IIRC, the Puppeteers are only pacifist and cowardly because they have convinced themselves that their species has no afterlife. They actually did an experiment to scientifically prove the existence of their immortal souls, and took the results at face value when it came up negative. This disbelief in an afterlife means that they consider death to be the worst possible fate to inflict onto anybody.
As long as they don't hand us a Cookbook during that 'first contact' and don't land in Russia or the Middle East, I would imagine that it would go fairly by-the-book...
Cause we all know that there's a policy already written up by the US Military, as to how to handle these types of events.
And it probably cost a whole lot more than a $700 dollar hammer to create.
STO Member since February 2009. I Was A Trekkie Before It Was Cool ... Sept. 8th, 1966 ... Not To Mention Before Most Folks Around Here Were Born! Forever a STO Veteran-Minion
As long as they don't hand us a Cookbook during that 'first contact' and don't land in Russia or the Middle East, I would imagine that it would go fairly by-the-book...
Cause we all know that there's a policy already written up by the US Military, as to how to handle these types of events.
And it probably cost a whole lot more than a $700 dollar hammer to create.
Per Rod Serling:
"The book they gave us - "To Serve Man"...It's a COOKBOOK!"
Formerly known as Armsman from June 2008 to June 20, 2012 PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
If the aliens have the technology to temporarily disable all earth weapons until they can officially announce themselves and their intentions, then possibly. Essentially: "As you can see, we have the ability to disable all of your weapons. If we wanted to destroy you, we clearly could do so right now. But we're about to lift the disabling effect now, proving our intentions are not hostile."
You know, militaries are not manned exclusively by xenophobes. They tend to be on the alert against one another because we're already familiar with humans, and know what we're likely to do. But if the first reaction to something strange to us were always "kill it", there wouldn't have been so many "war brides" during WWII, Korea, or Vietnam, would there? (One of my favorite aunts is Korean; when my uncle Fred first brought her to this country, she was looking forward to the advanced technology of the washboard so she could stop washing clothes by slapping them against the rocks down by the river. Didn't take her long to catch on to washing machines, though... )
Let's be honest, if aliens were to land anywhere in the Western world at least, an army would be needed - to keep reporters, paparazzi, and the merely insanely curious at bay until the visitors could get their bearings. Y'all have the rifles pointed in the wrong direction.
I'd say peaceful contact is likely. If the aliens are of a temperament that permits peaceful contact, I think we'll manage it. Think about our space program: the Apollo 11 plaque left on the moon says "We came in peace for all mankind." The pioneer probe has this pictogram:
It says basically "This is us, this is where we are, we are friendly, come meet us." Our space program is designed to be peaceful.
Humanity has put a lot of thought into how to make contact with alien life. My dad has a book which is basically a huge transcript of a bunch of scientists sitting down to speculate on what alien life might be life, and how to communicate with it. If an alien race is advanced and organized enough to reach out and make contact, they've probably gone through a similar process. We want to make peaceful contact, so unless something goes seriously wrong (or the aliens happen to make contact with ISIS et. al.), I think peace is within our grasp.
Humanity has put a lot of thought into how to make contact with alien life. My dad has a book which is basically a huge transcript of a bunch of scientists sitting down to speculate on what alien life might be life, and how to communicate with it. If an alien race is advanced and organized enough to reach out and make contact, they've probably gone through a similar process. We want to make peaceful contact, so unless something goes seriously wrong (or the aliens happen to make contact with ISIS et. al.), I think peace is within our grasp.
Reminds me - there's a committee within the US government, paid a small stipend and meeting about once a year, to discuss such things as contingency plans for cometary impact, alien invasion, a "gray goo" scenario, that sort of thing. It's composed primarily of SF writers, with a smattering of various scientific disciplines for when said disciplines aren't covered (for instance, one former member was Jerry Pournelle, so mechanical engineering was covered; maths were well within the range of Robert Heinlein; etc). It's not even classified, just obscure - and if aliens ever did arrive, all the members of that group would be on the fastest available transport to DC. (Or, as discussed in Footfall, whatever alternate location was selected after the aliens pasted DC.)
i often wonder if its even possible for humans to have a peaceful first contact with an alien race if they ever came to earth to say hi.the human race still has the huge problem of fearing what is different or unknown to us. personally this is what i think would happen.lets say aliens came to visit and if it was peaceful we would learn more about the universe and finally travel the stars.but i think we would try to kill and study them in stead and cause a war with them. am i wrong for thinking this?should i have more faith in are race then that? what do you guys think would happen?
"Drive me closer so I can hit them with my sword!"
If the aliens have the technology to temporarily disable all earth weapons until they can officially announce themselves and their intentions, then possibly. Essentially: "As you can see, we have the ability to disable all of your weapons. If we wanted to destroy you, we clearly could do so right now. But we're about to lift the disabling effect now, proving our intentions are not hostile."
Many military personal have come foreword, discussing exactly that, that they witnessed UFO's essentially 'turning off' nuclear missile silos since the 1960's. To me, that's a sign of peaceful force. And it also, as I see it, taking a dangerous object from a bratty kid.
You know, militaries are not manned exclusively by xenophobes. They tend to be on the alert against one another because we're already familiar with humans, and know what we're likely to do. But if the first reaction to something strange to us were always "kill it", there wouldn't have been so many "war brides" during WWII, Korea, or Vietnam, would there? (One of my favorite aunts is Korean; when my uncle Fred first brought her to this country, she was looking forward to the advanced technology of the washboard so she could stop washing clothes by slapping them against the rocks down by the river. Didn't take her long to catch on to washing machines, though... )
Let's be honest, if aliens were to land anywhere in the Western world at least, an army would be needed - to keep reporters, paparazzi, and the merely insanely curious at bay until the visitors could get their bearings. Y'all have the rifles pointed in the wrong direction.
Considering Eisenhower's "Beware the military industrial complex" speech in 1961, neither military nor government, I feel is worthy of doing that. It will HAVE to be common people.....not authority figures who have failed us, and have caused us so much misery in the form of war, killing, and so on, just for the benefit of an elite few for the past 70+ years. Let's face it, with government approval at an all time LOW, government has shown us they are unworthy to be the ones regarding an ET contact.
I'm all for common people doing it, I've have some nice results doing the CE5, Close Encounters of the 5th kind (where we initiate contact and invite them here), as I said, I'll be happy to explain it to anyone who's interested in it. Only equipment you'll requite is an open mind.
I think smokebailey has it right concerning people in power. Human beings in power want to remain in power. They will happily send other people half a world away to die if it will keep them in power. There are people like that all over the world. They play whack-a-mole with each other and only get antsy about exerting power when confronted by someone of comparable power. They usually motivate people to protect their quality of life by extolling the differences of people they want dead.
Our world leaders would sell one another's people into space meat processing factories to get a leg up on one another. Aliens could arrive on earth with the noblest intentions and we would blow it all on inability to deal fairly with one another without taking their foibles into account. Not to worry. Without your knowledge I acted on our behalf as the ambassador of humanity years ago. I asked nothing of humanity for my services as a negotiator. Carry on as you please. I told them to save themselves the hassle and come back in a century or less after we solved the problem of first contact with humans ourselves.
I think smokebailey has it right concerning people in power. Human beings in power want to remain in power. They will happily send other people half a world away to die if it will keep them in power. There are people like that all over the world. They play whack-a-mole with each other and only get antsy about exerting power when confronted by someone of comparable power. They usually motivate people to protect their quality of life by extolling the differences of people they want dead.
Our world leaders would sell one another's people into space meat processing factories to get a leg up on one another. Aliens could arrive on earth with the noblest intentions and we would blow it all on inability to deal fairly with one another without taking their foibles into account. Not to worry. Without your knowledge I acted on our behalf as the ambassador of humanity years ago. I asked nothing of humanity for my services as a negotiator. Carry on as you please. I told them to save themselves the hassle and come back in a century or less after we solved the problem of first contact with humans ourselves.
Tell them to come back and pick some of us up. I want off this rock populated by stupid apes.
You outta see how many weird objects appear in the sky when I do a CE5, both alone and with others (it's better with friends because the energy resulting with the company of others increases exponentially) and they moves as extreme speeds, making right angles, stopping on a dime, winking out of the sky to appear on the other side of the sky in an instant and vanishing. And able to make our electronic devices do things they were not designed to do, etc. Makes all the stuff you see on Trek look like nothing.
Also, remember, it's not humanity that's the problem, humanity's leaders ARE the problem. And we need a contact asap, we'll be able to finally get access to technology we SHOULD have had 70+ years ago (Tesla's a prime example, if he was not right, why did JP Morgan pull the plug on the project, not to mention that other prat, Thomas Edison trying to make Tesla look bad by using his electrical current to torture animals, trying to make it look dangerous?) all that stuff we saw on the Jetsons, Back to the Future 2, and even Trek would have been a reality since probably the 50's had science been freed of that one unwanted neighbor that never leaves it alone.....and that neighbor is POLITICS. You can blame guys like the Rothschilds and Rockefeller inbred clans for a big chunk of the reason the world's so messed up right now.
i often wonder if its even possible for humans to have a peaceful first contact with an alien race if they ever came to earth to say hi.
Depends on the aliens and which nation they tried to visit first. There's really so many factors that it's impossible to say one way or another. Certainly some people would form crazy cults around both the coming utopia and the coming "end of the world alien invasion." Both would be exaggerated extremes as any species capable of interstellar travel would be capable of finding a number of other planets like Earth, many of which would be uninhabited and probably completely without life, but fertile for biosphere-engineering. This would depend on how the aliens got here... If they were stellar nomads somehow very slowly moving from star system to star system in a self contained ship - the risk to humans might be much greater than a species that somehow found a way to vastly exceed the light speed barrier. It also depends on whether or not they have access to technological capacities far beyond our current understanding of science or only partially beyond or even not beyond our understanding at all - in the case of some species that had invented a sublight speed interstellar supership capable of supporting generations for centuries (or, who knows? Maybe they would have a vastly different lifespan and traveling between stars would be a long trip but not near most of their lives (unlikely, but I suppose possible)).
It comes down to what the aliens could possibly want from us how the interaction would go down. There are so many factors it's impossible to say.
"At the end of the movie, I really care about what happens to the characters … but I’m pretty much missing Gene Roddenberry in J.J.’s interpretation … and at the end of the day, that’s just not OK for me." - Levar Burton
"[OrciTrek] doesn’t have the story heart that the best of my Star Trek had," - William Shatner
"It doesn’t have that element that made … Gene Roddenberry‘s ‘Star Trek,’ what it was." - George Takei
"The Gene Roddenberry years, when stories might play with questions of science, ideals or philosophy, have been replaced by stories reduced to loud and colorful action." - Roger Ebert
I've long wondered where this idea came from that aliens would necessarily be universal pacifists who find our history abhorrent. One doesn't reach the top of one's planetary food chain by calm negotiation, after all. (Even in fiction, the only "pacifist" species I recall that became their top species were the herbivorous Pierson's puppeteers in Niven's Known Space stories, and even that was only because after fighting off their predators, they developed a species-wide aversion to the very violence that enabled them to survive for so long.)
This program, though reasonably normal at times, seems to have a strong affinity to classes belonging to the Cat 2.0 program. Questerius 2.7 will break down on occasion, resulting in garbage and nonsense messages whenever it occurs. Usually a hard reboot or pulling the plug solves the problem when that happens.
Two things any extraterrestrial species must have to achieve interstellar travel:
1. Reason and Logic - there is absolutely zero way an intelligent species could remove itself from a planetary confinement without these things. The only exception would be a species that somehow did not evolve on planets but within space itself - something that is almost astronomically absurd as gravity is the fundamental force that brings matter together enabling it to combine itself into new forms eventually, against astronomical odds, forming into self replicating molecules and then life.
2. Curiosity - without a desire or force to push one to discovery one shall never look up in the stars and wonder what is out there. Pure efficiency and expansionism isn't enough to make Humans on Earth of interest for extermination, or communication, as is almost certainly too insignificant a bit of matter to make a long term difference to some sort of extant interstellar species - there is so much matter in the galaxy and Earth is just a spec of dust in comparison. The only exception that expansionism could be a motive to be hostile to humans is the chance that alien life doesn't have supra-lightspeed travel in which case nearby living species adapted to a similar ecology as Earth might, in fact, be a grave threat as limitations in travel may present something like Earth as an only viable planet for colonization and expansion.
No matter what any intelligent life must be possessed of these things and, therefore, would never - under nearly any conceivable circumstances - be vastly different from ourselves.
This is one of the very bright observations by the writers of Star Trek in an era of very fantastic sci-fi with alien invasions and murderous aliens. They even have Kirk announce this premise in Star Trek (@ 0:35 in the video below).
As such, we have little reason to believe an alien species would be any less intellectually curious about us than we would be of it.
"At the end of the movie, I really care about what happens to the characters … but I’m pretty much missing Gene Roddenberry in J.J.’s interpretation … and at the end of the day, that’s just not OK for me." - Levar Burton
"[OrciTrek] doesn’t have the story heart that the best of my Star Trek had," - William Shatner
"It doesn’t have that element that made … Gene Roddenberry‘s ‘Star Trek,’ what it was." - George Takei
"The Gene Roddenberry years, when stories might play with questions of science, ideals or philosophy, have been replaced by stories reduced to loud and colorful action." - Roger Ebert
It's the irony of the science fiction story like all the monster and god stories that chase our imaginations through all of our collective cultures. You can dress it up in robes, give it wolf fangs, tentacles, or make it a brain in a jug. What makes it monstrous is that is us.
I never saw that before. It was perfect and easy to laugh along the alien because it was so easy to understand what he was laughing for. Thank you for sharing this.
Two things any extraterrestrial species must have to achieve interstellar travel:
1. Reason and Logic - there is absolutely zero way an intelligent species could remove itself from a planetary confinement without these things. The only exception would be a species that somehow did not evolve on planets but within space itself - something that is almost astronomically absurd as gravity is the fundamental force that brings matter together enabling it to combine itself into new forms eventually, against astronomical odds, forming into self replicating molecules and then life.
2. Curiosity - without a desire or force to push one to discovery one shall never look up in the stars and wonder what is out there. Pure efficiency and expansionism isn't enough to make Humans on Earth of interest for extermination, or communication, as is almost certainly too insignificant a bit of matter to make a long term difference to some sort of extant interstellar species - there is so much matter in the galaxy and Earth is just a spec of dust in comparison. The only exception that expansionism could be a motive to be hostile to humans is the chance that alien life doesn't have supra-lightspeed travel in which case nearby living species adapted to a similar ecology as Earth might, in fact, be a grave threat as limitations in travel may present something like Earth as an only viable planet for colonization and expansion.
No matter what any intelligent life must be possessed of these things and, therefore, would never - under nearly any conceivable circumstances - be vastly different from ourselves.
This is one of the very bright observations by the writers of Star Trek in an era of very fantastic sci-fi with alien invasions and murderous aliens. They even have Kirk announce this premise in Star Trek (@ 0:35 in the video below).
As such, we have little reason to believe an alien species would be any less intellectually curious about us than we would be of it.
true they would need the things on your list however saying they would not be much different isn't true at all. if there brain is even just 1% more evolved then us we would be like chimps to them. one of there toddlers would look like a Albert Einstein to us
Two things any extraterrestrial species must have to achieve interstellar travel:
1. Reason and Logic - there is absolutely zero way an intelligent species could remove itself from a planetary confinement without these things. The only exception would be a species that somehow did not evolve on planets but within space itself - something that is almost astronomically absurd as gravity is the fundamental force that brings matter together enabling it to combine itself into new forms eventually, against astronomical odds, forming into self replicating molecules and then life.
2. Curiosity - without a desire or force to push one to discovery one shall never look up in the stars and wonder what is out there. Pure efficiency and expansionism isn't enough to make Humans on Earth of interest for extermination, or communication, as is almost certainly too insignificant a bit of matter to make a long term difference to some sort of extant interstellar species - there is so much matter in the galaxy and Earth is just a spec of dust in comparison. The only exception that expansionism could be a motive to be hostile to humans is the chance that alien life doesn't have supra-lightspeed travel in which case nearby living species adapted to a similar ecology as Earth might, in fact, be a grave threat as limitations in travel may present something like Earth as an only viable planet for colonization and expansion.
No matter what any intelligent life must be possessed of these things and, therefore, would never - under nearly any conceivable circumstances - be vastly different from ourselves.
This is one of the very bright observations by the writers of Star Trek in an era of very fantastic sci-fi with alien invasions and murderous aliens. They even have Kirk announce this premise in Star Trek (@ 0:35 in the video below).
As such, we have little reason to believe an alien species would be any less intellectually curious about us than we would be of it.
true they would need the things on your list however saying they would not be much different isn't true at all. if there brain is even just 1% more evolved then us we would be like chimps to them. one of there toddlers would look like a Albert Einstein to us
sorry i ment to edit the above post i am a moron lol
if there brain is even just 1% more evolved then us we would be like chimps to them. one of there toddlers would look like a Albert Einstein to us
What environmental conditions do you propose that would evolve such a overcapacious mind? Genetic engineering or thousands of generations of artificial selection is the only thing I could think. Such an engineered species may be able to think faster through some means or have evolved special parts of the brain to, for example, speed up math calculations (almost wholly impossible to imagine for being selected for through any natural process because math is necessary for advanced technological civilization to exist, but not necessary for the survival of an independent lifeform much less for every individual in an entire species of lifeforms (as in not every individual in any colony needs to understand advanced concepts to utilize them - as we well know)).
Barring some sort of life form that exists outside our Euclidean space - or exists with one foot in it somehow - like a lifeform that somehow evolved in some sort of 4th dimension intercepting our perceived 3d manifold- it's wholly doubtful that such life - emerging from the same galaxy we emerge from, bound to the same physical laws of energy conservation, entropy, gravity, strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism, etc - would find our lack of understanding of super-light speed flight as an indication of vast inferiority any more than we believe people from the 18th century were actually biologically less "evolved" than today's people because they didn't have access to air travel. It's simply inaccurate to assess biology in this way and any technologically advanced extraterrestrial species would be capable of recognizing this.
This is why there's no "batshit insane" space species in Star Trek. The closest thing we have to "batshit insane" species are actually computers running on autopilot - like the Borg or V'ger or the Doomsday Machine.
Post edited by penemue#7777 on
"At the end of the movie, I really care about what happens to the characters … but I’m pretty much missing Gene Roddenberry in J.J.’s interpretation … and at the end of the day, that’s just not OK for me." - Levar Burton
"[OrciTrek] doesn’t have the story heart that the best of my Star Trek had," - William Shatner
"It doesn’t have that element that made … Gene Roddenberry‘s ‘Star Trek,’ what it was." - George Takei
"The Gene Roddenberry years, when stories might play with questions of science, ideals or philosophy, have been replaced by stories reduced to loud and colorful action." - Roger Ebert
if there brain is even just 1% more evolved then us we would be like chimps to them. one of there toddlers would look like a Albert Einstein to us
What environmental conditions do you propose that would evolve such a overcapacious mind? Genetic engineering or thousands of generations of artificial selection is the only thing I could think. Such an engineered species may be able to think faster through some means or have evolved special parts of the brain to, for example, speed up math calculations (almost wholly impossible to imagine for being selected for through any natural process because math is necessary for advanced technological civilization to exist, but not necessary for the survival of an independent lifeform much less an entire species of lifeforms (as in not every individual in any colony needs to understand advanced concepts to utilize them - as we well know)).
Barring some sort of life form that exists outside our Euclidean space - or exists with one foot in it somehow - like a lifeform that somehow evolved in some sort of 4th dimension intercepting our perceived 3d manifold- it's wholly doubtful that such life - emerging from the same galaxy we emerge from, bound to the same physical laws of energy conservation, entropy, gravity, strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism, etc - would find our lack of understanding of super-light speed flight as an indication of vast inferiority any more than we believe people from the 18th century were actually biologically less "evolved" than today's people because they didn't have access to air travel. It's simply inaccurate to assess biology in this way and any technologically advanced extraterrestrial species would be capable of recognizing this.
This is why there's no "batshit insane" space species in Star Trek. The closest thing we have to "batshit insane" species are actually computers running on autopilot - like the Borg or V'ger or the Doomsday Machine.
the answer is evolution.human brains were different when were learning how to make fire.who is to say there race wasn't around millions of years before us? i am sure if are spices makes it another million years are own race would see us has chimps.
if there brain is even just 1% more evolved then us we would be like chimps to them. one of there toddlers would look like a Albert Einstein to us
What environmental conditions do you propose that would evolve such a overcapacious mind? Genetic engineering or thousands of generations of artificial selection is the only thing I could think. Such an engineered species may be able to think faster through some means or have evolved special parts of the brain to, for example, speed up math calculations (almost wholly impossible to imagine for being selected for through any natural process because math is necessary for advanced technological civilization to exist, but not necessary for the survival of an independent lifeform much less an entire species of lifeforms (as in not every individual in any colony needs to understand advanced concepts to utilize them - as we well know)).
Barring some sort of life form that exists outside our Euclidean space - or exists with one foot in it somehow - like a lifeform that somehow evolved in some sort of 4th dimension intercepting our perceived 3d manifold- it's wholly doubtful that such life - emerging from the same galaxy we emerge from, bound to the same physical laws of energy conservation, entropy, gravity, strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism, etc - would find our lack of understanding of super-light speed flight as an indication of vast inferiority any more than we believe people from the 18th century were actually biologically less "evolved" than today's people because they didn't have access to air travel. It's simply inaccurate to assess biology in this way and any technologically advanced extraterrestrial species would be capable of recognizing this.
This is why there's no "batshit insane" space species in Star Trek. The closest thing we have to "batshit insane" species are actually computers running on autopilot - like the Borg or V'ger or the Doomsday Machine.
the answer is evolution.human brains were different when were learning how to make fire.who is to say there race wasn't around millions of years before us? i am sure if are species makes it a another few million years are own race would see us has chimps.
i am sure if are spices makes it another million years are own race would see us has chimps.
Except it's not merely that chimps lack the knowledge to use advanced tools - they lack language which makes them fundamentally different in a way that is absolutely biologically significant. Language is the single most important factor in the development of the human brain to its present capacity. Language is abstraction - it requires comprehension of abstract concepts - it requires advanced processing of abstraction - it requires pattern recognition and the ability to reproduce it and it functions as a natural selection force that has pushed human mental evolution in a positive direction. Fail to communicate properly or well leads to low mating potential and lower survival potential as social connections are important for human survival in pre and post-agrarian human civilization. Language determines how well you integrate into a religion or tribal belief system and culture. Language determines how well you function as a member of the group. This is an objective biological capacity that makes humans and chimps absolutely empirically different. We assess chimps objectively on their biological capacity.
Any species you are imagining as "super intelligent" would also assess things objectively or they wouldn't be flying in a space ship because they lacked objective reasoning. Therefore they would not regard a human as a "chimp" as they would certainly recognize the capacity for advanced abstraction and objective and deductive reasoning in humans which are objective differences between chimps and humans.
Regardless, most intelligent humans don't regard chimps as "just stupid animals." Some people, such as yourself, anthropomorphize them probably more than they deserve - others - being not particularly pro-social people or not particularly intelligent - fail to recognize the objective qualities that make them different from, say, a howler monkey.
We regard chimps as less than us because we cannot communicate with them via abstraction because they objectively lack the capacity to understand it due to lacking language faculties of the mind. I fail to grasp what particular quality you can conceive would be regarded as an objective standard that would cause an intelligent species to regard us as in someway "less than a sentient" species.
I for one am absolutely certain we are not the only planet with life in the expanse of the universe. But I assume no other life in the universe will be bound by different laws than we are and therefore, developing abstract objective reasoning, could not reach different empirically correct conclusions from those we reach - just as sure as both people in antiquity Japan and the historical Native Americans both knew fish come from the sea despite not even comprehending each other's existence or continent.
I guarantee you we would think vastly different of chimps if they started even plowing a field, much less launching geostationary satellites - even if we had never talked to one before.
Post edited by penemue#7777 on
"At the end of the movie, I really care about what happens to the characters … but I’m pretty much missing Gene Roddenberry in J.J.’s interpretation … and at the end of the day, that’s just not OK for me." - Levar Burton
"[OrciTrek] doesn’t have the story heart that the best of my Star Trek had," - William Shatner
"It doesn’t have that element that made … Gene Roddenberry‘s ‘Star Trek,’ what it was." - George Takei
"The Gene Roddenberry years, when stories might play with questions of science, ideals or philosophy, have been replaced by stories reduced to loud and colorful action." - Roger Ebert
if there brain is even just 1% more evolved then us we would be like chimps to them. one of there toddlers would look like a Albert Einstein to us
What environmental conditions do you propose that would evolve such a overcapacious mind? Genetic engineering or thousands of generations of artificial selection is the only thing I could think. Such an engineered species may be able to think faster through some means or have evolved special parts of the brain to, for example, speed up math calculations (almost wholly impossible to imagine for being selected for through any natural process because math is necessary for advanced technological civilization to exist, but not necessary for the survival of an independent lifeform much less an entire species of lifeforms (as in not every individual in any colony needs to understand advanced concepts to utilize them - as we well know)).
Barring some sort of life form that exists outside our Euclidean space - or exists with one foot in it somehow - like a lifeform that somehow evolved in some sort of 4th dimension intercepting our perceived 3d manifold- it's wholly doubtful that such life - emerging from the same galaxy we emerge from, bound to the same physical laws of energy conservation, entropy, gravity, strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism, etc - would find our lack of understanding of super-light speed flight as an indication of vast inferiority any more than we believe people from the 18th century were actually biologically less "evolved" than today's people because they didn't have access to air travel. It's simply inaccurate to assess biology in this way and any technologically advanced extraterrestrial species would be capable of recognizing this.
This is why there's no "batshit insane" space species in Star Trek. The closest thing we have to "batshit insane" species are actually computers running on autopilot - like the Borg or V'ger or the Doomsday Machine.
the answer is evolution.human brains were different when were learning how to make fire.who is to say there race wasn't around millions of years before us? i am sure if are species makes it another million years are own race would see us has chimps.
I'd say peaceful contact is likely. If the aliens are of a temperament that permits peaceful contact, I think we'll manage it. Think about our space program: the Apollo 11 plaque left on the moon says "We came in peace for all mankind." The pioneer probe has this pictogram:
It says basically "This is us, this is where we are, we are friendly, come meet us." Our space program is designed to be peaceful.
Humanity has put a lot of thought into how to make contact with alien life. My dad has a book which is basically a huge transcript of a bunch of scientists sitting down to speculate on what alien life might be life, and how to communicate with it. If an alien race is advanced and organized enough to reach out and make contact, they've probably gone through a similar process. We want to make peaceful contact, so unless something goes seriously wrong (or the aliens happen to make contact with ISIS et. al.), I think peace is within our grasp.
that is fantastic thank you so much for showing this learn something new everyday
It comes down to what the aliens could possibly want from us how the interaction would go down. There are so many factors it's impossible to say.
From my own studies over the last 25 years, I come to the conclusion they don't want anything for themselves, but to help us out, so we don't blow ourselves up, as well as the planet. The notion that there are ET races far, far more humane than any human could dream about is not far fetched whatsoever. And personally, all the stories you hear in the Hollywood movies, and certain sections of the Ufo community who think ET's wanna eat/TRIBBLE/kill/enslave us is nothing more than propaganda (which I call "fear TRIBBLE") made to make us fear and hate anything different from ourselves.....pretty much exchange prejudice, homophobia and mistrust in exchange for interstellar bigotry.....which is no improvement.
Many apparent ET visitations and contact prior to the 1960's, be it the 50's or in the ancient past (many ancient cultures, such as the Dogon of Africa and the Native Americans speak of visits from Star People who came from space, they specifically said the star people were from space. The Mayans still alive today say that their ancestors did not so much as disappear by some disaster or famine....no, they said that their ancestors 'returned home'...which makes me feel they were picked up by ET's in the remote past, if not being ET in origin themselves, and taken elsewhere) were rather peaceful and beneficial.
And the main reason why government and military are so adamant to keep it secret, via denial, lying, etc (And when I say 'government', I don't mean those clowns pointing fingers at each other come election time....though the Clintons DID have quite a bit of ET/Ufo research/learning when they went to the Rockefeller home in '93.....the 'government' I speak of is the one Eisenhower warned us of in 1961, "Beware the military industrial complex" for they would become too powerful...and Eisenhower is the last president to have full clearance, especially regarding ET issues....since than, many other levels of clearance sadly exists above the president, who's on a need to know basis....both Carter and Clinton tried, and both were flat out denied, and Carter, from what I gathered was threatened by a member of one of the intelligence communities....and that guy was Bush Sr.....and watch the Fallen interview with Clinton and Obama....both of them got REAL uneasy and nervous when asked about UFO's....their body language screams it) is not for protection religion or mass panic (we won't panic, that's an excuse to lie and cover it all up, like 'national security' being the excuse for the big brother policy here in the US since 2001 at least), but for ENERGY.
When the cat is out of the bag regarding ET life, which I feel is going to happen very soon, one thing the smart folks out here will ask eventually is "What makes their spaceships go?" Sure as hell not unleaded. For once the truth of ET life comes out, it will mean the end of oil, the end of the petro dollar (which is akin to 'protection money' that the Mafia and other gangs did) and the end of the macro economic empire as we know it...which is a GOOD THING. And if you don't believe me....check out the Stan Meyers case.....he invented a car, back in the late 1980's and early 1990's, that ran on WATER. He was all over the news and was later found dead, and many other alternative energy guys are found 'mysteriously' dead...and I refuse to believe everyone of them were THAT depressed. And with government approval is what, like 11% or even less now, and me having never believed a damned thing they said for as long as I can remember....and a media that focuses on pointless things....like the Kardasians, or Monica's dress, Bill Cosby, etc (Hell, in 1999, we learned of who really killed Martin Luthor King, yet the media was all about Monica's stained dress and Bill's BJ's at that same time).....and with all the wars over oil and resources, I WELCOME ET contact.
I think smokebailey has it right concerning people in power. Human beings in power want to remain in power. They will happily send other people half a world away to die if it will keep them in power. There are people like that all over the world. They play whack-a-mole with each other and only get antsy about exerting power when confronted by someone of comparable power. They usually motivate people to protect their quality of life by extolling the differences of people they want dead.
Our world leaders would sell one another's people into space meat processing factories to get a leg up on one another. Aliens could arrive on earth with the noblest intentions and we would blow it all on inability to deal fairly with one another without taking their foibles into account. Not to worry. Without your knowledge I acted on our behalf as the ambassador of humanity years ago. I asked nothing of humanity for my services as a negotiator. Carry on as you please. I told them to save themselves the hassle and come back in a century or less after we solved the problem of first contact with humans ourselves.
Maybe, or maybe not. It's all a matter of what they see as the best way to power. They could see the aliens as a threat to their power and want them gone or subjugated. Why? Well, it all depends on what the aliens do when meeting people. If the aliens act benevolent, it might erode the powerbase by causing the people to listen to the aliens and not the leaders. Or conversely, if the aliens are overtly aggressive, the aliens might be attacking their power base directly.
I think smokebailey has it right concerning people in power. Human beings in power want to remain in power. They will happily send other people half a world away to die if it will keep them in power. There are people like that all over the world. They play whack-a-mole with each other and only get antsy about exerting power when confronted by someone of comparable power. They usually motivate people to protect their quality of life by extolling the differences of people they want dead.
Our world leaders would sell one another's people into space meat processing factories to get a leg up on one another. Aliens could arrive on earth with the noblest intentions and we would blow it all on inability to deal fairly with one another without taking their foibles into account. Not to worry. Without your knowledge I acted on our behalf as the ambassador of humanity years ago. I asked nothing of humanity for my services as a negotiator. Carry on as you please. I told them to save themselves the hassle and come back in a century or less after we solved the problem of first contact with humans ourselves.
Maybe, or maybe not. It's all a matter of what they see as the best way to power. They could see the aliens as a threat to their power and want them gone or subjugated. Why? Well, it all depends on what the aliens do when meeting people. If the aliens act benevolent, it might erode the powerbase by causing the people to listen to the aliens and not the leaders. Or conversely, if the aliens are overtly aggressive, the aliens might be attacking their power base directly.
I say either way is gonna be good, it's not like our current world is any good....all ruled by greed for material and political gain by a few elite, powermad conspirators....Rockefeller and Rothschild being a few of the more well known ones.
Either way, things MUST change is man, and the planet is to get any better.
From my own studies over the last 25 years, I come to the conclusion they don't want anything for themselves, but to help us out, so we don't blow ourselves up, as well as the planet. The notion that there are ET races far, far more humane than any human could dream about is not far fetched whatsoever.
It has nothing to do with "humaneness." It has everything to do with reason. Any species intelligent enough to be interstellar in nature is likely not going to find Earth the "last best hope" for their species and therefore ever come to the conclusion that they need to wipe us out or enslave us or something to use Earth for their own purposes. I have listed earlier a few conditions by which an alien species might find earth some sort of an attractive target for hostility. The fact is, Earth is tiny compared to most planets. It is not made up of atoms that are not readily available on other lifeless planets. There's nothing special about the sun compared to other stars. There's very little special about Earth other than the fact that it has life on it already - and - therefore the "curious interest" it would generate among an interstellar species would be in the life on the planet and not the planet itself. There's no reason to believe an interstellar species wouldn't already have significant resources at hand to produce its own food and preserve its species and therefore there's no reason to believe they would find some immediate necessity to be hostile towards Earth.
I also said, however, that any species in some way not confined by the 3d manifold we perceive and exist in wouldn't necessarily be bound by these assertions as they would fundamentally observe a completely different empirical reality than we do. (I'm really not enough of a physicist to know much about the current hypotheses concerning the fundamental nature of the universe and what constituents make up spacetime itself - but I know enough to know that photons don't "experience" time or distance so not everything about the universe is as we perceive it)
Such a species could, in fact, mistake or regard us as insects in some way, I suppose, if it somehow observed us and existed outside the fundamental Newtonian and relativistic laws we understand and observe. I.E. if it somehow perceived all of space-time completely differently and existed in it in a different way than the ordinary matter we observe existing in it. A "Q" is suggested to be such a being, as are "The Prophets."
However, I'm fully convinced there are other 3d Euclidean sentient species somewhere in this wide expanse of nothingness and galaxies - and it is to these kinds of "probabilisticly extant" beings I am referring - other lifeforms bound to the same 3d manifold as us and made up of the same atoms as we are and composed and operating from molecules as we understand them.
Many apparent ET visitations and contact prior to the 1960's, be it the 50's or in the ancient past (many ancient cultures, such as the Dogon of Africa and the Native Americans speak of visits from Star People who came from space, they specifically said the star people were from space
I find this wholly dubious. But if governments were covering up aliens it would be because they are as Star Trek suggests humans would probably be in space: rational, generally peaceful but also protective of their own, and skeptical of interference with underdeveloped cultures of lifeforms - otherwise any hostile aliens who somehow had interest in us simply wouldn't have reason to regard our governments as any sort of authority preventing them from doing whatever the hell they want to the planet that attracted them here in the first place and the governments would have no reason or ability to hide their presence.
However, if the government were covering up aliens. NASA's budget would be much much larger than it is as the government would consider "catching up" with the aliens to be of paramount importance.
Post edited by penemue#7777 on
"At the end of the movie, I really care about what happens to the characters … but I’m pretty much missing Gene Roddenberry in J.J.’s interpretation … and at the end of the day, that’s just not OK for me." - Levar Burton
"[OrciTrek] doesn’t have the story heart that the best of my Star Trek had," - William Shatner
"It doesn’t have that element that made … Gene Roddenberry‘s ‘Star Trek,’ what it was." - George Takei
"The Gene Roddenberry years, when stories might play with questions of science, ideals or philosophy, have been replaced by stories reduced to loud and colorful action." - Roger Ebert
Comments
Cause we all know that there's a policy already written up by the US Military, as to how to handle these types of events.
And it probably cost a whole lot more than a $700 dollar hammer to create.
I Was A Trekkie Before It Was Cool ... Sept. 8th, 1966 ... Not To Mention Before Most Folks Around Here Were Born!
Forever a STO Veteran-Minion
Per Rod Serling:
"The book they gave us - "To Serve Man"...It's a COOKBOOK!"
PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
... and be like... "Oh... Hell no!"
The-Grand-Nagus
Join Date: Sep 2008
Let's be honest, if aliens were to land anywhere in the Western world at least, an army would be needed - to keep reporters, paparazzi, and the merely insanely curious at bay until the visitors could get their bearings. Y'all have the rifles pointed in the wrong direction.
It says basically "This is us, this is where we are, we are friendly, come meet us." Our space program is designed to be peaceful.
Humanity has put a lot of thought into how to make contact with alien life. My dad has a book which is basically a huge transcript of a bunch of scientists sitting down to speculate on what alien life might be life, and how to communicate with it. If an alien race is advanced and organized enough to reach out and make contact, they've probably gone through a similar process. We want to make peaceful contact, so unless something goes seriously wrong (or the aliens happen to make contact with ISIS et. al.), I think peace is within our grasp.
My character Tsin'xing
"Drive me closer so I can hit them with my sword!"
Many military personal have come foreword, discussing exactly that, that they witnessed UFO's essentially 'turning off' nuclear missile silos since the 1960's. To me, that's a sign of peaceful force. And it also, as I see it, taking a dangerous object from a bratty kid.
Considering Eisenhower's "Beware the military industrial complex" speech in 1961, neither military nor government, I feel is worthy of doing that. It will HAVE to be common people.....not authority figures who have failed us, and have caused us so much misery in the form of war, killing, and so on, just for the benefit of an elite few for the past 70+ years. Let's face it, with government approval at an all time LOW, government has shown us they are unworthy to be the ones regarding an ET contact.
I'm all for common people doing it, I've have some nice results doing the CE5, Close Encounters of the 5th kind (where we initiate contact and invite them here), as I said, I'll be happy to explain it to anyone who's interested in it. Only equipment you'll requite is an open mind.
Our world leaders would sell one another's people into space meat processing factories to get a leg up on one another. Aliens could arrive on earth with the noblest intentions and we would blow it all on inability to deal fairly with one another without taking their foibles into account. Not to worry. Without your knowledge I acted on our behalf as the ambassador of humanity years ago. I asked nothing of humanity for my services as a negotiator. Carry on as you please. I told them to save themselves the hassle and come back in a century or less after we solved the problem of first contact with humans ourselves.
Tell them to come back and pick some of us up. I want off this rock populated by stupid apes.
You outta see how many weird objects appear in the sky when I do a CE5, both alone and with others (it's better with friends because the energy resulting with the company of others increases exponentially) and they moves as extreme speeds, making right angles, stopping on a dime, winking out of the sky to appear on the other side of the sky in an instant and vanishing. And able to make our electronic devices do things they were not designed to do, etc. Makes all the stuff you see on Trek look like nothing.
Also, remember, it's not humanity that's the problem, humanity's leaders ARE the problem. And we need a contact asap, we'll be able to finally get access to technology we SHOULD have had 70+ years ago (Tesla's a prime example, if he was not right, why did JP Morgan pull the plug on the project, not to mention that other prat, Thomas Edison trying to make Tesla look bad by using his electrical current to torture animals, trying to make it look dangerous?) all that stuff we saw on the Jetsons, Back to the Future 2, and even Trek would have been a reality since probably the 50's had science been freed of that one unwanted neighbor that never leaves it alone.....and that neighbor is POLITICS. You can blame guys like the Rothschilds and Rockefeller inbred clans for a big chunk of the reason the world's so messed up right now.
And people ask me why I want off this rock.....
Depends on the aliens and which nation they tried to visit first. There's really so many factors that it's impossible to say one way or another. Certainly some people would form crazy cults around both the coming utopia and the coming "end of the world alien invasion." Both would be exaggerated extremes as any species capable of interstellar travel would be capable of finding a number of other planets like Earth, many of which would be uninhabited and probably completely without life, but fertile for biosphere-engineering. This would depend on how the aliens got here... If they were stellar nomads somehow very slowly moving from star system to star system in a self contained ship - the risk to humans might be much greater than a species that somehow found a way to vastly exceed the light speed barrier. It also depends on whether or not they have access to technological capacities far beyond our current understanding of science or only partially beyond or even not beyond our understanding at all - in the case of some species that had invented a sublight speed interstellar supership capable of supporting generations for centuries (or, who knows? Maybe they would have a vastly different lifespan and traveling between stars would be a long trip but not near most of their lives (unlikely, but I suppose possible)).
It comes down to what the aliens could possibly want from us how the interaction would go down. There are so many factors it's impossible to say.
"At the end of the movie, I really care about what happens to the characters … but I’m pretty much missing Gene Roddenberry in J.J.’s interpretation … and at the end of the day, that’s just not OK for me." - Levar Burton
"[OrciTrek] doesn’t have the story heart that the best of my Star Trek had," - William Shatner
"It doesn’t have that element that made … Gene Roddenberry‘s ‘Star Trek,’ what it was." - George Takei
"The Gene Roddenberry years, when stories might play with questions of science, ideals or philosophy, have been replaced by stories reduced to loud and colorful action." - Roger Ebert
Reminds me of that episode from Twilight Zone "Humanity has a small talent for war"
1. Reason and Logic - there is absolutely zero way an intelligent species could remove itself from a planetary confinement without these things. The only exception would be a species that somehow did not evolve on planets but within space itself - something that is almost astronomically absurd as gravity is the fundamental force that brings matter together enabling it to combine itself into new forms eventually, against astronomical odds, forming into self replicating molecules and then life.
2. Curiosity - without a desire or force to push one to discovery one shall never look up in the stars and wonder what is out there. Pure efficiency and expansionism isn't enough to make Humans on Earth of interest for extermination, or communication, as is almost certainly too insignificant a bit of matter to make a long term difference to some sort of extant interstellar species - there is so much matter in the galaxy and Earth is just a spec of dust in comparison. The only exception that expansionism could be a motive to be hostile to humans is the chance that alien life doesn't have supra-lightspeed travel in which case nearby living species adapted to a similar ecology as Earth might, in fact, be a grave threat as limitations in travel may present something like Earth as an only viable planet for colonization and expansion.
No matter what any intelligent life must be possessed of these things and, therefore, would never - under nearly any conceivable circumstances - be vastly different from ourselves.
This is one of the very bright observations by the writers of Star Trek in an era of very fantastic sci-fi with alien invasions and murderous aliens. They even have Kirk announce this premise in Star Trek (@ 0:35 in the video below).
As such, we have little reason to believe an alien species would be any less intellectually curious about us than we would be of it.
"At the end of the movie, I really care about what happens to the characters … but I’m pretty much missing Gene Roddenberry in J.J.’s interpretation … and at the end of the day, that’s just not OK for me." - Levar Burton
"[OrciTrek] doesn’t have the story heart that the best of my Star Trek had," - William Shatner
"It doesn’t have that element that made … Gene Roddenberry‘s ‘Star Trek,’ what it was." - George Takei
"The Gene Roddenberry years, when stories might play with questions of science, ideals or philosophy, have been replaced by stories reduced to loud and colorful action." - Roger Ebert
I never saw that before. It was perfect and easy to laugh along the alien because it was so easy to understand what he was laughing for. Thank you for sharing this.
i just watched that i am at a loss of words wow lol
What environmental conditions do you propose that would evolve such a overcapacious mind? Genetic engineering or thousands of generations of artificial selection is the only thing I could think. Such an engineered species may be able to think faster through some means or have evolved special parts of the brain to, for example, speed up math calculations (almost wholly impossible to imagine for being selected for through any natural process because math is necessary for advanced technological civilization to exist, but not necessary for the survival of an independent lifeform much less for every individual in an entire species of lifeforms (as in not every individual in any colony needs to understand advanced concepts to utilize them - as we well know)).
Barring some sort of life form that exists outside our Euclidean space - or exists with one foot in it somehow - like a lifeform that somehow evolved in some sort of 4th dimension intercepting our perceived 3d manifold- it's wholly doubtful that such life - emerging from the same galaxy we emerge from, bound to the same physical laws of energy conservation, entropy, gravity, strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism, etc - would find our lack of understanding of super-light speed flight as an indication of vast inferiority any more than we believe people from the 18th century were actually biologically less "evolved" than today's people because they didn't have access to air travel. It's simply inaccurate to assess biology in this way and any technologically advanced extraterrestrial species would be capable of recognizing this.
This is why there's no "batshit insane" space species in Star Trek. The closest thing we have to "batshit insane" species are actually computers running on autopilot - like the Borg or V'ger or the Doomsday Machine.
"At the end of the movie, I really care about what happens to the characters … but I’m pretty much missing Gene Roddenberry in J.J.’s interpretation … and at the end of the day, that’s just not OK for me." - Levar Burton
"[OrciTrek] doesn’t have the story heart that the best of my Star Trek had," - William Shatner
"It doesn’t have that element that made … Gene Roddenberry‘s ‘Star Trek,’ what it was." - George Takei
"The Gene Roddenberry years, when stories might play with questions of science, ideals or philosophy, have been replaced by stories reduced to loud and colorful action." - Roger Ebert
Except it's not merely that chimps lack the knowledge to use advanced tools - they lack language which makes them fundamentally different in a way that is absolutely biologically significant. Language is the single most important factor in the development of the human brain to its present capacity. Language is abstraction - it requires comprehension of abstract concepts - it requires advanced processing of abstraction - it requires pattern recognition and the ability to reproduce it and it functions as a natural selection force that has pushed human mental evolution in a positive direction. Fail to communicate properly or well leads to low mating potential and lower survival potential as social connections are important for human survival in pre and post-agrarian human civilization. Language determines how well you integrate into a religion or tribal belief system and culture. Language determines how well you function as a member of the group. This is an objective biological capacity that makes humans and chimps absolutely empirically different. We assess chimps objectively on their biological capacity.
Any species you are imagining as "super intelligent" would also assess things objectively or they wouldn't be flying in a space ship because they lacked objective reasoning. Therefore they would not regard a human as a "chimp" as they would certainly recognize the capacity for advanced abstraction and objective and deductive reasoning in humans which are objective differences between chimps and humans.
Regardless, most intelligent humans don't regard chimps as "just stupid animals." Some people, such as yourself, anthropomorphize them probably more than they deserve - others - being not particularly pro-social people or not particularly intelligent - fail to recognize the objective qualities that make them different from, say, a howler monkey.
We regard chimps as less than us because we cannot communicate with them via abstraction because they objectively lack the capacity to understand it due to lacking language faculties of the mind. I fail to grasp what particular quality you can conceive would be regarded as an objective standard that would cause an intelligent species to regard us as in someway "less than a sentient" species.
I for one am absolutely certain we are not the only planet with life in the expanse of the universe. But I assume no other life in the universe will be bound by different laws than we are and therefore, developing abstract objective reasoning, could not reach different empirically correct conclusions from those we reach - just as sure as both people in antiquity Japan and the historical Native Americans both knew fish come from the sea despite not even comprehending each other's existence or continent.
I guarantee you we would think vastly different of chimps if they started even plowing a field, much less launching geostationary satellites - even if we had never talked to one before.
"At the end of the movie, I really care about what happens to the characters … but I’m pretty much missing Gene Roddenberry in J.J.’s interpretation … and at the end of the day, that’s just not OK for me." - Levar Burton
"[OrciTrek] doesn’t have the story heart that the best of my Star Trek had," - William Shatner
"It doesn’t have that element that made … Gene Roddenberry‘s ‘Star Trek,’ what it was." - George Takei
"The Gene Roddenberry years, when stories might play with questions of science, ideals or philosophy, have been replaced by stories reduced to loud and colorful action." - Roger Ebert
My character Tsin'xing
I say either way is gonna be good, it's not like our current world is any good....all ruled by greed for material and political gain by a few elite, powermad conspirators....Rockefeller and Rothschild being a few of the more well known ones.
Either way, things MUST change is man, and the planet is to get any better.
It has nothing to do with "humaneness." It has everything to do with reason. Any species intelligent enough to be interstellar in nature is likely not going to find Earth the "last best hope" for their species and therefore ever come to the conclusion that they need to wipe us out or enslave us or something to use Earth for their own purposes. I have listed earlier a few conditions by which an alien species might find earth some sort of an attractive target for hostility. The fact is, Earth is tiny compared to most planets. It is not made up of atoms that are not readily available on other lifeless planets. There's nothing special about the sun compared to other stars. There's very little special about Earth other than the fact that it has life on it already - and - therefore the "curious interest" it would generate among an interstellar species would be in the life on the planet and not the planet itself. There's no reason to believe an interstellar species wouldn't already have significant resources at hand to produce its own food and preserve its species and therefore there's no reason to believe they would find some immediate necessity to be hostile towards Earth.
I also said, however, that any species in some way not confined by the 3d manifold we perceive and exist in wouldn't necessarily be bound by these assertions as they would fundamentally observe a completely different empirical reality than we do. (I'm really not enough of a physicist to know much about the current hypotheses concerning the fundamental nature of the universe and what constituents make up spacetime itself - but I know enough to know that photons don't "experience" time or distance so not everything about the universe is as we perceive it)
Such a species could, in fact, mistake or regard us as insects in some way, I suppose, if it somehow observed us and existed outside the fundamental Newtonian and relativistic laws we understand and observe. I.E. if it somehow perceived all of space-time completely differently and existed in it in a different way than the ordinary matter we observe existing in it. A "Q" is suggested to be such a being, as are "The Prophets."
However, I'm fully convinced there are other 3d Euclidean sentient species somewhere in this wide expanse of nothingness and galaxies - and it is to these kinds of "probabilisticly extant" beings I am referring - other lifeforms bound to the same 3d manifold as us and made up of the same atoms as we are and composed and operating from molecules as we understand them.
I find this wholly dubious. But if governments were covering up aliens it would be because they are as Star Trek suggests humans would probably be in space: rational, generally peaceful but also protective of their own, and skeptical of interference with underdeveloped cultures of lifeforms - otherwise any hostile aliens who somehow had interest in us simply wouldn't have reason to regard our governments as any sort of authority preventing them from doing whatever the hell they want to the planet that attracted them here in the first place and the governments would have no reason or ability to hide their presence.
However, if the government were covering up aliens. NASA's budget would be much much larger than it is as the government would consider "catching up" with the aliens to be of paramount importance.
"At the end of the movie, I really care about what happens to the characters … but I’m pretty much missing Gene Roddenberry in J.J.’s interpretation … and at the end of the day, that’s just not OK for me." - Levar Burton
"[OrciTrek] doesn’t have the story heart that the best of my Star Trek had," - William Shatner
"It doesn’t have that element that made … Gene Roddenberry‘s ‘Star Trek,’ what it was." - George Takei
"The Gene Roddenberry years, when stories might play with questions of science, ideals or philosophy, have been replaced by stories reduced to loud and colorful action." - Roger Ebert