See what I mean? We game developers have to thinking of everything. sheesh!
Speaking of little green men, has anyone here seen the pics supposedly taken by the Russian Phobos II Martian probe before it went dark in the early 1990s? First they show a huge shadow, moving across the Martian surface. Then they show what looks to be an object coming toward the probe. Then the probe itself vanished.
That Dean Stockwell unexplained mysteries-type show had a feature on this a couple weeks ago on the Space channel here in Canada. Some interesting comments were provided by the Russians who put the probe up, and the pics are hard to explain. The earlier one clearly shows a long, cylindrical shadow on the face of the planet that must have been caused by something in orbit. Russians had no explanation for it. Also, some of the heat-sensitive pics registered lines in a grid on the surface of the planet that were much warmer than their surroundings. Again, they had no way to explain this.
Here’s a link that I just found:
It looks like a meteor.
The shadow sure as hell doesn’t. Seems to be between the probe and the planet, meaning that it’s either in the low atmosphere or attached to the planet somehow. Also, it’s moving slowly. That and the heated grid on Mars shown in the infrared pics are flat-out weird.
This is all fascinating stuff. I always find myself drawn in by UFO info but won’t take the time to search it out. Thanks for all the links!
–Dave
As far as the elliptical shadow goes, a small shadow centered on the ellipse, gyrating from side to side and slightly less up and down can create an elliptical shadow like that.
As far as the IR images go, any kind of external noise – vibration, extreme heat, rapid temperate changes, radiation, and mechanical problems – can cause geometric patterns to arise from imaging.
Fun stuff to speculate on though.
— Alan
Yet those explanations weren’t forthcoming from the Russians, or many others who looked at the pics. The general consensus seems to be “Duh, I dunno.” Or maybe I’ve just been watching too much Dean Stockwell. I think it’s the fedora.
Russians aren’t very smart.
One quite convincing argument for why there are no extraterrestrial civilizations is the Fermi Paradox:
http://www.ndirect.co.uk/~transhumanism/Fermi.htm
To put it succinctly: if there are other techilogical civilizations out there, then where is everybody?
If there’s intelligent life out there, it should have taken only 5-50 million years to colonize the entire galaxy, given a very conservative diffusion model. In galactic terms, that’s pretty short.
Either there’s nobody out there, or by some almost impossible chance, not even ONE technological civilizations sprung up prior to, say, 10 million years ago. Which, given the size and age of our galaxy, is almost unthinkable.
Do a google search on the Fermi paradox, it’s interesting reading.
Ok, Fermi’s paradox is the creepiest thing I’ve heard about aliens in a long time, and it’s seriously wigging me out.
Out of the premises, I pick…“colonization should fill the galaxy” as the one being wrong. There’s got to be some unknown block to the first mover colonizing everything.
Augh, my head.
Here’s an interesting possibility:
http://xxx.lanl.gov/pdf/astro-ph/9901322
An astrophysical model is proposed to answer Fermi’s question. Gamma-ray bursts have the correct rates of occurrence and plausibly the correct energetics to have consequences for the evolution of life on a galactic scale. If one assumes that they are in fact lethal to land based life throughout the galaxy, one has a mechanism that prevents the rise of intelligence until the mean time between bursts is comparable to the timescale for the evolution of intelligence. Astrophysically plausible models suggest the present mean time between bursts to be $\sim 10^8$ years, and evolutionarily plausible models suggest the rise of intelligence takes $\sim 10^8$. Hence, this model suggests that the Galaxy is currently undergoing a phase transition between an equilibrium state devoid of intelligent life to a different equilibrium state where it is full of intelligent life.
Oh, bullpuckey on the Fermi Paradox. Why would we have “noticed” when we only invented even the basic radio telescope a few decades ago? Heck, we’ve only gotten to the point where we can detect extrasolar planets within the past few years – and even that’s just by detecting their gravitational influence. So how would we “notice” a space empire?
As for why they haven’t been here, with 10^10 to 10^20 inhabitable planets in our galaxy alone, what are the odds that they would have gotten around to stopping here?
I think about the only thing you can logically extrapolate at this point in our technological growth – and remember, we’ve only even had radio and engines for a about 100 years, so space shuttles and nukes aside we’re still primitive – is that nobody in the immediate neighborhood has solved the faster-than-light problem.
And if it turns out that FTL travel IS an impossibility, that does even more to explain why we haven’t detected life out there.
And it could be something so simple as aliens popping up here 1,400 years from now going “You were using radio to communicate? RADIO? You idiots. No wonder you weren’t answering.”
With endless kazillion planets out there, to think that “intelligent” life has popped up as a unique thing on earth is ludicrous. It’s like an alien sending a probe to earth, examining a single molecule of a single grain of sand in the Nevada desert, and concluding there’s no sentient life here.
The thing I thought was creepy about the Fermi paradox is that aliens should have, assuming they’re interested (and with the numbers, at least one of them should have), already colonized the earth themselves. With the time scales involved, it’s like arguing water won’t eventually fill every bit of a bathtub if you leave the faucet running for (a virtual) eternity.
It is pretty interesting, although like so many other scientific theories about life developing apart from Earth it assumes that we have a clue what’s going on. And there is no guarantee that we do. Any race intelligent enough to have colonized/travelled across much of the galaxy would certainly have the technology to isolate us in this solar system.