Fact or Fiction - True or False

[Devil-Dick Willie]

3 hours ago, Spike said:

For me, it is the myth that a human woman has willingly touched @Devil-Dick Willie 's willie. Dogs however I cannot be positive.

They love the devil dick 

[CaaC (John)+]

In 1942, an Indian forest ranger discovered a remote lake, high in the Himalayas, full of human skeletons. Who were they?

 

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On report: ET and other extraterrestrial beings

With interest in UFOs and alien life forms at a hype-induced high, what are the odds on that longed-for “close encounter”.

Extraterrestrial beings are on people’s minds as the Pentagon prepares to deliver a report on UFOs to the United States Congress.

Officials say the report will not rule out the chance that Unidentified Flying Objects (or Unexplained Aerial Phenomena) spotted by US Navy pilots come from somewhere else in the universe – but they are also not ruling out that they come from other nations, rather than other planets.

The Conversation quizzed five experts on their belief in intelligent aliens – not necessarily flying the UFOs, but out there. Somewhere. Four of them think they exist.

Astrobiologist Jonti Horner, from the University of Southern Queensland, says it is a “definite yes” because of the sheer number of galaxies in the cosmos.

“I find it impossible to believe Earth is the only planet that has life – including intelligent and technologically advanced life,” he says, adding that finding proof of it in that vast expanse will be “astonishingly hard”.

Curtin University astrophysicist Steven Tingay agrees that it’s “hard to believe that the particular mix of conditions that resulted in “life” only occurred on Earth – but that “life” could just be bacteria.

Planetary scientist Helen Maynard-Casely, from the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, thinks it’s “only a matter of time” before we find some sort of alien life. “Whether it can say hello to us? Well, that’s a different question,” she says.

Rebecca Allen, a space technology expert from Swinburne University’s Space Office Project, says that although people usually think of a humanoid life form when they think about aliens, it’s more likely to be microorganisms. “But hope remains,” she says.

The outlier, University of New South Wales astrobiologist Martin Van Kranendonk, says the answer is “no”. But he goes on to concede that the full answer is that we don’t know.

“Perhaps one day we can know if we have nearby inter-planetary neighbours, or if indeed we are alone,” he says. “Or perhaps we never will”. 

Meanwhile, over at The Guardian, SETI Institute astronomer Seth Shostak says our first contact could be with artificial intelligence.

SETI’s entire mission is looking for other life in the universe.

Shostak points to the diversity of life on Earth, how millions of species even here look very different from each other, to argue that ET probably wouldn’t look humanoid.

In fact, he doesn’t even think they’d be carbon-based life forms.

“Their cognitive abilities will probably not be powered by a spongy mass of cells we’d call a brain,” he writes.

“They will probably have gone beyond biological smarts and, indeed, beyond biology itself. They won’t be alive.”

Even with humanity’s fastest rocket it would take 75,000 years to get to Proxima Centauri, the closest habitable system, he says. So any interplanetary explorers would have to be synthetic.

“Artificial intelligence aliens may not be as appealing as those who are warm-blooded and squishy, but we shouldn’t get hung up on an anthropocentric viewpoint,” he says.

“Researchers who work in AI estimate that machines able to beat humans on an IQ test will emerge from labs by mid-century. If we can do it, some extraterrestrials will have already done it.”

The US UFO report is due within weeks.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/exploration/on-report-et-and-all-its-extraterrestrial-mates/

 

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Is searching for aliens worth the risk? Absolutely, says UK’s leading astronomer

Even if all we learn is that we’re alone, the search is worth the risk, says Lord Martin Rees, the UK's Astronomer Royal.

 

“Are we alone?” is probably the question astronomers get asked most often by the general public. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence is surely worthwhile, despite the heavy odds against success, because the stakes are so high.

That’s why we should welcome Breakthrough Listen – a 10-year commitment by Russian-Israeli investor Yuri Milner to buy time on some of the world’s best radio telescopes and develop instruments to scan the sky in a more comprehensive and sustained fashion.

But even if the search succeeded (and few of us would bet more than 1 per cent on this), it’s unlikely that the ‘signal’ from aliens would be a decodable message. It would more likely constitute a by-product (or even a malfunction) of some super-complex machine far beyond our comprehension that could trace its lineage back to alien organic beings on a planet whose evolution might have had a head start of a billion years (or required a billion years less) relative to that on Earth.

It makes sense to first focus searches on Earth-like planets orbiting long-lived stars. But science-fiction authors remind us that there are more exotic alternatives. In particular, the habit of referring to ET as an ‘alien civilisation’ may be too restrictive. A ‘civilisation’ connotes a society of individuals: in contrast, ET might be a single, integrated intelligence.

Even if signals were being transmitted, we may not recognise them as artificial because we may not know how to decode them. A radio engineer familiar only with amplitude-modulation might have a hard time decoding modern wireless communications.

Is it risky to search for alien life?

I find it hard to share the worries some express about transmitting any signals that would reveal our presence: advanced aliens would know already that we’re here and could be giving us special attention because we’re clearly undergoing a transition from a technological civilisation of flesh-and-blood creatures to a complex near-immortal cyborg or robotic entity.

Perhaps the Galaxy already teems with advanced life and our descendants will ‘plug in’ to a galactic community as ‘junior members’. On the other hand, Earth’s intricate biosphere may be unique and the searches may fail. This would disappoint the searchers. But it would have an upside. Humans could then be less cosmically modest.

The tiny planet we find ourselves on – this pale blue dot floating in space – could be the most important place in the entire cosmos. Either way, our cosmic habitat seems ‘tuned’ to be an abode for life. Even if we are alone in the Universe, we may not be the culmination of this ‘drive’ towards complexity and consciousness.

Finally, there are two familiar maxims that pertain to this quest. First ‘extraordinary claims will require extraordinary evidence’ and second ‘absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence’.

https://www.sciencefocus.com/space/should-we-look-for-aliens/

 

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https://bloody-disgusting.com/editorials/3639636/10-classic-urban-legends-seen-beyond-belief-fact-fiction/