Aliens, are we alone?
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I was looking through my latest issue of 8BS (56) when I came upon
the article on alien life. Being a bit sad, and more than a little
open minded on such subjects, I decided to add my two penn'orth and keep
the discussion going.
May I just say that that I found some of the ideas by both John
Ripley and Martin Wilson very plausible and sometimes totally
ridiculous. All the same they are their own opinions, and even though I
will be stating why I don't agree with some of them, I do respect that
fact.
Are we alone?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It seems totally ridiculous to me that we should be the only
sentient life forms in the entire galaxy, and the mere thought that we
are the first within the 'SOL' system (thats this solar system)
itself.
When you have the time, go out at night and look up into the
darkened sky.
What do you see?
Stars of course!
Each of those stars could support life in some way or another.
Intelligent or other, it is still life. Only human arrogance would
imagine that any form of life that does not originate from Earth would
be anything like what we are.
Before we look to the stars lets take a look at ourselves shall
we? We are carbon based life forms. We like to think that we are
intelligent, and technologically advanced.
But are we? We have ravaged our planet, depleted planetary
resourses, damaged the ozone layer beyond our ability to repair. What
gives us the right to even think about exploring elsewhere when we
can't look after our own planet?
Enough of that!
Other life forms, do they exist?
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In a word yes they do. We know this because numerous missions to
the various planets in this star system have discovered various
bacteria and fossils.
But what of further out? That is where your guess is as good as
mine. Lets say that there is and they visit Earth. How would we
reconise them?
* They would be different certainly, they may be too small for us
to see, or they may absorb all the light that we can see and reflect
light that is invisible to human eyes, rendering them invisible to us.
* They may have no physical form at all (as mentioned by J.Ripley &
M.Wilson); there is no reason to suggest that all life must reside
within a physical being.
* We would certainly have a great deal of difficulty communicating
with them. In fact they may have a different way of communication. If
their atmosphere does not permit verbal comunication, they may do it
some other way such as ESP or similar. We do not even understand the
human mind so I won't try to theorise an alien mind that only exists
theoretically.
* There is the possibility that they could be too big to notice
even our planet, being so small as to be the size of an atom to them.
That would be strange, we look out into the blackness of space and
think that is what space looks like. Safe in this knowledge wouldn't it
be a suprise if that blackness turned out to be a passing space slug
or something and that space was in fact pink!
* On the other hand they could have been too small for us to see,
in fact they could be so small they could move through the gaps
between the atoms in our bodies.
On the subject of life on Mars,
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If there was life on Mars it was nothing like life on Earth!
If there had been the sort of life that we have here then there
would be some evidence somewhere. It is almost a certainty that Mars
died millions of years ago, while the Earth was still young and we
were little invertebrates swimming in radioactive ooze.
But, I am open minded and do not rule it out all together. Perhaps
evoloution took a different course to here on Earth and Humanoid life
did not exist at all there.
So, how did life exist on Mars? Simply put we do not know and may
never know! But lets look at what we do know of Mars.
The planet is similar in position to the Sun or SOL star to Earth,
and the surface is geographically similar to Earth as well. The
atmosphere that remains on Mars is a week carbon dioxide mixture which
suggests that there MAY have been an oxygen mix gas for an atmosphere
at one time.
The presence of huge bowls in the landscape indicate that there may
have been vast continents and oceans. There are also huge mountain
ranges and craters as well. These craters may be the key to the whole
mystery.
If there were continents, oceans, an atmosphere, and primitive
life, then what was it like?
We know from the atmosphere that there may have been oxygen, but
how strong was the mixture? It would almost certainly differ from our
own. It could have been stronger or weaker, it could have had other
ingredients like Hydrogen, Helium, or other natural gases. This
suggests also that the oceans would have had water content with a
similar cycle of evaporation into the sky and then rain later on.
All this may have been capable of sustaining life like here on
Earth. Well we know that science has found small invertebrate fossils
on the surface of Mars. These may have been genetically similar to the
equivalent life here.
But for some reason life got no further as far as we can tell.
What if life still exists on Mars? All we can see is the surface of
Mars. There are hundreds of thousands of feet under the surface of
Mars that we can't see.
Is it possible that due to some ecolgical disaster, life turned
subterranian, and still be there today?
UFO'S, FACT OR FICTION?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A UFO, or Unidentified Flying Object is just as the name suggests,
an object that we can not identify. This does not mean that it is a
flying saucer from the planet Vulcan and that they have come to see
us.
The mere thought that they know we are here and have not come to
see us yet is silly. If you were in a spaceship and you found a planet
with life on it would you not want to land and say hello?
A large percentage of UFO's carry not aliens but plain old stuff
that looks a bit strange.
However, there are a certain percentage of these UFO's that may
just be aliens after all. Go to the library and look at books on the
subject. There have been alleged abductions, sightings, encounters
with alien space craft (flying saucers) all documented, but never
proven.
Just because we can not prove what it is, it does not mean that we
can prove what it is not. If these are alien visitors then why have we
had no contact. With sightings as early as the forties, it seems
incredible that nobody has been inclined to say hello.
That is not to say they haven't tried. We may not have the
equipment to receive their transmissions, or we heard them but did not
understand them. The truth is we just do not know, not for certain.
IS THERE AN AFTERLIFE?
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We know that there is a life, we all live it. But once we have
died we leave this existence and maybe move on to another. I don't
mean heaven or anything like that, I just mean that the human mind is
a powerful thing. There is not a computer in existence that can
compute the volume of data the brain can. And with 20% of the
human brain actually used, what does the other 80% do?
The essence that a person is, is contained in the brain, this means
when the brain dies the person dies. Well how do we know that for
certain.
Reincarnation may seem like a load of old codswallop to some, but
the simple fact is we can not explain certain things. These certain
things may turn out to be truth after all.
The personality of a person may still exist somewhere after the
death of the body, (this opens the way for ghosts and other things
like that, we can discuss that later). This is one possible
explanation to reincarnation. But on the other hand that essence may
just stay where it is and become part of the natural universe,
floating around watching and learning and ultimately becoming a being
of pure energy, totally aware and self suffiecient. Of course this may
not be the case, but as I stated earlier there is no proof for or
against it.
That is all I can come up with for now, but I'd welcome other
people's opinions on these subjects as well.
By for now E2K