(September 6, 2013 at 2:28 am)Lemonvariable72 Wrote: Or atleast have had a religion at some point in their history, I'm curious about this as a writer. (I know my english on these forums sucks)

Religion is very much the artifact of our particular psychology, which in turn is an artifact of our brain physiology. For example, I think it is fair to say a critical psycho/physiological trait of ours that gave us religion is the fact that our brains slip easily into using social behavioral circuitry evolved to deal with other members of our species to model non-social problems. This gave us all powerful god that is suspiciously full of the foibles we've come to expect from our fellow men, not to mention ourselves.
There are many other similar examples where it appears the particular way different thinking circuitry of brain is configured gives us our inclination and vulnerability towards religion.

since much of our physiology, including brain physiology that underpin our psychology, are as much the contingent product of the exact evolutionary path our species took to get to where we are as it is the product of necessecity imposed by where we are. It appears to me that even if an alien intelligence evolved in an environment broadly similar to our own, tge chances are still small that its physiology would have arrived at its current state along any path sufficiently close to our own that it too would share these particular quirks of our brain that gave us inclination and vulnerability towards religion.

So I would say the chances are any alien ever having what we might call religion in the sense attrubting things to an undemonstrated outside supernatural agent that they can interact with isn't high.

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(September 6, 2013 at 7:18 am)The Germans are coming Wrote: I am a hundred percent certain that a species that has advanced so far that it unlockes the secrets of intergalagtic space travel, will have left behind the dogmas of relegion before it ventured into a different solar system.

Why would you think all members of the species would have benefitted equally from such enlightenment as would be required attain intergalactic travel?

It really various on the culture and brain make up. In alot of sense they could be unified under a religion all the while be atheistic. I say it depends like many have stated on their brain make up, chemisty and culture. Religion does not always hold back intelligence. Any unifying force can spark technological innovation and the like.

(September 6, 2013 at 7:18 am)The Germans are coming Wrote: I am a hundred percent certain that a species that has advanced so far that it unlockes the secrets of intergalagtic space travel, will have left behind the dogmas of relegion before it ventured into a different solar system.

Unless their sole purpose for creating this technology was to go convert other aliens like us.

(September 6, 2013 at 3:05 am)wwjs Wrote: No doubt that they would have religion at some point but I don't think that they would still have it now.

I doubt this.

I can't prove why but the other side can prove no different.

There is no reason to think either side is right since it is all 100% speculation and cannot be based on anything we see or hear on our planet. Until we actually have experience with ET's we have nothing except raw guessing.

The universe is vast and if ET's are out there one could probably find that they had, have , and never had religions. All are possible and in a universe this side all are likely to have and are occurring as I type this.

(September 6, 2013 at 11:13 am)gall Wrote: There is no reason to think either side is right since it is all 100% speculation and cannot be based on anything we see or hear on our planet. Until we actually have experience with ET's we have nothing except raw guessing.

Obviously any speculation on this matter would be exactly that, speculation, but I'd of thought that goes without saying.

The thing is, the advanced form of life on this planet happens to have strong ties and history with religion. You can absolutely base speculation on that fact. Does it mean for certain that other forms of life out there would have similar histories or connections with what we call religion? No, but considering it has already happened once in the universe, it's not too far-fetched to speculate it may happen again in some form or another, should life be as abundant as I personally would guess it is out there.

I would argue similarly to Chuck, but ending up at diametrically opposite conclusions. I would argue that there are good reasons to expect convergent evolution to yield similar results regardless of the evolutionary pathway to that result.


These are rather gross generalizations, so forgive their crudity and omission of caveats. In general, though, the more complex the behaviors of an organism, the larger and more complex the organism, especially with regard to the biological systems that give rise to those behaviors. And while the reasons behind the dominance of sexual reproduction over asexual reproduction in organisms on earth is unclear, the widespread dominance suggest that it is a generalized solution to a general evolutionary problem. The two combined tend to result in species that are more likely to lean towards a K reproductive strategy rather than an r reproductive strategy (fewer offspring, more invested in each). This in itself contributes to selection pressures towards organisms with more complex behavioral repertoires. My conjecture is that consciousness and social behaviors are a likely consequence, and with the complexity and variability of such behavioral apparatus comes greater possibility for the capacities of the behavioral control machinery to combine to produce instrumentally useful behaviors that are not instrumentally useful as a consequence of their representative accuracy about some feature of the world (religion being a prime example). The only wild card is what role language plays, and whether the development of language and symbolic thought is a convergent evolutionary solution. I personally suspect that consciousness itself originated early in the evolution of animals as a control feedback loop for navigating and exploiting the internal and external environment of the organism, but others may disagree; as a result, I see the type of cognitive capacities and behaviors that exist in higher land and marine animals as converging on similar cognitive tool sets which has the potential to give rise to religious mental behaviors.

If the extraterrestrial life is highly evolved, I imagine it would have no need for religion.

(September 6, 2013 at 11:25 am)Napoléon Wrote:

(September 6, 2013 at 11:13 am)gall Wrote: There is no reason to think either side is right since it is all 100% speculation and cannot be based on anything we see or hear on our planet. Until we actually have experience with ET's we have nothing except raw guessing.

Obviously any speculation on this matter would be exactly that, speculation, but I'd of thought that goes without saying.

The thing is, the advanced form of life on this planet happens to have strong ties and history with religion. You can absolutely base speculation on that fact. Does it mean for certain that other forms of life out there would have similar histories or connections with what we call religion? No, but considering it has already happened once in the universe, it's not too far-fetched to speculate it may happen again in some form or another, should life be as abundant as I personally would guess it is out there.

Guess you missed the part of my post stating that because it is vast that all three scenarios are likely to have already happened.

Some have no religion
some have had religion
some still have religion

Hey they had a "religion" in the chronicles of riddick and if I remember their leader while he did suck could pull a soul out of a body. You never know lol...

All the guessing in the world based on what we see here is still just a shot in the dark. Things could exist out there that defy 100% of what we see. I really hope they do. If not it would get pretty boring in such a large space.


who knows maybe Xenu is actually out there someplace...

I would agree with Germans. There is a time, I would hope anyway, where each individual nation and race will give up those claims and solidify the "human race." Eventually l should think our planet will hit that point when overpopulation has pushed us all to merge all our individual states and countries into endless cities.

Unless of course nuclear winter wins out.

By that point I would also hope that as a "human race" we would have agreed that religion isn't getting us anywhere (and fast!) and advancement is far more important.

That's a lot of hope though. Jokes on the future denizens, I'll be dead long before we have to modernize the Amish and African colonies. Imagine what kind of debate that would be.

But of course it's impossible to know without meeting E.T. and finding out about their evolution and cultures. Personally, I think Pat Robertson is trying to keep himself alive long enough to try to convert them all when we find them.

(September 11, 2013 at 3:54 pm)Heir Apparent Wrote: By that point I would also hope that as a "human race" we would have agreed that religion isn't getting us anywhere (and fast!) and advancement is far more important.

Members of human race instinctively try to screw the race in order to get ahead within the race. This is why "profit maximization" is considered a much more realistic objective function in economic modeling than "global optimization".