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Bringing you atheist articles and building active godless communities takes hundreds of hours and resources each month. If you find any joy or stimulation at Atheist Republic, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner.
Donating = Loving
Bringing you atheist articles and building active godless communities takes hundreds of hours and resources each month. If you find any joy or stimulation at Atheist Republic, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner.
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Hate to end everyone's fun. But at least for this particular atheist, I go straight to reasoning and logic if I need comfort on something like this.
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TLDR: Space is way to vast, and time scales way too large for you ever to worry about aliens. Why? Read below.
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Is there intelligent life somewhere out there in the vastness of space beyond our own solar system? Quite likely based on pure numbers (at least a trillion, trillion stars out their in the known observable universe that is a lot of chances even if you put the odds extremely low.)
Has life with intelligence greater than our own (aliens in flying saucers) "visited" our planet like the various books and hollywood movies depict? Extremly, extremly! Unlikely. It makes for interesting books and movies but has no basis in reality.
Two Major problems with aliens coming to visit earth: Vastness of space and vastness of time and they are closely related for most part:
- Vastness of space.
Even if aliens could travel at the speed of light in a vacuum, the theorized "speed limit of the universe" this is much, much too slow of a method to "visit" or even "conquer" a planet for its resources. Let's say the odds of alien life with greater intelligence/technology then humans that could travel at the speed of light, is 1 in a trillion (let's ignore the time issue I mentioned real quick here.) If we take the closest 1 trillion stars, and averaged out on average how far away they are, the average trip for aliens to reach earth, is very roughly around 1 million light years away. Give or take several 100,000 years. Much too long to just visit to say "hi" or conqueror for resources or any reason really. This all applies even if you could go 10x the speed of light, or 100x. (Never mind the time dilation effects of traveling even close to light speed.)
So either aliens have figured out how to go much, MUCH! faster than the speed of light somehow, or the popular sci fi notion of folding space. Which in the hollywood sci/fi books version of there is again no basis for. Even if somehow you could fold space, traveling from one point to another intact is a long the same lines of surviving the forces involved in a black hole. Nothing known survives.
But say somehow super advanced aliens managed to make travel among the trillion stars in a reasonable time frame possible, we have to examine, why would they stop by earth, among the trillions of stars and trillions more of accompanying planets? That level of advancement, that level of numbers, is difficult to comprehend, possibly a decent analogy would be: a human, taking the time to take a look at all the trillions of ants on earth, looking for and picking the one ant out of that trillion that happens to have a coloring on it's butt in the shape of a heart, and going over and saying hello, or squishing it out of existence (if you think aliens would be the conquering kind.) Would you ever take the time to examine trillions of ants for something odd about one of them, even if you are not exactly sure what you are looking for?
Btw, an intelligent alien race capable of folding space and surviving would probably view us much like we view ants. And we do not really care if we see another ant. We do not care about possible resource a single ant would hold for us. Or what the ant's possible thoughts are.
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-Time
This one is shorter, as the point is simple. The known universe is roughly 14 billion years old. Humans have not really been making any major noise that even ourselves would consider "advanced" until the last 100-200 years or so. Our life times are roughly ~80 years. I also imagine you are only worried about the next decade really, if you were told aliens may possibly be coming in 20 years, you probably would not worry about it too much until it was less than a year away.)
10 years, is a tiny, tiny! fraction of 14 billion. Already talking less than 1 in a billion odds that aliens will come to visit in the next decade. Remember, winning the powerball is quite a bit more likely at 1 in 292 million. You are over 3 times more likely to win the powerball on the next powerball ticket you buy, then for aliens to so happen to visit earth in the next 10 years. Long odds indeed. And that is not even considering the vastness of space problem, or the "why would such advance alien life even find/care about us?"
@Logic
Party pooper. *sticking out tongue* And to think I put all that time and trouble into making my "Welcome Aliens!!!" banner along with a really nice welcoming gift package....*opening welcome package*....Well, no need letting these sardines and crackers go to waste. Anybody care to join me? Plenty to go around!
**tree rumbles and hunches down to bush size**
I hate party poopers also. But he does have a point. Same one I have made many times.
**reaches for some sardines and crackers, dropping them at the roots**
rmfr
The existence of aliens somewhere in the universe is a belief that atheism can lead very naturally to. Perhaps the key point of atheism is to realise that we're not the object of the universe and life on Earth isn't special in the sense that it's what the universe is all about.
If the emergence of life on the Earth is nothing cosmically special, and so a product purely of natural laws, then it makes sense that there should be somewhere else in the universe where aliens exist, or will exist, or have existed. Finding alien life would certainly corroborate the position of the atheist far more than that of the theist.
The problem with making claims about aliens is that we have basically no data we can draw conclusions from. As far as we know life has only definitely emerged once in the universe (here). We don't know if we developed relatively quickly, or whether we're quite slow on the scale. We also don't know how likely it is for life to emerge.
So from what is common knowledge there's no good evidence one way or the other.
It's also not clear whether aliens have interacted with us at all. We can probably safely assume that if any aliens have interacted with us their technology is very advanced to have been able to get here from another solar system. The only clue we then have about how they would behave is to look at how we behave towards what we consider primitive lifeforms. One thing we do is eat them, although hopefully any aliens we came into contact with would already have advanced enough technology so as not to require other animals for food.
We also keep animals in zoos, although the animals in this case are aware of our presence.
The other approach we take (towards primitive tribes on remote pacific islands) is to have a policy of no interference.
I think this approach is the only one really compatible with our experience.
So either no aliens have reached us yet, or they are aware of us and occasionally send the odd ship to see how we're getting on from afar, but have a no-interference policy.
In any case, my view is that aliens are probably out there, but it doesn't seem like we've had any contact with them yet.
Urban legends, movies, and many who make a living from telling tall tales perpetuate nonsense.
One good example is the "Bermuda triangle". Yes, we have all heard the stories. But if one with a rational mind takes just a casual glance at a map, it becomes very obvious that this area is very busy with all forms of aviation and marine traffic. With so many ships and aircraft passing through this area, simple odds tell us that there will be a lot of sunken ships and lost aircraft.
Area 51 was a cover-up. At that time the CIA were developing their top secret U-2's, and it was far easier to divert attention when an airline pilot saw a flash of light 40,000 feet above him. This was just a diversion fed to people with imaginations.
As LogicForTW has pointed out, space is huge, freaking large. The nearest star (apart from our sun) is 4.22 light years away. Let us break this down. The fastest satellite ever was NASA's robotic Juno spacecraft, traveling at 165,000 MPH. In other words that satellite would cross the continental USA in approximately one minute. Since one light year is 5.88 TRILLION miles, and the distance to Alpha Centauri (nearest star) is 24.8 trillion miles, let's just say that the speed of Juno is terribly slow when one thinks in interstellar distances.
The satellite that is furthest out is Voyager 1. It will eventually get to a star ... in 40,000 years.
And our galaxy, just this one in a hundred billion, is 100,000 light years across. If we could go the speed of light, it would take 100,000 years just to go from one end to the other in just our local galaxy.
The numbers are off the charts, the distances are just plain wild. So to expect any aliens who took the time and effort to get here would indulge themselves in taking anal probes is rather humorous.
SomeGuy1337, I suggest you apply the same critical thinking and rational though you do towards religion. Cast away the fear that was directed towards you, cast away the ignorance, examine the facts and you will realize that if there is life out there, this very average planet circling this very average star in a galaxy with 200 billion other stars in a universe with 100 billion galaxies, we are not even a grain of sand in the middle of the Sahara Desert.
Science fiction is cool, but it is fiction.
I hate being abducted by aliens. The next morning I wake up groggy, my taste buds don't function, my urine only looks yellow but it is bright blue, the shower water only touches my skin when when the droplets are small enough to fit through the cracks in my aura and my whole body is connected about a half of an inch off from where it was the day before. It's horrible. I go to rub my nose and I end up taking our an eye. I try to feed my self a bit of egg and end up snorting it instead. And I can forget about hitting the toilet. I get one of those three pronged squirts that shoot out all over the place and often end up weeing on my own foot. The day after an abduction is a great day for a sit down wee.
@Cog Re: Abduction side effects
Oh!.... My!.... God!....*shocked look on face*... So, basically, what you are saying is that all those mornings I woke up with what I thought was a hangover from a great party was actually the result of my being abducted by aliens???.... Holy shit!
No. It's only an abduction if you find small marks on your body that you know you did not have the day before. You really have to look for them. Like one morning I woke and noticed I had hair growing out of my ears. I had never noticed that before. Another morning I had a weird scar on my leg that I had never noticed. If you look hard you can find these indicators. Another sure giveaway is feeling great before you go to bed at night and then waking up in the morning vomiting or with the runs. This happens because of the alien gel used on the probes they shove down your throat and up your butt. It's alien gel that causes it because our bodies reject it.
@Cog Re: Alien gel
See? That's my point! I mean, that would certainly explain the pain in my rectal area all those different mornings. Maybe the aliens forgot to use the gel for the anal probe. Oh, sure, my stupid friends tried to tell me the pain had something to do with bottle rockets and various vegetables. However, now it is obvious to me the aliens simply brainwashed them to tell me that. Wow! It is great to finally know the truth!
Yea............ Truth Hurts!
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