Aliens: Do they exist?

Aliens: Do they exist?


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constant escape

winter withered, warm

This points out that, if intelligent life exists beyond us, its signals could very well have been encoded into media, encrypted in such a way as to appear as noise to an outside observer. Interesting, and unfalsifiable, point.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Hmm. I wonder, statistically, embryologically, how common twins are. And what kind of conditions are required. And I wonder if, upon initiating some Tipler-esque universe computer, what the chances are that two radical intelligences emerge, and manage to dematerialize completely before the cosmic program halts.
 

version

Well-known member

This points out that, if intelligent life exists beyond us, its signals could very well have been encoded into media, encrypted in such a way as to appear as noise to an outside observer. Interesting, and unfalsifiable, point.
I wonder whether it could be argued we've done this, perhaps inadvertently, via the internet.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Whether or not we've done this: we've certainly made a splash - whether or not that splash goes farther than we think it does, that is something to wonder. And whether or not that splash is detectable as signal, any more than the ostensible noise that constitutes our extraterrestrial throughput is decipherable by us, is another thing to wonder.

To be sure, especially in my case, to theorize this stuff is to play leagues above one's element - but it very well could be possible to. It's what we've built ourselves to do, no?

"Matrix" and "maternal" are cognate, tracing back to womb, a place of creation. To dematerialize is to cease to be material, and, in a sense, to leave the matrix, or to transcend it, or to render it obsolete, etc. To graduate from it, perhaps, or to end it and everything.

That is, the matrix is only in conjunction with its material.

The program halt would be the terminus of the cosmos. If it is anything like a Turing machine halt, from what I gather - it only halts if an answer is reached. I could be wrong there though.

The question is, what kind of problem would the dematerialization of intelligent matter solve? The question that has rested at the root of all our questions for as long as we've been asking them? The question that has, itself, proven to be logophobic (repellent of logos), inarticulable, hardly done justice by the word "question"?

That would tie things together quite neatly. And it all grows/turns toward that point (referred to as the Omega point), but this growing is willed, and this will is diffused, until it is granularly nucleated into a colloid, into singularities of subjectivity, the kernels of psyches. This could be how matter begins to arrange itself. The kernels network into system-minds, etc, until that will, still disparate, is completely unified, at which point subjectivity itself ceases.

If you program something to arrange itself, who's in charge of its becoming? Can we finally see that as the low-resolution question that it is?
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm

This is where I got "Tipler-esque" from. This seems to be a breathtakingly extensive information-based sci-fi canon, one that does well to present the sheer scale of things - and some of it might even be hard sci-fi, but I don't know.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Forget statistics and probabilities. What does your gut say? Is there intelligent life beyond this planet?
My gut says yes.
Has anybody here seen a big white light in the sky and then had their genitals experimented on? That's the real question.
Also yes. But what's that got to do with aliens?
Ah, is it something to do with extra testicles?
"In July 1982, during the film's first theatrical run, Spielberg and Mathison wrote a treatment for a sequel to be titled E.T. II: Nocturnal Fears. It would have shown Elliott and his friends getting kidnapped by evil aliens, and attempting to contact E.T. for help."
That does sound shit.
You ever read about the game?
"The final release was critically panned, with nearly every aspect of the game facing heavy criticism. E.T. is often cited as one of the worst video games of all time and one of the biggest commercial failures in video game history. It is cited as a major contributing factor to the video game industry crash of 1983 and has been frequently referenced and mocked in popular culture as a cautionary tale about the dangers of rushed game development and studio interference."
I believe that there was an episode of The Goldbergs in which he saved up all his money to buy this and was unbelievably disappointed.

I really like this song that was written (hopefully) for the film but which they chose not to use

 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Some classic movie "reviews" (demolitions) from SomethingAwful, from way back in 2002, are relevant to this thread:


and

 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
When people compute the chances of life emerging, is there a chance that we're thinking of these percentages the wrong way?

One of the (seemingly) consistent patterns up the ladder of physics and even into some metaphysics is that the optimal permutations are privileged, in that they exist longer than suboptimal permutations. That is, certain molecular structures are more architecturally sound than other structures, and thus they can hold together longer against the forces that would otherwise dismantle them and return them to equilibrium/disorder.

The same goes for biological evolution, it seems, in that certain phenotypes are more conducive to survival than other phenotypes. Hair length, beak sharpness, what have you. So its not like each possible permutation has the same chance of occurring, much less the same chance of subsisting. If you were to somehow get insight to the sheer number of possible permutations, some of them seem to be "weighted" more than others, thus making them more likely to be sustained, if they happen to be reached.

So microbial life across the universe could very well surpass its ostensible odds of coming into existence, because perhaps we don't consider the weightedness of some permutations over others.
 
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