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Post by swamprat on Nov 14, 2016 18:11:36 GMT -6
What Do the Aliens in "Arrival" Look Like?Carlos Huante tested many iterations with director Denis Villeneuve before they settled on the final design for Arrival, which came out this week and follows a linguist (Amy Adams) who's trying to understand what these visitors want. The creature artist settled on characters that tap into conflicting emotions: They're serene yet daunting and huge yet indistinct. They're heptapods (they have seven legs) and they look like a cross between a giant hand and a squid; their "fingers" resemble starfish that emit an inky, smoky substance, which is how they express their entirely visual language.
www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/news/article.cfm?c_id=1501119&objectid=11747877
Went to see this today. IT IS AWESOME! It has some unusual twists and turns. You MUST pay close attention. There is discussion about how brain function can impact our perception of time, and our ability to move thru time. It may give some folks a headache! Our military, and the world's governments pretty much react as one might expect. All in all, it makes for a fascinating movie!
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Post by swamprat on Nov 15, 2016 10:16:44 GMT -6
Electronic E.T.: Intelligent Aliens Are Likely MachinesBy Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer November 14, 2016
We often imagine intelligent aliens to be humanoid, but this is unlikely for a number of reasons. Credit: Albert Ziganshin / Shutterstock.com
Any intelligent aliens that humans manage to contact probably won't look much like you or me, or the squid-like creatures in the new film "Arrival."
If an extraterrestrial species becomes advanced enough to send signals Earthlings can pick up, it will likely shed its traditional biological trappings and become a form of machine intelligence in rather short order, said veteran alien hunter Seth Shostak.
To make his case, Shostak pointed to the path that humanity appears to be on. The human species invented the radio around 1900 and the computer in 1945, and it's already manufacturing relatively cheap devices with greater computing power than the human brain.
The development of true, strong artificial intelligence (AI) is therefore not too far off, experts have said. The famous futurist Ray Kurzweil, for example, has pegged 2045 as the year this world-changing "singularity" will hit.
"But maybe it takes to 2100, or 2150, or 2250. It doesn't matter," Shostak said in September during a presentation at the Dent:Space conference in San Francisco. "The point is, any society that invents radio, so we can hear them, within a few centuries, they've invented their successors. And I think that's important, because the successors are machines."
AI will interface with people's bodies for a while, but eventually humans will abandon the wetware and go fully digital, Shostak predicted.
"It'll be like — you build a four-cylinder engine. You put it in a horse to get a faster horse. And pretty soon you say, 'Look, let's get rid of the horse part and just build a Maserati,'" said Shostak, an astronomer at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute in Mountain View, California. "So that's probably what's going to happen."
Humans' machine selves will get smarter and more capable incredibly quickly, he added. Humanity's present intelligence is the result of 4 billion years of Darwinian evolution, which uses random variation as its raw material and is not directed toward any particular goal. But the evolution of machine intelligence will be engineered and efficient, Shostak said.
"Once you invent a thinking machine, you say, 'Invent something better than you are,' and you build that. 'Design something better than you are,' and you build that, and so forth," he said.
This idea has serious implications for the search for intelligent alien life. Unlike Earth organisms, super-advanced extraterrestrial machines would not require water or other chemicals to survive, so they would not be tied to their ancestors' home worlds tightly at all, Shostak said. And journeying tremendous distances would not be a big deal to these machines, provided they could access enough energy and raw materials to keep repairing themselves over the millennia, he said.
"We continue to look in the directions of star systems that we think have habitable words, that have planets where biology could cook up and eventually turn into something clever like you guys," he told the Dent:Space audience. "But I don't think it's going to be that way."
Shostak said he isn't counseling his fellow SETI astronomers to stop investigating potentially Earth-like planets such as Proxima b, a recently discovered world that lies just 4.2 light-years away. (And simple life-forms could still inhabit such worlds even if their most intelligent inhabitants went digital and departed long ago, Shostak said.) But it may be a good idea to expand the search to regions of space that would seemingly be attractive to digital life-forms, he said — for example, places with lots of available energy, such as the centers of galaxies.
"That may be where the really clever beings are," Shostak said.
"Maybe what we ought to do is look at places on the sky that connect two places where there is a lot of energy," in an attempt to intercept communications between alien machines, Shostak added.
"This is my message to you: We're looking for analogues of ourselves, but I don't know that that's the majority of the intelligence in the universe," Shostak concluded. "I'm willing to bet it's not."
www.livescience.com/56867-intelligent-aliens-machines-seti-search.html
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Post by swamprat on Nov 15, 2016 10:19:49 GMT -6
Unexpected 'Arrival': Humanity's Not Ready for Aliens By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer November 15, 2016
The prospect of aliens visiting Earth has been percolating through human thought for decades, thanks to countless sci-fi books and movies, such as the newly released film "Arrival." But it's still not clear how we would deal with the real thing.
Astronomers have drawn up a series of recommended actions to be taken after the detection of a signal from a faraway alien civilization, but it seems that no such effort has been made with regard to E.T.'s arrival here, said veteran alien hunter Seth Shostak.
"I don't know of any protocol if they land," said Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, California. "I've never heard of any such thing, and I'd be surprised if there was one," Shostak told Space.com. "But who knows what's in the bowels of the Pentagon?"
The U.S. military devises an incredible array of contingency plans — the Pentagon mapped out an invasion of Canada in the 1920s and '30s, after all, as part of a hypothetical war with the United Kingdom — so it is indeed possible that some kind of alien-fighting blueprint is locked away in a filing cabinet in Washington, D.C.
However, if the new arrivals turn out to be hostile or predatory, even the most ingenious battle plan would almost certainly fail, Shostak said. Any extraterrestrial civilization capable of journeying from its own star system to Earth would be far more technologically advanced than humanity is, he noted.
"It would be like taking on the Roman legions with the U.S. Air Force," Shostak said.
Some thinkers have speculated that the nations of the world would come together to fight off this existential threat to human civilization, but Shostak isn't so sure.
"I just don't see it. Nothing else has ever prompted that kind of a reaction," he said. "Nuclear weaponry is an existential threat, too, and I haven't noticed a lot of worldwide thinking that, 'We've all got to get together and stop this.'"
International cooperation might be even more difficult in the event of a SETI detection, or the arrival of friendly aliens on Earth.
"There's immediately going to be competition — 'Well, these guys are in touch with the aliens. We've got to get in there. Who knows what sort of good stuff the aliens might be telling them?'" Shostak said.
It's not clear whether clearly established protocols could help smooth such potential trouble spots. Take the SETI-detection protocol, which basically instructs scientists to double-check the signal; tell other researchers and prominent organizations, such as the United Nations, of the discovery; and not broadcast a message back to E.T. without proper "international consultation."
"We know from experience — from what happens when there's a false alarm, like this Russian signal of a couple of months ago — what really happens is that the protocols aren't even looked at," Shostak said, referring to a possible detection apparently caused by an old Soviet military satellite. "Nobody cares. What really happens is the media start calling up the scientists."
The relatively muted reactions to SETI false alarms also provide a clue about how humanity would respond to a bona fide detection, Shostak said. In short, the odds of mass hysteria are pretty slim, he said.
"People aren't rioting in the streets" after false alarms, he said.
The arrival of alien spaceships on Earth would present a much more immediate potential threat than a SETI detection, of course. So how would humanity react to a possible invasion? We may just have to wait and see.
www.space.com/34722-alien-arrival-humanity-not-ready.html
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Post by Deleted on Nov 16, 2016 14:37:53 GMT -6
Wouldn't be a good time for alien visitors to planet earth. If we can't find a way to consolidate our own people..to be a unified world..then we have no business entertaining outsiders. ESPECIALLY if they're not a popular color. Maybe a nice neutral color like green..wouldn't be so bad. Seriously...we have nothing to offer...we have no business spreading into space...we're pretty toxic right now...and while we have very good people on this planet...they're not the majority and you know how it goes with igannance. What people don't know they don't bother to look up or try to understand..they just shoot it...so...stay away from earth if you're smart.
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