I told them we're made of meat.

"we taste bad!"

Hey baby.. what are you wearing?

So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure
How amazingly unlikely is your birth
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth

Why do all you aliens look like humans with rubber crap glued to your foreheads and ears?

Let me show you all about this earth thing called "love."

Welcome to Earf

All Natural #erbal V!@gra!!! Please her in bed Genuine all natural pharma Ceutical the Secret big Pharmacies dont want u 2 Know!  OrDer Now!

Deep Contact: Get me off this miserable rock.

Hey, this is a great rock. Very fine minerals. The surface bacteria are pretty farking annoying though.

The people on Alpha Centauri said you guys were pussies. If you ever came around them, they'd beat you like a red headed stepchild.

Welcome to the Stuckeys of the universe. Those specials that you saw on the billboard out past Mars? Yeah. We're out of them. Yeah. We don't got none of them 99 cent pecan logs but we gots lots of the $2.99 ones.

You are in violation of the Prime Directive. You are visiting a pre-warp planet and have infected us with an unnatural thirst for technology. Or something. You are hereby ordered to turn over your ship, you weapons and your hotter females to me. I didn't write the Prime Directive even though it's known as the Harry Freakstorm Prime Directive, I just try and follow the parts of it that benefit me. So, show me how your toilet flushes, where the shifter for the warp drive is and un-ass that spaceship,

Oh what the hell. One more:

So what did you guys do to Jesus when he came a-calling?

did anyone else find that webpage to be an unholy abortion in need of being destroyed by fire?
gave up trying to even find the slide show and just figured that if aliens found that page they would flee for their lives rather than read it

Fermi: Why don't you call?

well, being only able to communicate with ourselves for all of recorded history will do that to a species

Odoriferous Queef: Can I take your ship for a quick spin to Pluto and back?
That's the 0 - 60 time on that baby?
Would you help me retro fit that engine to my '65 GTO?

/Sorry
//Too much Top Gear.

Reminds me of a cartoon from Punch magazine of two aliens meeting two humans and offering them a go in their space ship in exchange for a go in the human craft. Unfortunately for the future of a deal, the human "space ship" is a Dutch windmill. Chances are, however, humans being what they are, the Dutch couple made off with the space ship, leaving the aliens stranded with the windmill. A good cartoon very often tells a story that extends beyond the panel or panels of the cartoon proper (or improper).

Judging from the number of cartoons by different cartoonists, joy riding in an alien space craft is a fairly common human fantasy. One cartoon shows the aliens and humans getting drunking together while the "King" of the humans has a go in the alien spacecraft. The humans are hobos and their King is clearly drunk out of his skull judging from his erratic flight path.

The concept that extraterrestrials have a language that involves the exchange of symbols (just like us) is alien to me.

Since they are just like us, why not just ask them for a good Enchilada recipe.

Can we have Elvis and Glenn Miller back now?

FloydA: Why do all you aliens look like humans with rubber crap glued to your foreheads and ears?

This is one of my pet peeves. I've often thought of founding a Society for Real Aliens on the basic model of the movement for "Real" Ale.

The truth is that, like most of the conventions of SF, the nature of aliens is determined by the needs of human-story telling and technical limitations. In a SF narrative, you can make the aliens as alien as you like, but they still have to 1) want to steal our Earth women; 2) prize our primitive resources such as gold, air, water, or uranium; and 3) want to have sex, fight or eat us.

In reality our women would be as fugly to the aliens as they are to us, the resources aliens want would be easier to mine from asteroids and comets, and aliens might not want to have sex, fight or eat us because they are simply too alien. Life might evolve in a pocket of anti-matter, or based on silicon, or possibly even in forms that don't involve our kind of biology. It is likely that the molecules of life might be polarized right instead of left on other worlds very much like ours, and thus no matter how much the aliens resembled us, they couldn't eat us because they couldn' metabolize our sugars, proteins, etc.

Aliens might be so alien, not to mention so much smarter than us, that communication wouldn't entertain them, let alone interest them. We might be dumber than their pets. We can communicate with cultures that are tens of thousands of years behind our own in technical and organizational terms, but could we communicate with a Civilization ten million or ten billion years ahead? Mice and dinosaurs and bananas are all close cousins compared to the type of aliens that might be able to travel across interstellar space or take handy shortcuts we don't know about yet.

It annoys me that fictional aliens are too human, but there's nothing to be done about it except read the better sort of SF literature and ignore the space soaps on TV and in the movies.

I watch some SF but for the most part am not a dedicated fan of TV space soaps. Even much of the more "serious" non-franchise stuff is so silly and trite I lose interest after the first five minutes give away the premise and the plot. Having read a lot of SF and EC comics in my youth (and re-read a lot since), I pretty much know what happens next.

SF short stories seem to be firmly in the moralizing, predictable "idea" line established well before The Twilight Zone and its emulators.

The in-story explanation for the strikingly similar body plans for all these alien races is that they are, in fact, related to each other, having been bio-engineered or evolved from a common ancestral race that traveled the galaxy a few million years ago. The humans, Romulans, Vulcans, and Klingons all form a Darwinian family tree or else were the result of planet-seeding and parallel evolution or convergence.

In reality, however, it's basically a matter of how big a make-up, costume, and special effects budget the producers are willing to provide, and how patient or smart they think the audience is.

Almost every time one human culture encounters another, the more technologically advanced one destroys the less technologically advanced one.  If we encounter aliens similar enough to us to allow us to communicate or even have any common frame of reference (unlikely) and the aliens are the ones visiting us instead of the other way around, well.... there's no reason to believe that it won't happen to us.

Bring a towel.

Cymbal: miniflea: Almost every time one human culture encounters another, the more technologically advanced one destroys the less technologically advanced one.  If we encounter aliens similar enough to us to allow us to communicate or even have any common frame of reference (unlikely) and the aliens are the ones visiting us instead of the other way around, well.... there's no reason to believe that it won't happen to us.

That would only happen if we, or the earth itself, had something that they needed. Otherwise they would just do a flyby and determine we are too primitive to even be of any interest to them. To me, I think the latter would be the case most of the time, since mastering interstellar travel is far more difficult than harvesting resources.

This assumes they are rational.  But yes, I think that is more likely than the very human idea of conquest.

Cymbal: miniflea: Almost every time one human culture encounters another, the more technologically advanced one destroys the less technologically advanced one.  If we encounter aliens similar enough to us to allow us to communicate or even have any common frame of reference (unlikely) and the aliens are the ones visiting us instead of the other way around, well.... there's no reason to believe that it won't happen to us.

That would only happen if we, or the earth itself, had something that they needed. Otherwise they would just do a flyby and determine we are too primitive to even be of any interest to them. To me, I think the latter would be the case most of the time, since mastering interstellar travel is far more difficult than harvesting resources.

who knows, to them it would be like stomping an ant colony

Also, have you read Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's novel Footfall?  In it, a race of aliens attacks the earth.  There are two factions among them, the sleepers and the spaceborn.  The sleepers have been in cryogenic sleep and were born and lived on the surface of their home planet.  The spaceborn were, wait for it, born in space and have never lived on a planet, and remained awake during the several generations of their journey.  The sleepers are in control, but as the attempted conquest of earth goes on, the spaceborn increasingly question the need for a planet when all the resources they need can be found in the asteroids and whatnot.

brantgoose:

It annoys me that fictional aliens are too human, but there's nothing to be done about it except read the better sort of SF literature and ignore the space soaps on TV and in the mo ...

There is the case where current humans are just version 12.3.4 in some on going experiment that keeps adding different alien DNAs to what was originally a bunch of ape-like things that could swim and use tools. Thus humans are just becoming more alien like.

"I call this next one: Ode To A Small Lump Of Green Putty I Found In My Armpit One Midsummer Morning"

Cymbal: I don't know, I think we would bore ourselves pretty quickly. If all our needs are taken care of by alien technology what the hell would we do with our lives besides sex/drugs and posting drunken snarky comments on websites? Not saying that's a bad thing, but I think eventually even that would get boring.\

Hasnt gotten boring yet.

/and World of Warcraft...

KarmicDisaster: "we taste bad!"

Don't call us names, and most of all, please don't eat us....

brantgoose: Judging from the number of cartoons by different cartoonists, joy riding in an alien space craft is a fairly common human fantasy. One cartoon shows the aliens and humans getting drunking together while the "King" of the humans has a go in the alien spacecraft. The humans are hobos and their King is clearly drunk out of his skull judging from his erratic flight path.

And sometimes, the Earthling is a lucky bastard...

Ned Stark: Drinking certainly makes driving a piddly internal combustion powered vehicle more fun. Can't imagine the rule would be any different for a multi-ton FTL spacecraft with a reactionless drive.

Or on plutonian nyborg.

I will trade you a pint of absinthe for a thermos full of Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster.

Caffandtranqs: The "We are afraid of our propensity for violence" should have been accompanied with "Please save us from ourselves."

We have a Small Talent for War

I just hope they bring a cure for this burning sensation they left me with from their last visit.

/still wondering why they all spoke mexican

Starbuck being raped by a zombie? What sort of message are we trying to send these aliens?

I'm not sure we should say anything.
1. They are at or near our technological level: If they are close enough to build some kind of multi-generational ship there is a danger that they might see us as a threat and decide to 'exterminate' us just in case.

2. They are way beyond our technological level: Even if they're not close they could still see us as a threat or pest and decide to exterminate us.

I would hope technology would make a species more peaceful and intelligent but there is a chance that aliens might retain something like religion (superstition) which would make them emotionally unstable.

It would be interesting to see if, as a species learns more, it could handle the meaningless of life without going 'insane'. Right now the struggle for survival keeps us busy enough not to have to dwell on it. But, what happens when all our needs and even our desires are met? Can we find a reason to keep going? And if so, will it be a rational reason or a batshiat crazy religious/superstitious reason?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUaNHpxetyg&ytsession=oRbtGhou4sbpHxCz Q iYW_Mbz17GAbnsJTjxefsBuviA9SkiD75xa0pnDmsh5wZh8SmnnqnKQjUjhd8iHWm5H8GN oRhKC1no_JtegQU5o1_vu7Vayuo5To-kXP-B3giaOoIJXGN_aQBHvY5sL-S8inFRuFuiPB 1w0sMkWZ5pAuAHZs6yl-m4qb1gpYQNP9-qPzxAuRMz3IS39o6EZPRwf7OmTgeVPMRx1-R8 KLieppqeKZhtzYvYYFJQvseL-HJZxVb8vmXDDKlGiJ1JEDqFj-Dz3rNUm6XrxJ5Ew9TB2- gc6ev02WsZCFbkuZ02cMnnD9jQywocN-fqqm-AmbFqevegqwavjrxgC1o2kHruAjGjRlBc alpJV09hCi7xRH4Nqd7BpXE3HB3hVSZHOgsnWVO0NC7qB7h8zYdlfDbjfUoVBfMC-_QWt3 jhDh92cEI5Pw8Mcj8XLHTNpe_cVu_oZ_GTQDSdWDd0ctr9VzOFvJzmDna03Vwhq0-PyVjg UU759dQHMJML_d8XURDJvjZIfCnqUZBTcYD8UmA1zVs8Ab0tC8JLDCIv8AkdkhoXLKdoAQ Sm0VJU-q1tkiOen45rYU98PrrG5Z_daGMk8pRHekToOYibbEMGCMNGOTRDSIRyI-qd0xpf 4IS79UnjObSxmnnMQjhMy_Ns6fOMEltIay9q76vcZolFTHUvl52atwM2eip_tsOTAYhc

or
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNBV5hofD_U

/gotta learn a new "link" procedure...

RobSeace: [blog.seattlepi.com image 545x363]

Starbuck being raped by a zombie? What sort of message are we trying to send these aliens?

Starbuck was a man and would never get raped.

#11. "Suck my cawk, spacewhore!"