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Thread: What if China made first contact with aliens?

  1. #11
    Join Date: Jan 2013

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    I'm Justin.

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    https://youtu.be/ZlgyxQJHHcY

    Excellent series of videos by this chap on Science and Futurism Tom.

    Check them out - this one is "Where Is Everybody?".

  2. #12
    Join Date: Aug 2009

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    I'm Martin.

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    They get our messages allright, and all our radio and TV shows too. They just ignore the messages in the same way we ignore e-mails from Nigerian princes wanting help getting £2 million out of the bank.

    Reminds me of that episode of Futurama where the aliens only bother to come to Earth because they are unhappy that Ali McBeal has been cancelled.
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  3. #13
    montesquieu Guest

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    Quote Originally Posted by User211 View Post
    https://youtu.be/ZlgyxQJHHcY

    Excellent series of videos by this chap on Science and Futurism Tom.

    Check them out - this one is "Where Is Everybody?".

    Looks cool will listen tonight.

    The Chinese were quite late into sci-fi. For one of my wife's previous books (an edited volume of articles from an academic conference she hosted) I recall editing the the English of an article that had been originaly written in Chinese, about Zheng Kun-wu, one of the the first Chinese language sci-fi authors, writing in the 1920s and 1920s (though he was writing in Taiwan, at that time part of the Japanese empire - it was ruled by Japan from 1895 to 1945).

    Zheng was a great fan of Jules Verne and HG Wells, and there's an interesting aspect to this in that many western scientific concepts didn't really have Chinese equivalents at that time and the early sci-fi works ended up taking their vocabulary mainly from the popular press, where the expressions used often reflected a very Chinese way of looking at the world (notably in how modern scientific ideas interacted with older Chinese concepts and language around things like 'sky' and 'heaven', something that evolved in the West over a much longer time period).

    Anyway the trilogy of novels by Liu Cixin arrived today so I'll be getting stuck into reading.

  4. #14
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    Just write down a load of ones and noughts, pop it in a bottle and get some big butch bugger to chuck it out of the ISS. China are bound to get it first as it doesn't rely on electricity at the wrong voltage.


  5. #15
    Join Date: Apr 2012

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    I'm Geoff.

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    Why worry? There are no aliens. There is no life anywhere else in the universe and life on Earth is a fluke or even a mistake, which will fizzle out eventually and universal normality will resume.

    Even considering the idea of visitors from far away in space is just fanciful thinking!
    It is impossible for anything digital to sound analogue, because it isn't analogue!

  6. #16
    RothwellAudio Guest

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    Quote Originally Posted by walpurgis View Post
    Why worry? There are no aliens. There is no life anywhere else in the universe and life on Earth is a fluke or even a mistake, which will fizzle out eventually and universal normality will resume.

    Even considering the idea of visitors from far away in space is just fanciful thinking!
    Not sure if that was serious or not.
    My take on it is this: given the billions and billions of stars out there and the unbelievable enormity of the universe, how could there not be other life forms? Yes, there's life on other planets, but it's probably so far away that we'll never get to meet.
    More interesting is what the people on earth would consider to be "significant" life. If a few microbes are found somewhere, people on earth are likely to show little interest. If a few primitive plants are found, people on earth are likely to show little interest except for maybe the possibility that they could be harvested and used. What if animals that couldn't talk or build things were discovered? Again, not a lot of respect from Earthlings but maybe interest in farming them for food.
    But what if the life form was so super-intelligent that we appeared to be "dumb animals" to them? Now it's getting interesting! We might end up being farmed for food. Karmic payback?
    Anyway, the human race is so self-absorbed that the only life forms that would really interest us would have to be pretty much exactly like us - which is ironic given that the planet is full of creatures pretty much exactly like us (we call them "foreigners") and we spend much of our time waging war against them.
    If the aliens have any sense they'll stay away!

  7. #17
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    We've been a technological society for about 200 years.
    The universe as a whole has been around for 14,000,000,000 years.
    Any other technological society that is around will almost certainly be so advanced from us as to be literally inconceivable by our humble ape brains.

    So the idea of pointing a radio telescope and expecting to detect another civilisation is frankly ludicrous. Their comprehension of science and technology will very likely be totally beyond our grasp.

    The chances of us detecting an alien civilisation that just happens to be at the same level (and therefore uses something like the same technological tools) must be miniscule even if the universe is full of intelligent life.
    It's the inconceivably vast extent of time rather than distance or speed that constrains the likelihood of detecting any aliens.
    .

  8. #18
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    160 billion alien planets in our home galaxy. one hundred billion galaxies. has to be or have been some. Whether we meet is another matter.

    there is an equation for these odds... its called the Drake equation.
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  9. #19
    Join Date: Jan 2008

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    Going back to the original OP, the Chinese are doing astonishing things technologically.
    "The West" is no longer the sole player, in fact, the Chinese, largely unencumbered by a widespread more backward technical infrastructure as we are, are happily leapfrogging the West.

    We are going to have to get used to playing 2nd fiddle in the science game.
    The best hope we have is to team up with the Chinese in terms of scientific and technological advance, imo.
    .

  10. #20
    RothwellAudio Guest

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    Quote Originally Posted by jandl100 View Post
    Any other technological society that is around will almost certainly be so advanced from us as to be literally inconceivable by our humble ape brains.
    Why so far ahead? Why not far behind? Surely there would be a spread of evolutionary advancement - some ahead and some behind.

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