing us as a serious threat. We've shown that we're capable of great and terrible things.  My hope is we can reconcile as many of our differences as we can before we start spreading out.  Otherwise, our biggest threat won't be ET, it will be some hostile derivative of Homo Sapien.  

[The 12th Commandment]

12 minutes ago, mistertim said:

The thing is, if we have visitors from another intelligent civilization that would mean that they probably came from a long way away. It would likely be so far away that there is no way for it to have realistically happened without superluminal speeds or creating wormholes/distorting spacetime, which would intrinsically mean that their technology is far far beyond ours...possibly by thousands or even millions of years. They would be so far above us that we probably wouldn't be all that interesting to them. Basically just an anthill with some semi-curious insects crawling around. Why would they bother? 

We live in a particular time scale through our perception of time.  It's not exclusive and there's absolutely nothing to say that a different life form wouldn't perceive time very differently than we do.  I would guess it's highly likely that they would.  A year is just an arbitrary number and our life spans are just arbitrary numbers as well.  

[Renegade7]

7 minutes ago, Springfield said:

I think that the science needed to discover a faster mode of transportation to reach these planets, light years away, cannot be discovered here on earth.  I think that creating light speed travel, opening up a worm hole, bending space and time, things like that, will need to involve great amounts of resources (at first) that won't be possible due to earth's constraints.

 

I agree.  I don't think we'll figure out interstellar travel until we figure out anti-matter at minimum.  Certainly isn't enough of that on Earth, or even what's theoretically up there in Van Allen Belt.

[Renegade7]

7 minutes ago, KAOSkins said:

We live in a particular time scale through our perception of time.  It's not exclusive and there's absolutely nothing to say that a different life form wouldn't perceive time very differently than we do.  I would guess it's highly likely that they would.  A year is just an arbitrary number and our life spans are just arbitrary numbers as well.  

 

Hard to fathom time not mattering.  I appreciate life because death is always right around the corner.  No telling how a species even looks at that if they have those kinds of lifespans, or even immortal.  Our cultural concept of entities with immortality is it either eventually bothers the hell out of them (like some vampire stories) or they just become incredible curious and trying to quietly double-dip in with the mortals (like mythology), if not just outright establish that they are superior because they can.

[The 12th Commandment]

The best way I can try to say what I mean is that we anthropomorphize time. 

This explains it far, far better than I could (and includes some things I will never comprehend).  It's very thought provoking.  Beyond that, for a being that exists for a million years, and there's no reason to think that's not possible, a year would be like a second to us.

 

[BRAVEONAWARPATH]

On 8/26/2016 at 10:30 AM, Zguy28 said:

If you watch History Channel on Friday's you will find out that Aliens have been here all along and shaping every interesting thing in human history.

I don't know about "every" interesting thing but I think it's quite possible that some of human history has been shaped by ETs.