close encounters?

[CDPP]

Was that a hitch-hikers guide to the galaxy reference or am I being paranoid?

My grandpa actually worked at Area 51, but he never said what happened there. My dad would ask him when he was a kid, but he said that grandpa just got really silent and just basically said that nothing unusually really happened.

Haha caught in less than 10 minutes, indeed it is
Brotowel! ▯

Woah, what'd your granddad work as? Aeronautical engineering or something?

[Alycs]

Woo, brotowel []

And actually, I don't know exactly what he did. He seemed to dabble in "bad-assery" in general; like he fought in World War II, was a policeman afterwards, founded the city bomb squad, gave lessons at universities on how to detect and disarm bombs, worked at Area 51... but I don't know exactly what he did. All my grandparents but my grandma on my moms side died before I was born...

I could also probably ask my uncles about close encounters. Most have been with the military, and one of my older cousins works at the Pentagon (like he would say anything, though) xD

[Sonarch]

I thought this was going to be an aliens thread.

Hahaha I was thinking the same thing.


I don't think I've ever had situations where i'm doing something pony and try to cover it up, unless you count me not letting people look through my ipod, but there have been plenty of instances where friends at school bring up the topic of bronies and proceed to mock the idea of them, and it doesn't bother me personally, but it's generally a little awkward. It makes me wonder if they would behave differently if they knew I was one...

[Sonarch]

I mean, it's like, I don't go around bringing it up, but if asked I wouldn't lie or try to avoid the question, you know?

[Alycs]

Nope, my friends know I'm a brony and they still mock the show and the ideas; I occasionally join them.
Seriously, we're teenage/college-aged/older and we're watching a show about multicolored female talking horses. Its ridiculous; why pretend any otherwise

[Sonarch]

Nope, my friends know I'm a brony and they still mock the show and the ideas; I occasionally join them.
Seriously, we're teenage/college-aged/older and we're watching a show about multicolored female talking horses. Its ridiculous; why pretend any otherwise

oh, indeed

[Bronies Are Cool]

would it be less ridiculous if the exact same things happened, but the characters were not animals, not colorful, and did not look like they were for little girls. (would we even still watch something like that?)

[CDPP]

Woo, brotowel []

And actually, I don't know exactly what he did. He seemed to dabble in "bad-assery" in general; like he fought in World War II, was a policeman afterwards, founded the city bomb squad, gave lessons at universities on how to detect and disarm bombs, worked at Area 51...
Most have been with the military, and one of my older cousins works at the Pentagon (like he would say anything, though) xD

Apparently the badass gene runs in your family, are you secretly a CIA operative working under the guise of a hacker prodigy selling information to the FSB? What if all the pictures on the spam thread actually contain steganographically hidden images of classified documents ready to be decoded by the Kremlin?

[colortwelve]

closet bronies

Can you not.

[Alycs]

Woo, brotowel []

And actually, I don't know exactly what he did. He seemed to dabble in "bad-assery" in general; like he fought in World War II, was a policeman afterwards, founded the city bomb squad, gave lessons at universities on how to detect and disarm bombs, worked at Area 51...
Most have been with the military, and one of my older cousins works at the Pentagon (like he would say anything, though) xD

Apparently the badass gene runs in your family, are you secretly a CIA operative working under the guise of a hacker prodigy selling information to the FSB? What if all the pictures on the spam thread actually contain steganographically hidden images of classified documents ready to be decoded by the Kremlin?

No, actually I'm a third degree black belt in Tang So Do and a first degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do; International Science Fellow, and all my spam is 100% pure spam with only trace amounts of subliminal messages.

Also, one of my friends (actually more of a fellow I know) that previously hated MLP was finally peer pressured to watch it and liked it and he told me last night... so that happened...

[Nine Volt]

(or the base under DIA, the not-so-secret-to-me city under DIA. (its real))

That's not real; it's a conspiracy theory. There is no 'city' under Denver International Airport.

[Lying Pink]

would it be less ridiculous if the exact same things happened, but the characters were not animals, not colorful, and did not look like they were for little girls. (would we even still watch something like that?)

Yes, a little. But only a little.

[Bronies Are Cool]

(or the base under DIA, the not-so-secret-to-me city under DIA. (its real))

That's not real; it's a conspiracy theory. There is no 'city' under Denver International Airport.

you are correct, but only because the city is more of a country. just sayin. And there is a subway from there to Cheyenne Mountain and Area 51. It takes less than an hour to travel from one location to its destination because they travel at super sonic speeds, double sonic-rainboom speeds.

This is really where they've been hiding dem UFO's and stuff.

[Nine Volt]

Riiiiiiiiiight.

No. Conspiracy theories are not true, you are believing lies.

Do you also believe 9/11 was an inside job, or that the moon landing was faked? Or that the Illuminati are secretly running the world?

[Bronies Are Cool]

Riiiiiiiiiight.

No. Conspiracy theories are not true, you are believing lies.

Do you also believe 9/11 was an inside job or that the moon landing was faked?

nah, i was kidding. I doubt that 9/11 was an inside job, i doubt the landing was faked.

As far as aliens form outer space goes, I also highly doubt that they exist. Very, very highly doubt it, but I won't say that they certainly don't exist because we really can't say for absolute certain.

Ufo sightings, i think that sometimes they are real, but that does not make them alien. it just means that it is simply unidentified. I think that the "real ufo sightings" are just made on earth by humans, but they either will not tell the general public that it is some top secret government air craft, or it is made by people who really want to freak other people out and never say that it was them or anything. I do not think that most of the sightings are real or anything.

I don't think about this a lot, but I've thought about it before enough to have my own opinion on it. :3

Also, if you find a cool ufo sighting video, post it. id love to watch and analyze and come up with my own theory on what it really is. (i sound like some anti-alien nerd right now. lol)

[Nine Volt]

Ok, good. I was worried about your sanity for a while :3

Aliens most certainly do exist, somewhere out there in the vast expanse of the universe. No doubt about that in the minds of almost all modern scientists. However, they most certainly have not visited us, given the simple limitations on travel speed. The speed of light cannot be exceeded, partially due to a thing called time dilation; essentially, as an object approaches the speed of light (186,000 meters per second? I think it's meters, might actually be miles. Either way it's what scientists call "really fucking fast") then time will literally slow down for that object. Theoretically, time should stop at the speed of light, and by extension would reverse after exceeding it (although we obviously have no way of proving it). Thus, given the massively vast distances throughout our galaxy alone, there is simply no way aliens have visited us in the past. Any aliens advanced enough to hop across the galaxy would have to be sufficiently advanced to be gods compared to us. So unfortunately the most advanced aliens we could possibly see (in our lifetimes, at least) are possible extremophile bacteria living under the frozen surface of Jupiter's moon, Europa, or other extremophile lifeforms existing elsewhere.

[Bronies Are Cool]

i think that if aliens exist, they were be extremely small bacteria-like organisms. I mostly would deny the existence of humanoid aliens

[Nine Volt]

Humanoid, maybe, maybe not. Human aliens? Definitely not. But there is a 100% chance that intelligent aliens exist.

The Drake Equation:
Nc = N* fp ne fl fi fc fL

The equation represents the following:
N* represents the number of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy

Question: How many stars are in the Milky Way Galaxy?
Answer: Current estimates are 200 to 400 billion.

fp is the fraction of stars that have planets around them

Question: What percentage of stars have planetary systems?
Answer: Current estimates range from 20% to 50%.

ne number of planets per star that are capable of sustaining life

Question: For each star that has a planetary system, how many planets are capable of sustaining life?
Answer: estimates range from 1 to 2.

fl is the fraction of planets in ne where life evolves

Question: On what percentage of the planets that are capable of sustaining life does life actually evolve?
Answer: Current estimates are 100% (where life can evolve it will) .

fi is the fraction of fl where intelligent life evolves

Question: On the planets where life does evolve, what percentage evolves intelligent life?
Answer: Estimates are 50% .

fc is the fraction of fi that communicate

Question: What percentage of intelligent life forms have the means and the desire to communicate?
Answer: 10% to 20%

fL is fraction of the planet's life during which the communicating civilizations may survive

Question: For each civilization that does communicate, for what
fraction of the planet's life does the civilization survive?
Answer: This is the most vague question. Using the Earth as our model, the expected lifetime
of our Solar System is approximately 10 billion years. Already communication by radio has
been for less than 100 years. How long can our civilization survive without destroy ourselves
as some predict or will we overcome our problems and survive indefinately? If doomsday came
today this figure would be 1/100,000,000th. If we survive for 10,000 more years this figure
would be 1/1,000,000th.

When all of these variables are multiplied, we get:

Nc, the number of communicating civilizations in the galaxy.

So, a conservative estimate is:
200 billion stars
20% of them have planetary systems
1 planet per system capable of supporting life
50% of capable planets develop life (likely to be more, but this is conservative)
20% has the capability to communicate (again, probably higher)
10,000 years that life exists

So, we have a very, very conservative estimate of 800 communicating, intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy alone. And there are about 50 billion galaxies.

13500 civilizations is a less conservative estimate. It's probably somewhere between the two. And thus, if we use the Milky Way as a basic template galaxy, that's 675,000,000,000,000 civilizations (optimistically). However, to my understanding the Milky Way is a fairly large galaxy, so that's probably a few trillion off.

[Alycs]

However, remember the drake equation is in fact a example of an Appeal to Probability. Saying that a thing could be true makes it true is a common fallacy.

None the less, its an interesting equation, if highly basic.

[Nine Volt]

However, remember the drake equation is in fact a example of an Appeal to Probability. Saying that a thing could be true makes it true is a common fallacy.

None the less, its an interesting equation, if highly basic.

Sheer probability; we're 99.9999% likely to not be the only intelligent life in the universe. I'm not saying it's true because it cold be true; it's highly likely though.

[Alycs]

Yes, sheer numbers make it highly probable; but ever meeting them is highly improbable. If we assume (against fallacy) that the every time the probability of a second equally intelligent existing raises about 50%, that would leave about 10,000,000 civilizations.

10,000,000 civilizations in 100,000,000,000,000 light years. Even if they did exist we would certainly never hear from them, and ever meeting them would be a near miracle.

EDIT: But then again, its the miracles that make life exciting

[Nine Volt]

Exactly, I said that in an earlier post. Any civilization advanced enough to travel billions of light years might as well be deities compared to us.

[FLAOFEI]

Or we could just say that the universe has an infinite size, an average for number of planets per volume, giving us an infinite number of planets.

Then we can state we only ever know about a finite number of planets, that may or may not have life.

If we then divide the finite number of planets we will ever observe by the infinite number of planets in the universe and we should get how many planets out of the total number of planets in the universe. We divide the finite number by the infinite number and get 0.

So to conclude. We will always know 0 about the universe.

[Bronies Are Cool]

Or we could just say that the universe has an infinite size, an average for number of planets per volume, giving us an infinite number of planets.

Then we can state we only ever know about a finite number of planets, that may or may not have life.

If we then divide the finite number of planets we will ever observe by the infinite number of planets in the universe and we should get how many planets out of the total number of planets in the universe. We divide the finite number by the infinite number and get 0.

So to conclude. We will always know 0 about the universe.

is it possible to know 2 about the universe?

[Nine Volt]

Or we could just say that the universe has an infinite size, an average for number of planets per volume, giving us an infinite number of planets.

Then we can state we only ever know about a finite number of planets, that may or may not have life.

If we then divide the finite number of planets we will ever observe by the infinite number of planets in the universe and we should get how many planets out of the total number of planets in the universe. We divide the finite number by the infinite number and get 0.

So to conclude. We will always know 0 about the universe.

The universe is not infinitely large. It is expanding and certainly almost incomprehensibly massive, but not infinitely so. The observable part of the universe is about 93 billion light years across and is about 13.8 billion years old, so there is a finite amount of planets, stars, black holes, matter/antimatter, etc. Although it is likely that we are not capable of observing the full extent of the universe, there is no truly infinite physical space.