Posts Made By: Paul Kammueller

This is a "something completely different" thread, a lot of subject matter has gone stale so it's free association time -- I'll be making all this up as I go and nobody can disprove it so there! :-)

It occurs to me that we are scientifically fortunate to have an impressively complete fossil record of our planet's history such that we can explain our origins scientifically. I suspect many alien worlds might not be so fortunate -- here's why:

If an alien race became advanced and spacefaring, they may colonize many worlds -- hundreds or thousands of planets over tens of thousands of years. Empires rise and fall, civilizations fall apart and it is likely many of these worlds, by choice or by accident, would lose all contact with homeworld. Over tens of thousands of years many would also lose all record of it.

We may, if we venture into space, find that intelligent species actually living on their world of origin to be an extreme minority -- in this event, many of these races would be at a complete loss to explain their origins, having no fossil record *at all*!

We may expect alien races to thus be an extremely religious lot on the whole. It would be interesting to see what elaborate myths would have to arise to account for the origins of themselves and the flora and fauna of their world. And what, if any, of their true origins survived in some symbolic language in those myths. It would also be curious to see what state or direction their science reaches toward under these circumstances.

Anybody feel like voting on undemonstrable speculative quantities?

1) There is no alien life -- the universe was created by God for man alone
2) Alien life exceedingly rare -- we'll have to run to the next galaxy to find it
3) Life common, intelligence rare -- we'll be the only spacefaring race in the Milky Way, or one of a few
4) Intelligent life fairly common -- we'll find the galaxy already largely colonized by those who came before us.
5) Intelligent life in your face -- the Purple Whirlpoolian Dinosaurs already rule much of the galaxy and are patiently waiting for us to become sufficiently advanced to be a useful slave world

I'm thinking a fairly fuzzy future time range, say 500-5,000 years hence:

1) Rulers of the Great Galactic Empire
2) DOOMED (no future)
3) Golden Age -- population hyper-educated, mostly rich, mostly happy
4) Dark Age -- population uneducated, poor, barely surviving
5) Ice Age -- arctic life diversifies as humanity retreats
6) Greenhouse Age -- bugs and reptiles diversify as mammals retreat
7) High-tech future in context of #3-6
8) Post-tech/low-tech agro-pastoral world in context of #3-6
9) Lazy Age -- population lazy and stupid as all our needs are met and all our thinking done by machines
10) Machine Age -- population gone as machines decide we're no longer needed
11) Humanity spends all its time hiding in cornfields in a world ruled by DAMN DIRTY APES!

A Big Boy on its way now, X17 or X18 class solar flare, loud and fast, due to arrive tomorrow at noon -- last one was a measly X1.2? Articles at CNN.com and space.com

If we were being selectively bred I would have expected more impressive results.

On Anacortes see these two versions of mirrors listed. What's the difference? Figure? Coatings?

Overcast and raining all week here in MN :-( :-( :-( :-(

pretty cool:

http://soho.nascom.nasa.gov/hotshots/

Examples:
1) Inquisition (Church with unlimited political power)
2) Soviet Russia (state religion: atheism)
3) Iran under the Ayatollahs (state religion: Islamic Fundamentalism)
4) Afghanistan under the Taliban (state religion: Islamic Fundamentalism)

There are other examples of course. It baffles me why *some* religious people frown upon church-state separation. Do you really want the government dictating matters of belief? Do you want government dictating YOUR beliefs? Government has a number of necessary functions. Telling us what to believe regarding God, or gods, or an existence or lack thereof, is NOT one of them.

Or, to put it another way, is there any possible good that could result from non-separation of church and state? Is there any conceivable upside whatsoever?

I dunno if this is really the forum for this but SETI kind of falls into the "search for truth" category so there.

I was browsing through SETIathome's website last night and realized that the band of sky being scanned is mostly out of the plane of the galaxy. In fact it seems to be focused on the regions of the sky least likely to produce successful results.

It seems to me we should be looking toward the galactic core, I would think that would be the place for advanced civilizations to be. The one place in the galaxy that generates more usable energy than any other, that's where star formation occurred first and mostest, I'd think if there's any really advanced alien life the Big Boys must hang out there, at Galactic Central Downtown. We're way out on the fringe, in the middle of absolutely nowhere.

Has there ever been a real concerted effort to search the galactic core for radio signals, or other anomalous electromagnetic energy signatures or anything else that could result from activity by extremely powerful civilizations?