Spaceships

[Lila Malvae]

This is a touchy topic with me. I don't know what to think, really. I tend to believe that most who talk of spaceships being completely wacko, but maybe that's because I've never had a personal experience with anything like that. What do you guys think?
Am I being judgmental or reasonably biased against the topic? What are your opinions on UFO's, etc?  

[PhantomPhoenix0]

Well, I dont think the government is hiding any, but I do think that there are Aliens on other plants. Whether or not we will actually see them I dont know. The reason behind this is just logic. If you look at the billions of stars, and knowing that most of the stars in the sky have their own system of planets, you truely think that earth is the ONLY planet with life on it?  

[Cerulean Crayon]

I agree withy PhantomPhoenix that we aren't alone, but I'd personally feel that they are something we cannot reach/comprehend/see as life. And why would they want anything to do with us, humans being as they are?  

[CuAnnan]

I don't know where I stand on this one.
The cynic in me denies the possibility of contact with reference to the laws of Relativity.
The believer in me clings to the possibility of superluminal velocities.
All in all, I can't make a decision until I know if the light barrier can be broken or not.
If the light barrier can be broken, depending on to what extent, contact is a possibility.
Otherwise the set of laws governing Rare Earth come into play and any intelligent life-forms are so far away that we will never be able to reach them, nor they us.  

[Jishin]

Life on other planets? Sure.

It wouldn't surprise me if they found life on Mars.

Not sentient life, mind you, but I'd stack bets that there are or were life forms on Mars at some point in its history. Mars was initially as warm as the Earth, and microorganisms can grow in a profound number of inhospitable climates, ranging from the polar caps to the depths of the ocean to the blistering Sahara. I expect there was life on Mars in the past, if there isn't still now.

Spaceships ... the jury's still out on that. There are things that we Do Not Know about how the universe works. It is certainly possible, though if it is, we will probably not have the technology to do so for ... eh ... *thinks* .... what, another couple-five hundred years, given the way our science has exploded? Think about it -- millions of years in human evolution, and we went from the Renaissance to space travel in 500 years.

We live in a freaking golden age.

So I don't see why intelligent life could not have gone that far, if it is possible .... why they'd be hanging out in our neck of the woods is a different question.  

[WebenBanu]

When someone steers the conversation in the direction of UFOs, I generally lose interest fairly quickly. Sure, it's possible that there are other life forms out there somewhere, but I don't really see it as our most pressing concern right now. Let's assume, for the moment, that we knew for sure that there were other races out there- so what? We still need to work on our own problems first, right? We need to get our own affairs in order before we start thinking about contacting other races- we really don't need to be complicating things for ourselves right now, and if we can't handle our own technology just imagine what we'd do with someone else's.^_^'

Besides, maybe aliens exist and maybe they don't. What good does it do us to specualte about something which we can't prove right now and couldn't really do anything about it if we could?^_^

I did read one book, though, which posited an interesting theory that so-called "UFO" sightings are actually fey, and that people's minds are configuring the experience in a way which fits what they think they're more likely to see. Old accounts of "fairy kidnapping" are supposedly similar in several respects, but nowadays people aren't as familiar with such creatures nor are they expecting to see them. "Aliens" seem more logical to a culture which has already ventured into space, and so that is what people talk about.

Still, I think it's pure speculation at this point, and not a topic which is likely to produce any helpful ideas for our society. We'd do better to focus on more practical maters- like homelessness, overpopulation, hunger, war, oppression, and pollution. There are many other matters to keep us occupied, ne?^_~  

[TatteredAngel]

I believe that there have been sightings of unidentified objects in the air. I find it a tremendous leap of blind faith to say things like "I don't know what that is and it doesn't move like I expect it to so it must be alien life or a vast government conspiracy or both."

I see a lot of things in my day to day life where I don't know quite what I'm seeing. I think most UFO sightings are probably just that. And when you're ready to jump to conclusions, you shut yourself down to other possibilities.

Part of it is that I simply have a hard time believing that an alien race would be dicking around all over Earth yet never trying to make any provable contact or attempting to communicate via methods that aren't conveniently mysterious. Then, also, there's the lack of agreement between sightings about the size and type of supposed alien spacecrafts, the appearance of the aliens, etc. You'd think the place was swarming with a multitude of alien races that are only interested in zipping about and occasionally making generic fruitless contact. And I just can't swallow it.  

[SlaineWildfire]

Hmmm. Interesting.

Well, personally, I definately think that there is a high probability that there is life on other planets. I mean, we have life on this one (as far as we can determine) so why not somewhere else? Not sure if they'd be anywhere close enough to want to come visit us, and who knows, they might be on a different realm of technology. But sure, they probably exist.

I read a book called Angels and Aliens, and it makes interesting correlations between supernatural phenomena and Biblical events and alien activity. It's fairly intriguing.  

[Arrowroot]

I'm a boring skeptic when it comes to this type of thing. I believe that life on earth was an accident so to speak. We initially came froma metiorite (sp?) which is supposedly the theory anyways. and something about a star explosion, and poof.... evolution... in a very condensed sentance.
I believe there is a possibility that there could be life somewhere else... i mean the universe so so incredibly vast... its hard to believe earth was the ONLY 'accident'
However the likely hood of us getting in 'contact' with them...very very slim.
first lets make the light boundry then we can think about visiting other planets... not that i would really want to, to be honest...
and plus... i dont think we would gain much from getting in contact with other planets... nor they from us O_o