I chased a few ghosts looking for Chianna and Zhaan and started wondering, where are all the aliens?

I'd appreciate links to characters with skin in primary colors :D.

Edit: I've got the SFP (blue alien princess) freebie already.

Message edited on: 10/21/2005 17:05

Message edited on: 10/21/2005 17:13

I like Leanan Sidhe at PoserPros. It's not free, but it's a very cheap - a Pro Club item. She's got pale white skin, and so you can make her any color you want, just by changing the object color.

Shucks. I thought this was going to be a philosophical argument about the diversity of extra-terrestrial intelligence or lack thereof, starting with the Fermi Paradox and moving on to Drake's Equation, delving into the realities and possibilities of interstellar and intergalactic space travel. :)

Randym, thanks. That name strikes a bell, I think I agree that it's cool...btw I should've specified that commercial is fine. So, you're telling me this Sidhe character actually looks good using that method (the color thing)? That's great if so.

Kuro, hijack away. I can't recall Fermi's Paradox but if memory serves it struck me as a loada crapola.

I love SETI arguments. :D

My personal theory on intelligent life in the galaxy needs revising given they've just found a supergalaxy that belies the current thinking on the age of the universe.

Message edited on: 10/21/2005 18:11

http://www.daz3d.com/shop.php?op=itemdetails&item=2349&cat= http://www.daz3d.com/shop.php?op=itemdetails&item=2971&cat= Here are a couple ... the first one has a lot of variations available but it is for M3 (though the texture and color shifts can be used for the other unimesh figures)

Thanks Ghost those look cool.

Fermi's thing was that the universe should be loaded with life, but since no one's talking it can't be, or something like that right?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi%27s_paradox Wow there's really some interesting reading there, most of it not even strictly about Fermi's Paradox. :) The stuff about the Rare Earth hypothesis is fascinating. Personally I think, given the age of the universe (new data not withstanding since I'm waiting for the big brains to talk about it for a while) and evolutionary time, that many people are overzealous in predicting intelligent alien life.

I did a search for something last night and remember seeing some threads about "aliens".... here are the links. I haven't looked in them for content... but maybe you can find something in them. http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=2396653 http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=2112069 http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=2181477 http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=2233731 http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=2235122 http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=2286606 http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=2300079 http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=2396653

Well, it's not an extremely realistic texture. But primary-colored aliens generally aren't terribly realistic to begin with. ;-)

One thing I like about Leanan Sidhe is her brows and lashes are trans-only. So you can make them any color you want, too.

This is Stephanie Petite with the Leanan Sidhe textures, and the object color changed.

Waitaminute. Are we talking, glue-macaroni-salad-to-their-forhead (aka Star Trek) aliens, or Barlowe's Guide to ET's aliens, or "It came from some, alien, antimatter galaxy at the other end of the universe" aliens, or ALIEN aliens, or boy, that's weird! aliens? Sixus has been making some ver' strange beasties for a while. Various people have taken a whack at creatures from mythology and fantasy. Fae are, of course, ubiquitous (although they sulk from Renderosity of late). So what is an "Alien" to you? BTW -- I always heard it as "The Drake Equation," not "Drake's Equation." Unfortunately the variables grow larger and larger towards the right side of the equation, until you might as well say "I guess so. I dunno." And isn't the Fermi paradox pretty much a reworking of Olber's Paradox -- applying Olber to the concept of intelligent, radio-using species? I rather like the Dyson wrinkle on that anyhow; visible light is evidence of waste, and the fact that we still see stars in the sky is pretty good evidence there isn't a technological civilization of the sort we Western Capitalists would recognize out there.

It may be popularly named 'The Drake Equation', but the attribution goes to Frank Drake, so it's Drake's Equation, right? ;) The flaw in Fermi's Paradox is the assumption that interstellar (let alone intergalactic) travel is linear or even exponential. It is worse than exponential. It also underestimates the problems of transporting life across the great voids of space (radiation, gravity, micrometeors, and so on). Let's put some facts on the table to illustrate the point: 1. The trip from Earth to the Moon takes 3 days. This is the nearest extraterrestrial (natural) object in the universe for us and, fortunately, one that orbits Earth relatively close. 2. The trip from Earth to Mars takes 6 months (and only under proper orbital configurations). This is the nearest extraterrestrial planet within our solar system (if Venus is nearer, it is currently too hostile for human venture). - Note the difference already between 3 days (72 hours) and 6 months (4320 hours) - we're not even to the edge of the solar system proper yet! - 3. The trip from Earth to the nearest star (Proxima Centauri) is 4.2 light years! Unless some uber-Einstein crushes General Relativity, there is no way for a humaned spacecraft to attain even a significant percentage of light speed, therefore it would take something like (let's guess 50% c) 8.4 years to reach. Not impossible, but it would require several innovations, either stasis or a fully functional life-sustaining habitat (air, water, plants, animals, food, artificial gravity, automated repair systems, materials or manufacturing of raw materials, and so forth). Such an endeavor would take quadrillions of dollars (i.e.: the entire human population and governments working in unison and foregoing GNPs and such). 4. The trip to the nearest galaxy (M31 Andromeda) would take 2,000,000 light years!!!!!!!! (need more exclamations). This is beyond the life expectancy of any living organism of Earth by a factor of 1000 and most species reach extinction within this timespan. This distance may be center to center, but even taking edge star (which ours happens to be) to edge star, it would still be around 1,900,000 light years. That gulf is insurmountable without discoveries in Physics that would aid in circumventing General Relativity. No living organism on any planet in the universe could bridge intergalactic gulfs without nearly deity-level technology. It wouldn't take 50 million years, it would take a miracle! Warp-drives and subspace may all sound within technological possibilities, but they require General Relativity to be superceded or circumvented. No such luck in the 100 years since Einstein published. I don't agree with Dyson (though I haven't read what this wrinkle is). The resolution of information decreases with distance. The most distant objects in the universe that we can 'see' only impinge a photon here and there. Intelligent life hundreds of thousands, millions, or trillions of light years away would be impossible for our current technology to distinguish against all natural 'noise'. The signal would need to be strong, unusually coherent, and pin-point directed (this is why Laser-SETI has merit). The problem is that the probability of a laser point impinging on our planet, for instance, considering scattering galactic dust, gravitation deflection (stars, black holes), and simple occlusion are, you guessed it, astronomical! ;0)

Addendum: Going by our current Physics, there appear to be no ways to traverse the vastness of space in reasonable time periods. The limiting factor of 'c', even if we could convert ourselves into energy and transmit it flawlessly, would still not allow us to overcome the distances in timely fashions. Wormholes, like blackholes, may seem inviting alternatives but they suffer the same problem as blackholes. Once you are beyond the event horizon, the laws of Physics as we know them breakdown - or at least we have no knowledge of what laws prevail. You cannot design anything to traverse a standard wormhole without knowledge of what to design for. Such pursuits would be disastrous. This also precludes any knowledge of where in the universe the exiting blackhole of the wormhole resides. My contention, and that's all it is, is that one must 'pucker' spacetime gravitationally (since gravity seems to be the only known distorting factor over spacetime) in a way that allows the distance traversed to be significantly reduced, gravitational anomalies avoided or restrained, and source and destintation to be predesignated. That's a tall order. If we could 'tunnel' outside of spacetime while retaining a spacetime fabric 'cylinder' between two spacetime points, that may provide a way to get from point A to point B without even requiring the elimination of G.R. Of course, my terminology and specificity are necesarily vague since no one has yet proposed such a mode or ways to implement it (the Casimir effect is about the closest approximation to what I'm proposing). The picture, I suppose, would be of a wormhole where the singularity has not formed and the event horizon is toroidal so that at the center is a viable spacetime conduit. After that, I think the cosmological physics is way beyond me to understand how such a configuration could occur or be 'manufactured'. But it makes for interesting speculations. :)

Well...there are simple physical reasons why no alien civilization will cover the known universe; basically, the universe isn't old enough! You'd have to start waaay back, back when gravity was just starting to decouple, if you mean to have today's colonies out at the observable edge. Unless you violate light speed, which as an implicit violation of causality opens up a whole new can of worms... However. Moore's Law is but one of the observations that technological progress is at least geometric. That's inherent in Freeman Dyson's thinking, and also speaks to Moravec and his machine intelligences. The argument is as follows; double the time since the industrial revolution and we will be in a position to send generation ships and seed far systems with robotics. Repeat that interval, and we'll be dismantling stars for material. Repeat that interval again (always assuming we haven't destroyed ourselves) and we are in a position to make dramatic changes to the very look of the Local Group. Now recall that we spent tens of thousands of years playing with pointed sticks, and tens of millions of years being pond scum, and of course a good four billion years just waiting for the planet to cool down a little. Compared to the piddling thousand years needed to develop a truly stomping technology, if there are other civilizations out there the odds are that one of them woke up a little earlier in their historical morning and has already been there, done that. Hence Dyson's "Why the heck do we still see stars?" Of course, there are intriguing questions on whether our particular philosophical make-up is some unusual co-incidence of the evolution to intelligence of a competative omnivore. Or whether there are natural checks that occur a little further along the evolution of society and thought, that prevent the technological expansion out into the stars (or at least make it a little more eco-friendly). You touch apon the problem of information theory above. I think of it as the "pulsar problem" myself. Information theory basically says the higher the information density, the closer in form it comes to noise. Anything that repeats, pulses, shows any form of mathematic regularity, is a fit subject for compression algorithms to be applied to surpress the pattern. If there are civilizations out there choosing to have twenty-year pauses in their instant messaging chats, what little trickle of radio energy comes our way is going to be very hard to decipher from noise. And, of course, given certain theoretical limits (say, the natural RF noise of our stormy little envelope of air, and the static of cosmic rays dancing in the magnetosphere), reception gets efficient faster than transmission gains in power. Early radios pumped hella power into the air. Spirit and Oppy, on the other hand, are dependent on us doing some pretty sophisticated massaging of their miniscule signals. So, really, the only targets worth pointing an OZMA at are intentional ones. And as Sagan himself mentioned a time or two, it isn't like WE are sending a nice clear signal to possible friends out there. One hopes the aliens are a tad more altruistic. Or less practical than we are. Sounds like we've read many of the same sources, Kuroyume! (Now why don't we ever get into interesting stuff like this in chat?)

Attached Link: http://www.poserproducts.com