Britain has alien-war weapons, says former government adviser

[Eddie Teach]

Do you believe in evolution? I think that process leads to inevitable similarities in a broad sense. For instance, aliens would have to want to live, at least long enough to pass their genes on. They would want resources they needed for survival. They would also take some kind of steps to ensure their survival once they realized humans were a threat.

Aliens capable of interstellar travel would need an understanding of mathematics. That might not be enough to communicate, but it should be enough for them to recognize our sentience, seeing patterns in our communications.

Final thought- we might actually not understand the aliens' motivation in such an encounter. But it would likely be due to incomplete information, and not that it was incomprehensible. Sci-fi authors don't have that problem, they know everything even if the humans in their story don't.

[Razgovory]

What if the alien we encounter is a robot?  What if evolutionary pressures no long motivate an alien's behavior.  I mean, evolutionary pressures don't guide us that much.  What evolutionary pressure is making Marty stand in line to buy an iPhone? 

It's possible that an alien species could understand mathematics at a higher level or simply differently then we can.  We wouldn't be able to understand it's mathematics any more then a dog can understand calculus.  There could be a physical limitation.  One of the interesting things in mental health is how people with certain types of brain injuries are incapable of thinking certain things.  For instance, there's a type of illness where you can't see more then one "thing" at a time.  The person looks at a room with a table, a clock, and a cat.  He can look at the cat and see a cat, and he then look at the table and see the table.  But he can't add them together, they can only be understood as individual items.  This is called visual agnosia.  Now imagine an entire species with some kind of blind spot like this.  They get by after a fashion, but can never understand a more complex tool then a sharp rock since anything else requires adding two things together.  Imagine how we might appear to such a species, our actions incomprehensible as we go taking several distinct items and magically making them one. Having the aliens understand it as "magic" gives them too much credit.  It just happens.  They don't understand why, or even that it is happening.  They may even forget that you had the component parts of your new tools, you might take a sharp rock, a stick and some sinews and make an axe and they don't realize that the axe, stick, and sinew were separate items after you put it together.  Even if you do it right in front of them.

Now imagine an aliens species that has the ability to do things that we simply can't comprehend, that we have similar blind spots.  It's possible they could have already visited, but we didn't notice.  Some sort of phenomenon that we think we understand could just be aliens passing through we just can't understand them as such.  And since we can't even notice them, they don't pay us much mind.  Perhaps that pluck us out of space-time from time to time, not like an alien abduction, or a mysterious disappearance, but like we were never there.  When they pluck us out space-time our existence in space-time doesn't just end.  It never was.  That person is retroactively never born.  How would we even know such a thing is occurring?  Such a thing is impossible to us.  Just like the person making the axe in front of those aliens who can't see two things at once.

[Eddie Teach]

What evolutionary pressure is making Marty stand in line to buy an iPhone? 

Bad example, he is a dead end. And heterosexual guys who buy iPhones probably do occasionally parlay it into getting laid. Anyway, Marty's not gonna buy an iPhone if he can't afford food or heating.



While it's certainly possible that aliens exist who we could not perceive with, for lack of a better word, magical powers, it is less likely and less compelling than aliens who are governed by the laws of physics that we know. Though that hasn't stopped sci-fi writers from writing about that kind as well.

[CountDeMoney]

What evolutionary pressure is making Marty stand in line to buy an iPhone? 

Bad example, he is a dead end. And heterosexual guys who buy iPhones probably do occasionally parlay it into getting laid. Anyway, Marty's not gonna buy an iPhone if he can't afford food or heating.

On the contrary;  fags are an excellent demographic:  not only do they have discretionary income by not having a husband or kids, the need to retain an appearance of progressiveness and hipness at the cost of everything else makes them an excellent marketing exploit.

[Ed Anger]

Plus they are weak willed and easily swayed by shiny things.

[CountDeMoney]

Plus they are weak willed and easily swayed by shiny things.

lulz, mah trinket and baubles.

[katmai]

TMI seedy. Don't need to know what you call your junk.

[The Brain]

Maybe the aliens are hyper advanced in gender studies instead of physics. Their powers may appear like magic to us.