From The Jerusalem Post: Former Israeli space security chief says aliens exist, humanity not ready

Jaybird

Jaybird is Birdmojo on Xbox Live and Jaybirdmojo on Playstation's network. He's been playing consoles since the Atari 2600 and it was Zork that taught him how to touch-type. If you've got a song for Wednesday, a commercial for Saturday, a recommendation for Tuesday, an essay for Monday, or, heck, just a handful a questions, fire off an email to AskJaybird-at-gmail.com

Related Post Roulette

18 Responses

  1. Jaybird says:

    You have to admit: It would explain a lot.Report

  2. InMD says:

    At least he clarified. Someone might have thought he meant illegal aliens and signed up.Report

  3. Jaybird says:

    Perspective:

    Report

  4. Damon says:

    The hard part I have in believing that is that the aliens contact us. Surely we are not so interesting…just stupid mammals at the bring of immolating ourselves in war. Why waste their time. Wait 10 thousand years and see if we change.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to Damon says:

      Carl Sagan gave a great anecdote about talking to people who claimed to be in contact with aliens. He said that whenever he talked to them, he always gave two sets of questions.

      The first set was sciencey stuff. How did you get here from there? There are time and distance problems but you seem to have managed to get here quickly on a scout-sized ship rather than a colony ship. Could you answer the following questions about how you got here so quickly?

      The answers to these questions were always duds.

      The second set of questions were touchy-feely crap. Should we love each other more? Should we abandon war? Should we abolish nuclear weapons?

      The answers to these questions were always emphatic. Yes! We *SHOULD* love each other more! We should totally get rid of fighting entirely! ABOLISH THE BOMB!

      I imagine that if I talked to someone who claimed to regularly have conversations with one of the various gods out there, I’d want to know some of the stuff that only the various gods would know.

      As it is, I’m stuck learning about baby witches only who, apparently, share “co-consciousness” with various Greek deities and, apparently, Greek deities like going to Starbucks and enjoying iced lattes.

      GET YOUR BUTT OVER TO THE LOCAL CLASSICS DEPARTMENT AND CLEAR UP SOME OF THE OPEN QUESTIONS ABOUT ANCIENT GREEK VERB CONJUGATION!!!!!Report

      • DensityDuck in reply to Jaybird says:

        “Where did the angels come from?”
        “Heaven! God!”
        “What do they look like?”
        “Sort of like people only different.”
        “What do they want?”
        “We should love each other and be kind and share everything and no more wars or pollution…”Report

  5. CJColucci says:

    I’m perfectly willing to believe that intelligent life, possibly more advanced than us, exists somewhere in the universe, but unless what we think we know about the physical laws governing the universe is wrong, they’re too far away to get here. Maybe they could have sent unmanned probes a century or two ago — though what would have alerted them to our presence in those pre-broadcast days? — and they have ended up here in recent decades, which would be remarkable enough, but hardly something that would need to be covered up.Report

  6. North says:

    I’m perfectly willing to believe that alien life exists out there somewhere. The mind blowing enormity of merely our own galaxy plus a simple sense of probability and the obvious fact of our own existence pretty much mandates it.

    But space is so yawningly inconceivably vast and light only goes so fast. The idea of alien life coming here? Not impossible but so enormously improbable as to be virtually the same as impossible. How? Why? How? Why? How? Why?Report

  7. Marchmaine says:

    Pretty sure this is a nonagenarian grudgematch somehow involving Buzz Aldrin.Report

  8. Dark Matter says:

    I see no reason to think Aliens would be so subtle that we don’t know, but so un-subtle that “some” of us would know.

    We’re terrible at keeping secrets. If they’re serious about staying hidden then they’d stay hidden. If they’re not then technology many thousands of years more advanced than ours would be obvious.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to Dark Matter says:

      Are strippers going to weird news websites talking about Staff Sergeants trying to impress them with tales of the lizardmen? If not, I think we can reasonably conclude that we are alone in this corner of the universe.Report

    • KenB in reply to Dark Matter says:

      I thought Douglas Adams already answered this:

      “Teasers are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They cruise around looking for planets that haven’t made interstellar contact yet and buzz them.” “Buzz them?” Arthur began to feel that Ford was enjoying making life difficult for him. “Yeah,” said Ford, “they buzz them. They find some isolated spot with very few people around, then land right by some poor unsuspecting soul whom no one’s ever going to believe and then strut up and down in front of him wearing silly antennas on their head and making beep beep noises.”

      Report

  9. fillyjonk says:

    Just as long as we don’t turn out being like cows (or deer, or sport-fish) to the aliens, though I could imagine that happening. (“It’s a COOKBOOK!”)

    I always figured life on other planets would be like bacteria or similar – pretty simple. I mean, most of the life here is bacteria and fungi. We’re kind of the oddball outlier, and generally evolution doesn’t “need” for life to be intelligent to survive.

    Though I admit the angel idea is intriguing….what if they found an alien, and it was all eyes and wings, and yet could communicate with us, and started out every conversation with “fear not!”Report

    • Michael Cain in reply to fillyjonk says:

      Frederick Pohl’s couple-of-pages short story “Punch” where the aliens have given humans spaceships and weapons and all sorts of other technology. Some humans have taken one of the aliens along on a duck hunt. One of the humans says something like, “We don’t shoot sitting birds.” And the alien responds with, “Another bond between us! Neither do we.”Report