LOL... Now I want to change my forum name to "Plutonius" .... mods ? please ?

We would certainly do a lot of weird and also unreasonable and unethical things, without even noticing.

In the book I mentioned humans never find out what the aliens are or how they look like.
In the end only the sole human embassador realizes all assumptions were wrong but it's not explained in detail to the reader - the reader, like humanity, will never know, and the planet gets destroyed that very moment.

Lem wrote other stories about failed contact, for instance "The Masters Voice" (could also mean "Voice of the Lord") where an alien signal is recorded.

Humans, in a top secret project, develop all kinds of (plausible) theories about it's origin and meaning just to realize they will never figure it out.
In the end it's even unclear if it was a signal at all.

I mean we can't even talk to whales and do weird and cruel things to dolphins etc.

I read His Master's Voice, and Solaris, of course, and probably a few others that I am not remembering. But my absolute favorite was The Futurological Congress, which coincided with my own, um, Experiences in that area.

I would look at it more like he dismisses the idea that it is going to be easy or simple to communicate with or understand truly alien intelligences, or that we can even decently imagine what they are about. In His Master's Voice, the aliens send a message to us, and there are even strange, tangible things derived from what they send, but darned if we can figure out what it means, or how to put it all together. The book ends with no real solution to what the message is or even whether the aliens' intentions are hostile or benign.

It is a shame that the UFO people - who are (superficially) the people most interested in alien intelligence - are so lacking in this kind of broader view of what might be involved. Everything they assume seems to come from some kiddie TV show.

Someone pointed out that in the 1950's, people who claimed to have been abducted by aliens and taken aboard a flying saucer, said they were shown "star maps". These star maps they described as being pull-down maps - like the kind you would have in a 1950's elementary school classroom. In more recent decades, such abductees described "star maps" that were projected on electronic displays.

Apparently the aliens developed interstellar space travel before they developed flat screen TVs.

When I was a kid growing up, this show introduced me to the concept of UFO's. I'm fascinated by aliens and their hidden or transparent agenda, depending on what you believe.

The show is now dated but it's damn good. I bought the DVD's some years ago and after watching the series, I gave the discs to my brother.

I recently re-purchased the Blu-Ray version and can't wait to watch it again!

Aliens, UFO's, Hell yeah!

I dont know this series but I vaguely remember Space 1999

It's an oldie, the show first aired in September 1970 and ran til' 1971.

UFO was an awesome show!

It was produced by Gerry Anderson, who previously had done those various sci-fi shows with the marionettes: Fireball XL-5, Planet Patrol and of course Thunderbirds.

His wife Sylvia designed futuristic costumes for the show. I remember some fairly sophisticated plots, and I think at some point it turns out that (spoiler alert!) the UFOs they are fighting are piloted by captured humans who have been "turned" by the aliens. In other words, that the actual aliens are far more remote and mysterious than they were on a typical science-fiction TV show.

But of course, the very best thing about UFO was Lt Ellis, played by Gabrielle Drake. Fun fact: Gabrielle Drake was the sister of musician Nick Drake ("Pink Moon")

Kool trivia for sure. Yeah, I loved the ladies in the show. At the time they seemed so futuristic with their costumes and the purple hair. I loved the fancy cars in the show as well and the submarine squadron. Very kool indeed. 👍

Good times for sure in those memories. BTW, the series has a very unique filmography style that places a special emphasis on the music and facial features of the actors that I haven't ever seen on any other show. It was excellently executed IMHO.

I recall reading that Sylvia Anderson, the producer's wife had a deliberate idea that the purple wigs were part of the "professional" presentation of the women who worked at the Moonbase. They wore their own normal hair when "off duty". I guess kind of like a tie is for businessmen.

The Earth-based SHADO women did not have the wigs.

I appreciated the attention to detail, like when they had UFOs incoming, they would put on their space suits in case they lost atmosphere.

I wonder if all those years filming marionettes made him really appreciate a real human face that he could zoom in on!

For sure, the show had a very unique character. The purple wigs definitely added a special touch. I'd no idea that Space 1999 was created as a type of continuation of UFO.

I thought this video was kool, it's a summary of what the show is about.

I still love the synth intro to "In Search Of..." with Leonard Nimoy!

Great example of how you can communicate really complex things with music.

In this case it's everything about: cheese, what it is, what it looks and tastes like, what it is made from.

Oh boy, does this piss me off!! IMO, probably the worst, most insidious and damaging concept promoted by the UFOlogist cohort.

We can save ourselves from our own folly, but there is no Big Daddy in The Sky that is coming to save us from our own folly. If the aliens are here and they have been watching us, and they did not intervene to stop the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Khmer Rouge etc etc, then they obviously will be content to just "take notes" as they observe us blowing everything up. It is up to us or nobody.

The sooner we realize this, the better the chance we have of rolling up our sleeves and doing what needs to be done to avoid an unpleasant fate.

The aliens are obviously too busy carving designs in somebody's corn and then running away to stop wars or environmental destruction.

Oh please, they're not doing crop circles, they're sticking probes up Cletus's behind and eating the genitals off cattle...
Obsessed with our private bits those cheeky grey men!

priorities!

I love this man.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=***-ueBWdqQ

Replace those three asterisks with these three letters: F a g (case sensitive)
Gearslutz even censors URLs

Or you can just watch this version (not sure if this version nulls against the one above though):

"the group that looks exactly like we do"

Not sure if he thinks they look exactly like we do because they evolved that way, or because we evolved that way, or just because they are so advanced as to be capable of perfect disguises.

He is right about one thing: If beings capable of advanced stuff like interstellar (or inter-dimensional!) travel wanted to do us harm, we would have been wiped out a long time ago. "Dog Food" as he calls it.

So they are not destroying us. They certainly are not preventing us from killing each other! Every technological invention we have has clear direct antecedents to previous human inventions, so we are not really "skipping" any steps. I mean, if Leonardo Da Vinci made a radio, you would know that 'something was up'.

So they are "among" us, they look, walk and talk exactly like us. They are not harming us, clearly not stopping us from harming ourselves, and not really helping us in any tangible way either. Their impact seems to be totally Neutral. They are "here" but they are not really changing anything.

Why, it's almost as if they don't exist.

There is only one reason for deep space travel which is study of other biologies/cultures.

However there is a problem: all your findings will be outdated if you want to send them back to your place of origin.

You're so close minded... /sarcasm

This was always my challenge to my conspiracy minded friends (I used to be one back in the day if we're telling the truth), if the rubber ever meets the road in any way that changes my life I'm in. Until then, wake me up when the hidden truths are distinguishable from fantasy!

I was reading about space travel and how distance and time have to be separated out when talking about those vast distances. It was bending my noggin' to comprehend it all, but basically it makes no sense to refer to local time when you're stars apart. We all exist in one another's past.

I was watching the Perseverance Mars probe's Entry, Descent and Landing "live" on NASA youtube streaming page. With previous missions, they used to continually remind you that we are watching what happened "11 minutes ago"... IOW, if it crashed, it "already" crashed, we just "don't know it yet".

But it seemed that this time around they were more or less admitting that the only meaningful "now" is when we get the information, since there is no faster way for it to get here. It is strange for us to think of it this way. But all the events being read off as the telemetry is received: parachute deployed, heat shield ejected, are as 'now' as we are going to be able to get.

But then the question is if interstellar travel does make sense at all.

Does it make sense to accumulated knowledge about a distance past?

"These were the Earthlings, 140 000 yaears ago. They ate what they called Mammoths. Our extrapolation says it's unlikely Earthlings still exist. But we may start an other trip in three Million years to see how the Dolphins have changed"

In other words to make use of the information you have to stay there.
But if you stay there, you could as well just stay any place else, in other words, at home.

Maybe there is a flaw in this thought I dont know.

well whatever their travel speed, they can still send messages back home at the speed of light. And 140,000 light years is the very opposite side of the galaxy, and then some. The nearest star is just 4 light years away. They would have access to everything we know and all of recorded history, almost. Just missing 4 years. They would be getting the story of how one of Earth's political leaders was pathetically lying about the size of the crowd at his inauguration. Seems like a long time ago to me, but compared to the mammoths, not so much.

It is also possible that such explorers might encounter beings more advanced than they. Who, instead of hunting mammoths, are hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of years ahead of them. That information might take a 'long time' to arrive back home, but it would still be information about the "future" as far as they are concerned.


One of the proposed 'solutions' to the Fermi paradox is that expanding out into space to other star systems is simply not high on the 'to-do list' of the alien civilizations for reasons we have yet to imagine. It seems to us from reading our sci-fi that the 'future is in the stars'. But perhaps there are other things more interesting in 'inner space' or virtual reality or something we have not even thought of yet.

you have to admit, a breathable atmosphere and food to eat is hard to beat. Planets don't just come with oxygen. It is created by life. The planet influences the life and the life influences the planet. No other planet is ever going to 'fit' us quite as well. Or be full of stuff we can eat.

A little while back, there were people signing up for that bogus "Mars Colony" thing. But if they actually moved to Mars, they would have to spend the rest of their lives "indoors". I am climbing the walls after just a year. And I can go out with just a mask, I don't need a whole space suit.

Even though sometimes it seems like a good idea.

That Mars scheme, it really struck me how seemingly intelligent people thought that that was real option.

Reminded of a grim SciFi short story where pepole where sent up to space to remedy over population when they really where killed instead of going anywhere.

Strictly speaking they may have been genuinely intelligent, and maybe just not closely following what NASA, CNSA, Roscosmos, and Space X (the people actually launching spacecraft) are currently capable of. I think someone could be forgiven for not really having the scientific background to understand that right now - just by weight - we can't even send four corpses in a 1968 VW Beetle to Mars, much less a viable colony.


IMO, it's in street-smarts that the people who got sucked into it were really lacking. It smelled like a con to me from day one. The reality show funding. The "points". It was no more about Mars than Mary Kay is about eyeshadow.


Hey, don't complain! They are remedying overpopulation!




IT'S A COOKBOOK!!!