Fred99:

 

fussy, fragile, need too much pampering.

 

You've met my wife then.

networkn:

 

Well, they could be assessing us for suitability for a number of things, like as pets, food, or other things.

 

They just want to root around in our anuses. There is no accounting for extraterrestrial perversion.

1101: just because we dont know what it is, why must it ALLWAYS be aliens ?

Rikkitic:

 

They just want to root around in our anuses. There is no accounting for extraterrestrial perversion.

 

Uranus maybe - not mine.

SJB:

 

Fred99:

 

fussy, fragile, need too much pampering.

 

 

You've met my wife then.

 

Yep - and I'm getting fat - 'cause she gives me a biscuit every time I drop by.

gzt:

1101: just because we dont know what it is, why must it ALLWAYS be aliens ?

Umm.. because we don't believe in fairies anymore.

But we're not much smarter than rats

Fred99:

 

Yep - and I'm getting fat - 'cause she gives me a biscuit every time I drop by.

 

That's funny. The others get muffins.

SJB:

 

Fred99:

 

Yep - and I'm getting fat - 'cause she gives me a biscuit every time I drop by.

 

 

That's funny. The others get muffins.

 

Maybe she does that when she runs out of Tim Tams?

I'd say > 99.9% probably that there are other lifeforms out there within the billions of galaxies.

Then < 0.01% probability that any lifeform that started in another galaxy has been here in the past 10,000 years. Problem is distances are huge, such a tiny window of time in the scale of the universe, and speed of light really does seem to be a fundamental limit.

Transferring our consciousnesses to robots? Our understanding of the neural code is still rather crude. Even if we fully understand the neural code, a lot of information is likely encoded in synapses and dendrites that are at the molecular scale. Will likely require more detail than an electron-microscope can provide, and scanning an entire brain is something we are far far away from with enormous engineering challenges to overcome.

zenourn:

 

any lifeform that started in another galaxy has been here in the past 10,000 years.

 

Our galaxy is 100,000 light years across. 1000 centuries at light speed just to cross it. Let alone the distance between other galaxies.

zenourn:

 

Even if we fully understand the neural code, a lot of information is likely encoded in synapses and dendrites that are at the molecular scale. Will likely require more detail than an electron-microscope can provide, and scanning an entire brain is something we are far far away from with enormous engineering challenges to overcome.

 

If the entire brain could be scanned, presumably it could be replicated. Immortality via a backup & restore process... backup your brain regularly, or before doing any risky activity. If you don't survive, it can be restored. And potentially parts of one brain merged into another.

frankv:

 

If the entire brain could be scanned, presumably it could be replicated. Immortality via a backup & restore process... backup your brain regularly, or before doing any risky activity. If you don't survive, it can be restored. And potentially parts of one brain merged into another.

 

You'd need to write a living will defining how many bitcoin you'd be prepared to pay for the keys to decrypt your memories and consciousness each time you were hacked.  Maybe that's what prions causing CJD etc are - bits of malicious code injected by alien hackers in our distant past.

I wasn't actually trying to suggest that we might ever upload our organic minds into less fragile containers. I wouldn't rule that possibility out completely at some point in the very distant future, but I was thinking more that a time will come when AI robots simply take over from us and that will be the next phase of human evolution. 

Even if an alien life form bothered to visit us the chances of being close enough to us in the evolutionary scale such that we could communicate meaningfully is zero.

We, like all other life forms in the Universe, are effectively alone.