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Project Serpo, and related discussion
oddment
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
For some reason I decided (in a fit of boredom) to look into aliens via Wikipedia today. This led me to stories about reported abductions, different kinds of 'aliens' and the various conspiracy theories and hoaxes that have been reported throughout the years. I eventually came across something called Project Serpo. Basically, it is a 'conspiracy' stating that after the Roswell crash of 1949, some years after this to be exact, 12 people were sent to the home world of the alien species who crashed for some kind of exchange program. I'll quote from Wikipedia for those of you who can't, or can't be bothered, to follow the link:
Follow the link in the quote to the site, which shows you the articles that started all of this. Now, it is almost certainly a big hoax, but what an interesting hoax it is!
So this thread is basically a discussion of Project Serpo, alien sightings, abductions, theories on intelligent life in our universe, and basically anything related to 'aliens'. Go right on ahead and discuss!
The first mention of a 'Project Serpo' was in a UFO email list maintained by enthusiast Victor Martinez [1]. Various versions of the conspiracy theory circulated, and were later detailed on a website (www.serpo.info).
According to the most common version of the story, an alien survived a crash near Roswell in the later 1940s (see Roswell UFO incident). This alien was detained but treated well by American military forces, contacted its home planet and eventually repatriated. The story continues by claiming that this led to the establishment of some sort of relationship between the American government and the people of its home world – said to be a planet of the binary star system Zeta Reticuli[1]. Zeta Reticuli has a history in ufology, having been claimed as the home system of an alien race called the Greys (despite repeated debunking by noted UFO skeptics). (source needed)
The story finally claims that twelve American military personnel visited the planet between 1965 and 1978 and that all of the party have since died, from 'after effects of high radiation levels from the two suns'.
Follow the link in the quote to the site, which shows you the articles that started all of this. Now, it is almost certainly a big hoax, but what an interesting hoax it is!
So this thread is basically a discussion of Project Serpo, alien sightings, abductions, theories on intelligent life in our universe, and basically anything related to 'aliens'. Go right on ahead and discuss!
PSN Sig Hidden Within!*
*Thanks Thanatos!
*Thanks Thanatos!
oddment on
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"Oh shit! Dudes!
Did... did we tell them we have two suns? Do you think they'll mind- OH HI THERE!"
On the other hand, if I were an alien capable of interstaller travler, I really don't think visiting Earth would be high on my list of places I needed to go. How exciting can a planet full of hairless apes who are always fighting each other be?
I think you answered your own question.
You should reread your last sentence, that does sound exciting.
Maybe for betting.
Alien 1: I've got 2 to 1 odds that the loud apes who talk to much will bomb the shit out of someone.
Alien 2: Your're on!
Planet Earth - the biggest monkey knife fight in the universe.
I mean, what if we, humans, are the first ever star-faring race, and we become as the "ancients" or "Asguard" or whatever else from all the Stargate shows. At least, thats how it plays out in EvE, which I find more believable than most Sci-Fi plotlines.
TLDR: IF humans want space exploration, we have to develop it ourselves, and stop waiting on some other creatures to come along and give it to us.
MWO: Adamski
Who says it doesn't take a rather particular set of circumstances to develop sentience, one of which being a planetary type that didn't appear until later in the universe's span?
That's an interesting thought, that it would take a large amount of supernova to create the amount of elements necessary for a planet that can harbor life to be created and you don't get the number necessary until roughly 10 billion years into a universes life. I don't have an answer for that one except that it would probably mean there are other civilizations at roughly our current level out in the universe, since the supernova thing would probably occur in other galaxies similar to ours.
If there are older and advanced ones out there that can't get around the speed of light, that's a depressingly likely possibility, it would mean we are stuck out here alone.
Spoiler if you care:
Of course, no one knows why some ancient race did this, or why no one is allowed out of this structure.
Anyway, it would be interesting if an alien race decided to reveal themselves to us. Maybe they've evolved beyond lying.
In this case, we'd see a technologically superior race immediately subjected to factory work in China while we all have jetpacks.
God I hope they never read this and decide to disintegrate me.
between fucking with the yokels and hawt alien sex, I can believe they'd come if they could and knew we were here.
Hey, Look something diffrent. Totally diffrent forms of biology, and the arts and sciences they create. Potential slave labor or religious converts.
If they are intelligent enough to travel between the stars, I assume they would be curious enough to come and take a peek, assuming it wouldn't take generations to get here. Even if it did, still would probably be worth while.
There is probably other life out there. Almost certainly they don't know we are here. If they did, they probably couldn't get here without a massive effort if they could get here at all.
Anthropomorphism of course, but planets with life on them are rare enough that I can't see how any race wouldn't see them as extremely valuable.
Collegehumor, I think.
Okay, maybe not. I looked through 18 pages of articles and didn't see it.
I read it somewhere, too. "They talk by pushing air through their meat!"
Here: http://home.earthlink.net/~paulrack/id82.html
Matrioshka Brains are where all the cool aliens are at.
I'd rather live in the real world.
Also, I don't know which is more stupid. Believing we are along in the entire fucking universe or believing , at our current state, we are important enough to be visited. Goddammit this human centrism BS has to stop.
Granted though, Fermi's paradox doesn't exclude the existence of intelligent life in a distant galaxy somewhere else in the universe, where they would be so far away that it is and forever shall be impossible for us to make contact or be in any way aware of their existence. Those aliens might exist. But aliens that are relevant to us, in the sense that we could contact them, detect them, or in some way be aware that they are or once were there, do not exist.
I never really understood all the emphasis people place on Fermi's paradox. Besides the near limitless number of social/cultural factors that could lead one alien race to chose to not contact another. Hell, off the top of my head we have:
Prime Directive style society
Multiple societies that keep each other in check and stop contact to prevent advantage to their opponents
Patient alien races (who are studying us before opening discussion)
Evolutionary pressure favoring quiet races (someone who kills any active alien races they find)
etc.
Even leaving aside all that, the biggest problem I have with Fermi is he assumes anyone knows we're here. We're in the ass end of nowhere galactically, and up until the 1940s you would literally need to be either right on top of us or able to see the surface of the planet to know we existed, and since then we've only managed to leave a foot print some 50 odd light years in radius. On the kind of scale we're talking about, it's like wondering why no one ever pays attention to that one beautiful grain of sand on the beach.
Terry Bisson, called "They're Made Out of Meat."
Let's suppose they decided to hide from us, for whatever reason. That means they somehow manage to perfectly mask all traces of several galaxy-spanning civilizations from us. Absolutely not a single visible or detectable trace, not a piece of trash floating around, not a stray signal, nothing. And they keep round-the-clock patrols to make sure smugglers/thrillseekers/explorers/etc. don't sneak into the "forbidden nature preserve", which is, just like their clean-up effort, perfectly 100% effective. This set of perfect alien powers requires much more of a stretch of the imagination than simply assuming they don't exist.
What if they don't tend to colonize worlds? What if civilization's urge spread only goes so far? Why go over to your neighbours when there's space for everyone and bandwidth aplenty just near your own star?
I can see the case against starfaring life, travel between the stars without cop outs(FTL, Wormholes) is far too rigorous. But rejecting the notion of no other advanced life is pretty narrow minded.
I always found the colonization aspect even more tenuous than the simpler "why has no one contacted us and/or why haven't we seen signs of them" version because of the even higher number of completely arbitrary assumptions and potential pitfalls (no guarantee any given race would need or want to expand, no possible justification for the rate or success of expansion, no reason to assume our solar system in the ass end of the universe would be touched by anything other than complete colonization, small odds we'd find anything but to most glaringly obvious signs of former inhabitants anywhere but earth, etc.).
As to the hiding, it's again based on completely arbitrary assumptions. No one has to clean up anything, since we're in one of the farthest fringes of our galaxy and there's no reason to believe anyone would bother to come here to leave anything for us to find (or that we'd see anything smaller than solar scale artifacts elsewhere) or that any civilization existing on larger than a single solar system scale would bother to, or even effectively could, use any signals we could detect. Hell, even if they did, we've only bothered to look across a fraction of the universe since the 70s. The general point here being that unless aliens were right on top of us in galactic terms there could be near endless societies of any number of types through the universe and we would be none the wiser.
Any given planet has limited resources, creating a natural imperative to go out elsewhere. Moreover, a single planet can be destroyed easily, by an asteroid, solar flair, etc., so there's a second natural imperative to get out of there.
Star travel without cop outs isn't so much rigorous as just plain slow. Going into orbit is easy enough, we're doing it routinely now. Once you're up there you just need will-power and capital to burn (two things we seem to lack) and start building big-ass reinforced spaceships, possibly out of hollowed-out asteroids, with good recycling systems. Then aim at a nearby star and shoot. And wait for decades or centuries. The waiting is the hardest part.
If you want to send out probes first, to explore and start setting up infrastructures for the colony ahead of time, it's even easier. Send out a few factory robots that, once they reach a star, take in raw materials and start shooting out exploration robots and construction robots. While you're at it, make them build a few more factory robots to send out to the next star on the list, and your automated colonisation process is underway towards complete galactic colonisation without any further need for your help, input or ressources. Once again, without FTL, the waiting will be the hardest part.
You're the one making assumptions. I'm only working from your basic assumption - that intelligent life commonly occur all around our galaxy. We can expect a variety of attitudes, but some of them will have an expansionist attitude. And of them, some will come our way, maybe because they run out of place or because it happens to be near their borders or because they were bored one weekend or for some weird alien reason we'll never understand. You're the one stretching it by assuming that life is common but either none of them are expansionists or all those that are also somehow happened to completely miss our region of space.
Well like I said earlier, Fermi's paradox isn't about the entire universe, just the part that affects us, i.e. our galaxy. The Andromeda Galaxy could have a million alien empires and we'd never know.
But if they were in our galaxy, yes they would be right on top of us. You can't spend billion of years fitting endless societies within the limited space of our galaxy and not run out of space.
You're missing the point of argument about the paradox, and since this seems to be a thing of yours, I'll try rephrasing it again and then I'm agreeing to disagree and ignoring this line of conversation.
The Fermi Paradox is sophomorically simplistic. Any attempt at quantifying the likely occurrence of life, yet alone intelligent life, is based predominantly on arbitrary probabilities of certain conditions which gives us anywhere between millions/billions of sentient races in our galaxy's lifetime to perhaps a handful.
Even if we allow for the sake of argument this is right, it still completely ignores the cultural, societal, technological, or biological factors that could reduce the odds of contact or observation by unquantifiable orders of magnitude. One could count off factors that could effect the odds of any one race being directly or indirectly observable by humanity, each of which must be assigned some none-zero probability of stopping humanity from noticing sentient life.
If you take the more "realistic" applications of Fermi's paradox which yield some finite number of likely alien races and apply the probability of their existing without every coming anywhere near us, or coming near but staying unobserved by the general public, or leaving no artifacts or signals we would have found yet, or etc. we a more than plausible case for the existence of sentient life without fulfilling Fermi's paradox.
Add on top of all that the probability of our seeing any signs of life given the minute timeframe of our sentient and technological existence and the piecemeal nature of our observations and a case can be made that at this point our finding any sentient races should be the infinitesimally small likelihood, not the other way around.
Win.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Why should we have found life already? We don't know how rare or abundant it is. To say rule out the existence of life that is potentially billions of years old and millions of light years away is, frankly, stupid.
Conspiracy theories always interest me. Not always because they could be real, but because someone has taken the time to concoct some far out story that some people believe. Stuff like Paul McCartney being killed in a car accident in 1966 and being replaced by a look-a-like. I mean, come on now! But people believe it, and find 'evidence' to support it. Does anyone else have any favourite hoaxes or conspiracy theories?
*Thanks Thanatos!
Then, in order to populate the galaxy, this race would have to continue to increase at a rate high enough to continue expanding across the stars for this entire period of time, and not succumb to ennui, or well, I honestly am not sure how to anticipate the psychology of a mature race across tens of millenia, but sustaining a drive to populate the galaxy seems like a lot of effort to maintain.
Out here in "the ass end of the galaxy" stars have a mean distance to their closest neighbor of about 6 light years.
We've been actively looking for aliens as long as we've been sapient. 130 years ago we were pointing our telescopes skyward with the express intent of finding gentlemen in tophats and ladies with parasols strolling along Martian canals. I could argue that we've been looking for alien life at least as far back as 100 B.C. when Lucretius wrote "We must realize that there are other worlds in other parts of the universe, with races of different men and different animals". Of course our methods weren't nearly as sophisticated. But we'll be saying that about our current search 20 years in the future, so that shouldn't be the entire reason to discount it.
Also Serpo is a joke. Its main problems as a hoax are its lack of boldness and poor fact checking. Everyone's from Zeta Reticuli.