"‘We’re not ready to meet aliens’: Humans are too...." Topic

…. stupid and religious to cope with extra-terrestrial life, claims expert

"Finding extraterrestrial signals has been dreamed about for decades.

But a researcher from the University of Cádiz in Spain says we shouldn't be looking – because we're not ready to meet aliens.

Gabriel De la Torre revealed to MailOnline how his survey of students showed the general level of ignorance and influence of religion would leave us shocked if we made first contact…."
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Amicalement
Armand

I'd like to see what he believes in a place that I have more convinced in. Dr Gabriel De la Torre I believe has the experience to have a good judgement of this sort of thing so i'm Going to see if I can find more.

x42

This is an opinion piece disguised as science.

As long as we are talking about things that have not happened yet, it will always be an opinion of what may be the result.

OK, out of the six results on the front page two would be questionable (though I doubt that many people believe in angels AND demons, I think the question contained both so that his sample looked even more 'stupid'). The prof may be suffering from a wee bit of academic arrogance. Just a wee bit.

Glup!….

Amicalement
Armand

…modern aviation? How?

@nvdoyle: That one is purely on The Editor, Armand posted this in Utter Drivel.

Unless we lucked out with some highly ethical aliens (I'm talking like Alistair Young's Eldrae, who consider removing a sophont's capability to choose to be the most horrible crime possible!), I'd expect our contact to be about as good for us as the colonization of the Americas or Africa.

There are two main options here, the first is that we pick up a signal, they are an immense distance away from us and our reply would take so long it's going to an issue for the great-grand-kids several times removed and then we wait for a reply and it might take a million years to just exchange formalities at a speed that would bore ents.

Option two they come knocking on the door. In which case no matter how you put it, if they have bad intentions they'd wipe us out. Even basic self-replicating drones could be swarming the Oort Cloud and outer planets multiplying until there are a few quadrillion out there and they simply accelerate towards our planet and take us out through a series of kinetic impacts, think nukes coming out of a gunship full of miniguns, millions every second, hitting every square meter of our planet with a force comparable to a hydrogen bomb.

They could keep this up for centuries until our planet is completely dead.

The prof may be suffering from a wee bit of academic arrogance. Just a wee bit.

Yes … but he's a college professor so he knows more than most of us !

But I wouldn't be too surprised that those around the world with fundamentalist/"fanatical" religious beliefs would see the aliens as demons, etc., sent from Hell, Satan[or whatever religion's equivalent]is trying to trick us, etc. Fortunately I think those types are in the minority overall.

I'm sure the aliens will want to help us live better lives by giving up our backward belief systems and letting them use the parts of the planet that we're not even using, like the oceans, ice caps, rainforests, cave systems, abandoned mines, high mountains, deserts, and jungles.

They'll compensate us fairly for that useless stuff, and will even set up places reserved just for us to live in.

It will just be coincidental that a disease for which they have antibodies will prove fatal to large numbers of us.

Approaching a solar system stealthily is almost impossible, the kinds of power used for getting up to close to lightspeed (and then slowing back down again) is something you can see 20+ years before arrival.

If it was a starwisp, we'd know almost as soon as the probe launched, since we'd be seeing monochromatic light from the laser launcher for several years.

If it's something bigger like an antimatter torch, well, that's a really distinctive gamma ray emission that we will see as soon as they turnover to slow down.

The prof may be suffering from a wee bit of academic arrogance. Just a wee bit.

It's rather breath taking in my opinion.

Judging the intelligence of a group of people is a very… subjective thing. I think this "research" and its "findings" tell us more about the researcher than the researched.

I am certain that humans would be acceptable to aliens if we were dipped in paprika.

The aliens may be staying away due to people like Professor de la Torre…

The only aliens in the universe are attempting to cross the border in TX as we speak.