Social Question

cockswain's avatar

Do you think aliens have ever visited Earth?

Asked by cockswain (15286points) July 19th, 2011

Why or why not? If yes, do you think they’ve abducted anyone ever, or helped direct the construction of pyramids or anything like that?

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48 Answers

dappled_leaves's avatar

Sure, in bacterial form… but if you’re asking about sentient beings like you and me… nope.

ragingloli's avatar

I think there is sufficient evidence to entertain that hypothesis.

wundayatta's avatar

Nope. I’ve never seen any credible evidence to support the hypothesis.

Jeruba's avatar

I’d love to say yes because it’s a much more interesting proposition. But no. Sorry, no. Nazca Lines notwithstanding.

Brian1946's avatar

There are some who are even now languishing in Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Arizonian tent prison. ;-)

laureth's avatar

Yeah, they come to take jobs… the cash they send home is almost half of the Alpha Centauri system’s GDP!

Seriously, though, I sincerely doubt it.

dabbler's avatar

I like @ragingloli “sufficient evidence to entertain that hypothesis”
—entertainment; party talk; let-your-imagination-go-wild stuff.
Beats blaming everything we don’t fully understand on God.

Jeruba's avatar

Wait a minute, @dabbler. Are you saying that God and aliens are mutually exclusive?

ShanEnri's avatar

I must agree with @wundayatta and @Jeruba not enough credible evidence, but it would be very interesting to find out that we’re wrong and they were here before!

roundsquare's avatar

Of course. They make very pleasant dinner guests and always bring excellent wine from their home planet. Careful though, its a bit stronger than the wine we’re used to here on Earth.

atomicmonkey's avatar

I’ve never understood why people can’t just marvel at the ingenuity of the ancients. “The human brain couldn’t possibly have conceived this complex structure” and soforth.

I never got how ‘space aliens built this’ can be a more plausible explanation.

I just don’t get excited by aliens as a concept. It doesn’t spark my interest.

Now, Vampirates on the other hand….

Cruiser's avatar

Yes. I believe an alien life form was the spark that started life on earth and there are just way too many inexplicable events that only alien involvement would explain and she loves to drink all my red wine when she visits!!

DrBill's avatar

yes, we are here in search of intelegent life, have you seen any?

cockswain's avatar

Another question: why do they seem fascinated with our butts?

roundsquare's avatar

@DrBill Check the mice.

RealEyesRealizeRealLies's avatar

I don’t believe that any physical extraterrestrial life form has ever visited earth in a traditional type of flying saucer spacecraft. I don’t believe there is any other physical life form in the universe aside from what we have here on earth.

However, I have much belief in inter-dimensional sentient beings that we wouldn’t, couldn’t recognize as such no matter how hard we tried. These beings are not Grok-able by humans to the degree of any sufficient description or categorization.

FluffyChicken's avatar

I think fungi might be aliens.

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies your use of the word Grok just gave me a nerdgasm.

FutureMemory's avatar

Unlikely. Our universe is just that big.

RealEyesRealizeRealLies's avatar

@FluffyChicken We’ll have to nergasm together then… cause the whole “fungi might be aliens” is a Terrence McKenna rap that I’m quite familiar with and mostly in agreement. But, over the years, McKenna had changed his position from the fungi actually being the alien, to the fungi just being the physical mechanism the alien uses to propagate its essence throughout the universe by use of spore transports. The actual alien is an inter-dimensional being that uses the mushroom to be known. And they are responsible for the monkey becoming human, because evolution kicked in high gear when the monkey came down from the trees to forage food on the ground. Those who ate the mushrooms were instantly transformed with better eyesight and extreme horninessinesses.

The mushroom was actually the forbidden fruit in the biblical fall.

FluffyChicken's avatar

Hell yes Stoned Ape theory!! I think the Mana of Exodus may have also been a fungus.

gondwanalon's avatar

If aliens have visited Earth they would likely make their presence known to more than just a few unfortunate people. They are made to look like cooks. Why do the aliens not provide any real evidence that they have visited Earth? Because they never have.

Hibernate's avatar

They are not aliens just brothers from another planet.
We should keep in touch more often.

ragingloli's avatar

“_They are not aliens just brothers from another planet. _”
So you can not have sex with them? Unlucky you!

ucme's avatar

Okay, fuck that druid shite, stonehenge was built by alien beings intent on playing football.
I know this to be true coz Mickey Rooney chronicled the event in his diary.

rooeytoo's avatar

Well ever since I read the book, Chariots of the Gods, I have been less skeptical. I really believe that when you look up at the sky and see all those stars, it is arrogant to believe that we are the only ones or the smartest, most advanced.

So I think it is possible, but that is about as far as I will go.

FutureMemory's avatar

@gondwanalon They are made to look like cooks.

I have NEVER seen an E.T. working the kitchen of any restaurant I’ve been to.

Hibernate's avatar

@ragingloli I’m sure even if I wanted to someone had a different saying here and she’d mind .

chewhorse's avatar

Yes, I think aliens have and are still living on earth.. Look around at all you see then look in a mirror.. THE ALIENS ARE US!!! (even the bible attests to that with the fall of adam/eve.. where do you think THEY fell from?).

dabbler's avatar

@Jeruba “God and aliens are mutually exclusive?” Heh heh, who knows?

Just seems whenever something happens that our big brains don’t quite have mastery of, someone’s bound to claim TheDivine did it, as if that’s useful at all. I mean, if you believe in TheDivine, of course he/she did it, but that adds no information at all. We still want to know what happened. Aliens could be involved in God’s plan, why not?

wundayatta's avatar

@rooeytoo Of course it’s possible. Green-eyed invisible monkeys are possible, too. You can’t prove they aren’t.

However, even if there is so-called “intelligent” life elsewhere in the universe, the distances between stars and galaxies and the barrier of the speed of light and the economic barriers make it extremely unlikely they will ever visit earth. In addition, that life may take a form we simply don’t recognize. How would we know how to communicate with plasma creatures? Or what if a galaxy was a life form? Conscious and intelligent?

dabbler's avatar

IF aliens have visited earth I’m gonna conjecture that they mastered some form of (faster-than-light method of transportation, either that or they are stones and live a very very long time compared to us and would not relate to us when they got here. We’d know the latter as meteorites.

cockswain's avatar

Without substantially faster-than-light transportation methods (which defy physics anyways), it seems no intelligent life in the universe is ever likely to meet each other. That makes existence a little more bleak. Miller time!

FluffyChicken's avatar

@cockswain unless of course their sense of time, if it exists at all, is incredibly different than ours. Maybe a thousand years to us is like a second to them.

cockswain's avatar

Good point. But then we wouldn’t really get to interact with them if that’s the case. Imagine how frustrating that would be asking them how their trip was and waiting for a few millenia for a brief answer.

RealEyesRealizeRealLies's avatar

We wouldn’t recognize an alien life form even if it was growing up in our own back yard.

FluffyChicken's avatar

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies ...like mushrooms. ehem

Mushroom spores can survive the vacuum of space, you know.

RealEyesRealizeRealLies's avatar

Where did you get this knowledge if not a McKenna fan?

roundsquare's avatar

@cockswain And that would be after we figure out how to communicate.

FluffyChicken's avatar

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies Oh, I am indeed a McKenna reader, however Paul Stamets , the foremost authority on fungus at the moment would confirm that, in fact I learned that at a lecture of his that I went to.

SimpatichnayaZhopa's avatar

No, there is no hard evidence that ETs have ever visited Earth. Indeed, some leading scientists show that they cannot possibly visit us, if they do indeed exist. Interstellar travel is not feasible, so all life forms are confined to their own star systems. The fuel demands for interstellar travel can never be met. The distances between stars is much too great to be overcome in nay feasible time period. Excessive acceleration kills life forms. Matter has a strict speed limit, so it can never travel sufficiently fast to reach another star. The amount of fuel is much larger than the spaceship, and it must be accelerated as well. All of these factors make it impossible or ETs to visit Earth.

dabbler's avatar

@SimpatichnayaZhopa‘s answer is pretty much the story given today’s understanding of science.
However, notice that today’s understanding of science is radically different to what we thought we knew 100 years ago. A hundred years from now we might understand things like string theory differently and find that the speed of light is the limit under our ‘normal’ conditions of three and a half dimensions and that faster-than-light travel can be accomplished through means that don’t require the energy contained in a whole star system.

Then we may have other ideas about whether or not it’s possible for ETs to have visited Earth.

ragingloli's avatar

A few years ago, it was impossible to go to the moon in sailing ships.

SimpatichnayaZhopa's avatar

Bad analogies and wild groundless speculation that is little more than fantasy mean nothing compared to hard Science and Mathematics. Actually, new discoveries may limit possibilities, further, rather than open new doors. It would be much easier for ETs to travel to other stars in the Newtonian Universe.than in the modified Einsteeinian Universe, Magical Thinking is illogical. The problems exist that forbid interstellar travel, and there are no magic solutions to them. Few people comprehend these problems that Nobel Prize winner in Physic Edward M. Purcell showed. I agree with the reputable scientists rather than people who prefer groundless speculation, Star Wars fantasy and illogical magical thinking. Discussing going to the Moon is a different matter than going t Alpha Centauri..

ragingloli's avatar

Relativity allows the formation of wormholes, opening up the theoretical possibility of wormhole travel.
It allows the distortion of spacetime, and the mathematical model of the Alcubierre Warp Drive has been refined as to lower the energy requirements to the equivalent of the Voyager space probe.
Physics does not prohibit faster-than-light travel.

SimpatichnayaZhopa's avatar

Wormholes is more speculation and magical solution to an insoluble problem. Alcubierre Warp drive is pure fantasy. Only people who are naïve in real science believe such nonsense. Yes, the Theory of Relativity prohibits matter from travelling at the speed of light, not to mention even faster. You evidenctly are unfamiliar with the Lorentz Equations. Again, using wild speculation an fantasy plus magical thinking does not beat real Science and Mathematics.

ragingloli's avatar

Warp drive is not about matter moving at or faster than the speed of light.

SimpatichnayaZhopa's avatar

Warp drive is “Star Trek” fantasy. Alcubierre requires exotic matter in a quantity larger than the universe if you read more about it, so it is fantasy. Exotic matter is his invention that is a deus ex machine like “Star Trek’s” warp drive.

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