How long? So far the only people that have said they would be interested in seeing me were scammers trying to get me to pay for strip cams or send money to Nigeria.

How many hundreds of people am I supposed to contact before someone says "Oh, meeting people? You mean like what I signed up to this site for? Ok."

With Christianity it seems like most people choose to take childhood's immaturity and couple it with the ferocity of an adult protecting something.

I don't think anybody needs gods to believe in to behave morally but a lot of people need to grow up first.


What's more frustrating is seeing the people who can show that they know how to be critical and reason and so forth but who refuse to turn those things on any aspect of their faith. Well, I suppose that behavior is probably the key component required for faith of the sort we see today to be so wide spread.

It used to be longer but I decided I didn't like the tone and should trim it down to just the parts that seemed enthusiastic.

I went through every page of the search for people anywhere near me (I've got the range going over state lines a little bit,) mailing just about everyone that weighed less than my handicapped aunt, didn't have children over two years old, and didn't smoke frequently.

I'd estimate that after today I've sent out mail to about 300 people now. Maybe a third of it I took the tone "I think I'm what you are looking for," another third was more "are you what I'm looking for," and the last third was probably just some random question I had about something in their profile.
Do I need some special format in that?

It seems like if I ever do get so much as a date out of this it will be a pyrrhic victory.

I can't say I'm a fan.
Up till WoW each generation of these games reworked the idea and such.
Next up there were things like Conan, LotRO, and Warhammer focusing on mature content, detailed content, or pvp but basically being WoW with updated graphics and just a little shift in focus.

As far as I can tell the focus of Aion is "hey, this looks really nice." The factions? Light guy and dark guys, not willing to see eye to eye. The universal enemy? Dragons. The general goal? Avoid total catastrophe so they can, well, sort of keep living if those dragons don't kill them, except that the only reason they didn't before was sort of that tower players are trying to destroy.


Oh but there are wings! Well what game haven't players been able to fly in? People are poorly coordinated in two dimensions and from what I've seen of 3d coordination they don't even do 2 dimensions of it as well as they did on the ground.

Now, air travel did sort of make a mess of the system WoW had laid out so making it work is nice but hat would be like if WoW had looked at Everquest and said "we'll just make that look better and make the travel times a little more reasonable."


So what I really see here is the "Oh, this stuff is popular now?" industry stepping in to just capitalize on making the games look nicer while actual ideas about how to do something interesting haven't factored in.
Well, it's like if people enjoyed going to an art museum and somebody saw that there were a lot of people in there and decided they should play summer action movies in the place and muscle out the artists.

Ok, to be fair this particular art museum didn't really have much serious art but it was getting the point where it might soon and they were at least a little classier than chase scenes and explosions for the most part, or angels fighting dragons if you prefer.

So do I have some fatal flaw about my profile or do people just sort of not reply much to anybody?

Even if you're straight up convinced of that you have to realize you sound like a crackpot when you keep insisting on it that way, right? Try to tone it down just a little. The idea that he's stupid rather than evil gets more mileage and if you want you can sort of end whatever you're saying with "but what's more frightening is if he's not stupid but did this all on purpose."

Anyway that question doesn't work in your favor either because I had just said that the colossal mistakes made in these wars are a big enough embarrassment to prevent anyone from doing it again and I think even the terrorists have learned that putting the US into a panic will play into the hands of the people they really hate (or at least I thought they viewed Bush like that.)

Now, I'm sure you won't have much trouble seeing how fundamentalist Christianity played into all of this. With the way that they're currently losing the legal battles against science education they are already losing ground in this country and if we keep voting out their school board members each time they try to put religion in the classroom they'll eventually run out of devout voters who will put any faith in them.

Christianity in general is probably not a problem but what those extremists do is morally bankrupt and they only ever got so far by convincing normal Christians that they were doing normal Christian things. It's becoming visible that that is not what they do and with a little bit more bad PR I don't think we'll have any more presidents from that group.

There are a lot of people in this country who are both concerned for the well being of future generations and who learn how they can help with that. As long as they're still fighting the people who don't learn and just say the problem is "not enough God" the measures to prevent this kind of thing happening again are already in progress.

And again, it was a huge embarrassment so the two big factors are practically taken care of.

General greed might be a third factor but for now I think people recognize the value of stable economies so we've got that keeping everyone too busy to think about another war for now. There's a strong enough possibility of major changes in the way our companies do business further down the road that I can't speculate beyond that.

... they're worms that take over the spinal cord. How is that reptilian?

Now, Stargate Atlantis- well, technically those ones we sort of from insects but they didn't have insect features. Well, they looked mostly like cave adapted humans with maybe a few fish parts.
Eventually Atargate moved on the the split group from the ancients but I don't remember the ancients being reptiles- they were just like humans including the ridiculous ability to interbreed with them (but hey, I won't expect Scifi writers to know the immune system's role in acting against interspecies fertilizations.)

NISLF doesn't roll off the tongue very well.

I don't know if there's ever been a formal belief in a big sect of Christianity but for awhile there was a popular notion that when some people died they got assigned as angels and then worked there way up through the ranks of some kind of heaven organization.

"Every time a bell rings and angel gets his wings" may or may not be related but it makes you wonder why there would be so many angels still waiting on that if they'd all been there from the start.

As I was saying there's quite a lot you can do to us without us realizing that we can pop out of our bodies. Why are they doing so little of that sort of thing?

A couple of decades ago there seems to have been a very large upwards shift in the number of people who thing everyone can do this- if they were successfully repressing us why would that be the case?

Well they don't count because that's the anus of the world and they're not people.
...I figure this is technically what he's thinking but that he'd never dream of phrasing it like that.

What it comes down to is that we don't see them as having any connection to our society.


While it is true that the masses want peace that because they've given up the whole resolving most issues with violence aspect of their lives to their governments.

Without police I could rely to protect me from the occasional nasty neighbor and a military I could rely on to remind other countries that attacking me is a bad idea I'd I'd be really pro-guns and probably have to live with some extended family so we could form a sort of militia on a moment's notice and probably raid nearby families we weren't on good terms with if only to kill them before they could kill us.

Now, I don't mean that I can tangibly see the police and military being what stops me from doing those things- I consider myself to be quite moral. What I mean is that there are a couple of places in the world where you can look at the society and in lacking the police and military organization we're used to having they take up those tasks themselves and it turns out people are a lot more extreme when the only penalty is a death they thought was on it's way anyway.

If you're familiar with the big psychology experiments of decades past you probably don't have much trouble accepting that people would fall into this sort of behavior rapidly.


I don't mean to justify the war(s) on terror by any means but at the very least they've been enough of an embarrassment that we won't see that kind of thing repeated any time soon. NATO and Israel have still got a ways to go but I'm optimistic.

Still, we've demonstrated upon ourselves that you can do some really awful things to people and if our spiritual aspect is being suppressed doing those things doesn't break that suppression.

The aliens are not doing enough if they are aligned against us.

Doesn't fit with the premise though. They want to planet, not just to weaken us.

I've heard that before. What I'm saying is that I don't get why a race with a 65 million drop on us can't just pacify us with some sort of hypnosis and basically run circles around our politicians. Just a couple hundred years has been enough for us to make tanks that would have been nigh invincible against what we used to use so with millions of years you'd think they could just send in mobile billboard type things we couldn't get rid of and yadda yadda yadda.

Even if they're in some kind of economic slump where everyone is poor they ought to be able to round up enough stuff to make it look like they were rich and then shanghai half of us on transports to go dump us on whatever planet they're not fond of while they started moving in on this planet.

A race that was capable of leaving this planet for another one would have had enough technology at the time to just fake things video of people responding back to their loved ones and it's hard to imagine that they haven't made any further improvement in the millions of years since then.

We're advancing an awful lot for them to be stopping us. What's holding them back?

We probably can't get rid of wars altogether but as time marches on we've had fewer and fewer people dieing in the wars (well, fraction compared to the total population anyway.)

Back when people basically fought with axes and maybe a shield about one in every two males would die from battle injuries. In modern times it's magnitudes lower.

Plus we've got that recent reminder that killing primitives is still really ****ing expensive and doesn't turn into an easy payout if you go in under prepared, or maybe hardly ever.

Actually after taking an intro to astrology course I've been keeping up with astronomy news so I'm not relying on just conjecture. There should be many many Earth-like planets in our galaxy. The whole drake equation thing pretty much started out as a "here are all of the numbers we need to figure out" staging ground to get the ideas-ball rolling but after we starting working out the first few factors conservative estimates said there should be about 10 civilizations in our galaxy right now and liberal ones were more like 10,000. We're about halfway through the equation right now and so far the values have been more towards the liberal end but still in the middle ground.

Once we check out Europa we will have some very minor non-conjecture estimates for the factor involving the origin of life in general. After that we'll basically have to wait until we've publicly made contact with another civilization or done some seriously exhaustive planet searching in a whole bunch of star systems.

Nonetheless basic chemistry is all you need to be able to tell that there should be lots of Earth-like planets out there. Supernovae throw the heavy elements far and wide and the light ones are all over the place already so basically it comes down to how many stars are there similar to our sun.

For planets a little less habitable for us but still habitable to chemically similar life you could look for planets close to smaller stars or moons around gas giants like Jupiter. There's a pretty simply calculation (well, you wouldn't want to do it by hand but a computer can handle it with less effort than the browser you're looking at this in,) for where you get liquid water and everywhere there's liquid water at least some form of Earth-life can survive.

Bigger stars aren't good places to look because they burn out faster and if there are other big stars forming nearby that's going to mean supernovae that could burn away all the life in nearby systems. So basically you don't want to be to near the center of the galaxy and can sort of limit the search to stars about as far out as we are, which is handy because things similar to where we are are close and that's the first place you'd want to look anyway.

The field I'm actually going into is biology, hence all the certainty about how life works. It's really slow and boring when the environment is stable but when half of the pieces are knocked out making new connections is worth basically doing a retarded ob of it since there's nobody around to do it any better.

So if the dinosaurs had died out early mammals would have had a lousy time because they couldn't take advantage of all the slow connections dinosaurs had laid out. Of course most of those connections went away with the dinosaurs anyway but even so parts of our environment wouldn't have EVER been the way they are without them.

Even with an infinite universe the planets identical to ours should be so far away that the light from their stars never reaches us (expanding universe makes the distance grow even as the light is moving through it.)

I'm glad you thought that they could be disguising themselves but I can't think of any reason their disguises should be so far off. "Scales? Whoops, I can't tell those apart from skin. Not enough time to do it over" sorts of scenarios would have to happen over and over and over but surely they can at least count to get the number of fingers and toes right!
Getting proportions right is harder for humans and maybe thinking beings in general but they shouldn't ever be so far off as the greys usually are.

There's another way to look at it though- these humanoid aliens might be made genetically to interface with us as well as the original aliens. Trying to have similar ranges of perception as both species and both forms of communication seems like a very appealing explanation for why they should have these forms.

Evolution is just like some watch that ticks along in a predefined way. The whole meteor wiping out the dinosaurs bit should have made this clear enough. If meteor had hit them 100 million years earlier we wouldn't have birds but might instead have a huge variety of bats.
But that's just the most recent one. What if the Cambrian Explosion had come at a very different time or any number of the other catastrophes followed by random survivors spreading out to fill up the open space?

Even if you had a planet completely identical to Earth but without having the other planets and debris in it's solar system be exactly the same it should get hit by the large rocks at very different times.
But you wouldn't find any planets even that identical anyway. Even with planets humans would do well on there would be variations in size/gravity, the brightness and distance from it's star, composition of it's atmosphere, etc. Again, I'm talking about worlds with air and water and such that would be very friendly to us: even with that they're going to be different.

The number of worlds that are different but livable would greatly greatly outnumber those worlds that were indistinguishable from Earth. There must be some other explanation for why all the aliens we see are human shaped.

Bacteria start breathing oxygen and diversify into some new life forms on account of having more energy to do so. Jellyfish and worms are the two I've brought up. Worms start taking in calcium from the water and forming bone type structures and diversify some more. Insects, shellfish, and fish are some of the groups that come from this. Fish start to breath air by swallowing it and eventually develop lungs and then convert some of their fins into legs. Amphibians, reptiles and mammals show up around this time.

So for humans it went worm to fish to mammal and then apes and the society thing put us just about where we are now. Many of the reasons things like worms diversified into many forms of life while jellyfish didn't are big catastrophes that suddenly changed the ecosystem. These catastrophes are things like space rocks hitting the planet and killing most living things with just random survivors left.

There is not a good reason life, even on a planet almost exactly like Earth, should again go worm to fish to mammal even half of the time.
We have the general shape we do because of those earlier steps, not because it is somehow a special shape to have. Being able to hold tools might be very important for starting civilization but I have pointed out other shapes that could hold tools. We should see as many of those shaped aliens as the ones that are human shaped and we should see even more that are unlike any shape I have brought up.


Now, if you were to argue that the aliens we see are usually traveling from some parallel dimension so they aren't just from a planet like Earth but from Earth itself that might be a decent reason for them to be humanoids with reptilian features or whatever because the closer worlds should be more similar to our own but if they are journeying from other stars we should see many kinds of aliens people never see.

But thanks for the welcome. I've had a profile for awhile but didn't realize that the community link meant forums.

Well ya, we're not very creative so we always mentally warp humans to make the same kinds of aliens. There should at least be some other form that works for advanced civilization besides humanoid but the most anyone every imagines along those lines is some Earth creature directly scaled up.

There are ways to make the reasons much less compelling than they are here. As lame as Canada is they're very similar to America yet violent crime is so reduced and when was the last time they went to war with anyone?

I don't mean to make it sound too simple, it's not, but we've definitely got ways left to improve.



Sometimes yes but other times you just get a bunch of mercenaries torturing people who were never given trials to decide if they were even guilty.

Most people don't think any of the modern wars have done nearly so much of that as the older ones did and I'd wager that they didn't think that benefit was worth so much money and bloodshed if you could just work out things with some diplomacy instead.

But if you want have less vice you could also do it by secularizing our religions. Countries where people have to work out their morals for themselves have people behaving more morally from the same perspective. Perhaps we've let strict religion turn into a vice?