I miss Carl

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Should ask them "Does this tie go with this shirt?". Real aliens will be too busy to be bothered with keeping up on the latest fashion trends, and a correct answer would prove the person to be a hoax.

Of course if they replied "Black goes with everything" it could be tough to tell......
 
OK. I'll play.

"Because we don't like your attitude, Carl. You're arrogant.

"You get a chance to communicate with entities that have a different base of knowledge and experience to share, and you want to play trivial pursuit with them !

"And when we try to impress on you the importance of goodness and decency as a force in the universe with rammifications far beyond anything you can imagine, you use us as fodder to milk cheap laughs from people as shallow as you are.

"Whoever gave you the idea that we're the cosmic equivalent of a candy machine that's obliged to give you the answer you want because you put a question in the slot and pulled the knob for it ?

"Or, for that matter, that people who think the way you do are somehow entitled to information that you haven't, in a sense, earned ?

"Imagining that you deserve something merely because you want it describes the mentality of children and spoiled adults, Carl.

"Sorry for being so blunt with you, but you did ask us."

:alien:
 
I would think answering two of the longest unanswered (well, one is kind of solved post his death) questions in mathematics would be a very good "test" of advanced intelligence. And if one accepts that our immediate solar system could not have produced these aliens, and considering the vast distance to even the closest star to ours (and with recent "evidence" of which local stars have or do not seem to have planets around them, it's potentially several times farther than the closest star to ours), it would be logical to me that these beings would have to be quite advanced (intellectually) to us to figure out how to get here alive and would probably have quite advanced mathematical knowledge to ours. (I must add that there are a few communities not too far from me that I suspect harbor genetic traits that are not of this earth, sans the advanced intelligence aspect!).

Considering that "good" or "moral judgments" have such a wide array of meanings and values among Earths' various cultures, I would assume it would have an even more different meaning to an extraterrestrial (my assumption, of curse) that it would be the more difficult question to answer than a mathematical one. Therefore being a rather poor "test" for verifying advanced intelligence.

Your first answer did ring well with me, however. I attended a talk a few months back by three philosophy professors from my school. It was about the conflict and competition of teaching evolution and/or creationism in US history with an emphasis on Arkansas. They mentioned that a few decades back when teaching evolution was illegal in Arkansas, there was a growing voice to allow it by some newspapers and citizens, and of course resistance by others. They had numerous public debates and for one of them, Carl Sagan came to Little Rock to "debate" several church leaders. It was held at a large Baptist Church (to which Sagan protested as he was assured it would be at a public auditorium) and many of the more conservative churches in the region organized bus loads of their congregation to attend. It was, to say the least, a highly hostile crowd for an East Coast, big city, pointy-headed intellectual, non-Christian (Jewish), astrophysics professor, outsider to walk into.

The presenter gave several accounts from both news paper reporters and politicians attending and some (those that disagreed with his perspective) referred to Sagan as "arrogant" and accused him of having a condescending attitude. Crowds with signs protested outside, and many were inside as well, often interrupting him with shouts, hymns, and name calling. He was rather hurriedly rushed back to airport and hustled out of town (local sheriff said it was for his own protection), but a few years later they revoked the law and today each school district has the choice to teach one, or the other, or both, or none at all.

I apologize for drifting a bit off topic, but it did remind me of how Sagan was received by my state.

Natch
 
I like Sagan, and I didn't mean for my comment to come across as churlish or demeaning, but I do have to wonder how there could even be a set set of questions worth asking a being so advanced beyond our own knowledge that they could travel light years unscathed, only to be me tby a troll at the bridge with a math riddle. But, it could be any riddle, couldn't it be? Here's a Rubiks cube, ya got 30 seconds. What defensive scheme would the Giants have to run to beat back the Colts offense? Does God exist, and does this tie go with this shirt?

If approached by an alien that just rolled up on me from light years away I think the only fitting question at that exact moment would be "How the f*!& did you just do that?" :eek:
 
The Cosmos series still has one of the easiest to understand illustrations of evolution.

From where I stand the statistical probability of there being life off this planet is very high, even inside our own solar system seems pretty decent given liquid water on some of Jupiter's moons and Saturn's moons. Obviously not intelligent life, bacterial and the like probable, might even be some smaller multi-cellular life forms. Outside of our solar system there is definitely unintelligent large life forms, especially with recent discoveries of planets around neighboring stars and it looking like stars having planets seems quite normal. Even if .1% of stars had planets and .1% of those had earth like planets and .1% of those gave rise to life who knows how many of those would have enough time to evolve into intelligent creatures. But that still leaves billions of earth like planets in the universe. The difficulty with finding intelligent life is a logistical nightmare. First, we've only had the capability to detect radio signals for 70 years. Which means in order for us to detect a extraterrestrial signal from a distant star they would have to be that many years a head of us in the evolutionary chain for each light year away they are. Which who knows if they've blown themselves to bits already and their signals could have already gone past us or haven't made it to us. Since we're here we can safely say that life does arise. We live on an relatively ordinary planet, on an outer arm of an ordinary galaxy with billions of stars in a universe filled billions of galaxies each with billions of stars.

With the likelihood of life existing out there being high the likelihood of them ever visiting here would be very low. Being able to travel the distance required in the life span of the creature would be difficult since you'd need to travel close to the speed of light, PLUS we've only been sending transmissions for 70 years so they probably wouldn't even know we're here and would probably have better targets to head to over us, and if they were smart enough to get here making contact with the village idiots of the world in the middle of no where would probably not be the choice method of contact.
 
Man if he was still alive I would love to see him and Richard Dawkins on stage just talking. My brain would probably explode inside my skull 10 minutes in from the information overload, but it'd be so worth it. Richard Dawkins and Niel deGrase Tyson did a tour like that and they'd just sit on stage and talk about whatever popped in their mind.

One entire event. What happens when you put an evolutionary biologist and a astrophysicists on stage together? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RExQFZzHXQ

Of course the video on youtube of Dawkins telling the story about the guy from science magazine saying "Science is interesting, if you don't think so you can f@#$ off." His british accent makes it that more hilarious.

 
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