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To: Lancey Howard

Actually time and distance is defined in terms of fundamental physical properties. Any advanced intelligence would understand the same properties.


15 posted on 10/11/2009 12:38:34 PM PDT by C19fan
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To: C19fan
fundamental physical properties... advanced intelligence

Those are strictly human concepts. It's a tough thing to get one's brain around, but the kind of human vanity that attacked Copernicus is the same kind of human vanity (except on a much, much larger scale) that will not allow us to think (think: another human concept) outside the box. It is, in fact, impossible for us.

If we have determined that we humans have five senses and assigned them labels, imagine how many more possible senses there could be. An infinite number? Why not? I sometimes look at plants and trees and wonder what senses they might have that we humans do not share. Whales, dolphins, bats, insects? Who knows?

And I have always marveled at how a teensy little fly can land on my arm and I go to smack it real quick and it usually gets away. What sense of time does that tiny insect with a brain the size of a grain of sand have that lets it be quicker than me? Does it sense (whatever kind of sense?) my hand coming at it in slow motion?

In any event, I maintain that the odds of making contact with beings that share any human senses, ie., the same "reality" (yet another human concept) as us is beyond calculation. It ain't happening.

It's fun to dream, though. That bar scene in Star Wars is still one of my favorites! Heck, I have an attic full of books by Heinlein, Asimov, and numerous others (not to mention the entire original Tom Swift collection), many purchased through the Science Fiction Book Club back in the 1960s. In 1966 I made my own model of the Enterprise and hung it from the ceiling in 8th grade art class following the third episode of Star Trek.

We may someday make "contact" with something "out there", but we probably won't even realize it if we do.

FRegards,
LH

21 posted on 10/11/2009 4:26:34 PM PDT by Lancey Howard
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