Moontanman

Such a super Earth would probably have a very dense atmosphere, this would be a double edged sword. The super Earth could stay warm much further away from it's sun that we are but be much harder to leave.

Doesn't the presence of heavy elements cause fusion to happen at lower mass? I think i read someplace about the first stars having to be much more massive due to a lack of elements heavier than helium. Carbon is significant if I remember, there is at least one star that has a unusual amount of transuranic elements. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Przybylski's_Star

Would aliens who evolved on a Super Earth be trapped due to the difficulty of leaving the planet? A Super Earth 16,000 miles in diameter with a similar density would have a volume 8 times Earth's, 4 times the surface area, and twice the gravity. Escape Velocity would be twice Earth normal? I'm not sure if my numbers are accurate but you get the idea. https://www.space.com/40375-super-earth-exoplanets-hard-aliens-launch.html

Intelligence is in the mind of the being defining it. We think of ourselves being the most intelligent creature on Earth because intelligence tests are designed by us and compared to us. Elephants have huge brains and are quite intelligent and if they were designing an intelligence test we would probably come up short in their minds...

My yongest son always asked "how Come"

No independant information is involved, just chemicals reacting in ways governed by physics. The information is imposed from without by us to make it easier to explain and quantify complexity... Complexity can arise and can be shown to arise spontaneously from kaos... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory

I used to be a bit of a heavy drinker, tequila was my poison of choice and drinking water was my secrete to no hangovers. When i was young we used to camp on the beach and surf fish all night, if your definition of surf fishing is drinking all night and taking your line out of the water if the fish become too annoying... In the morning after a night of drunken revelry while everyone else was lying around sick and throwing up I would be cooking bacon and eggs and laughing my ass off. Most of the guys refused to use my method due to being told that drinking water would make them sicker. Old wives tales are often incorrect...

I would have to disagree that there is no evidence for how abiogenesis came about, there is considerable evidence just not absolute evidence. There are more than one possibility for many of the necessary processes the possibility exists that there are more than one valid route to life. Artificial life like forms have been developed in many definitions of life but the path to our particular life is still unknown and may indeed be a synergy of more than one path. It's quite certain that eucaryote life like us... is a synergy of several different life forms combining in a symbiosis. I may not be a biologist but i have reproduced biologically.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis Once you get past the idea of a sudden appearance of a recognisable life form the idea becomes much more manageable. The process is thought to have been gradual not sudden and some would say inevitable under the correct circumstances. The one thing abiogenesis is not is chance, chance is not part of the process, chemicals react in ways governed by physics not chance... http://www.iflscience.com/physics/life-inevitable-consequence-physics/

The best hangover sure i know of is drinking water, large amounts of water, before, during, and after your alcohol bing. Not drinking too much is a much wiser route to avoiding a hangover...

There is a name for it Strange, it's called lying for god...

If we are expecting to see the equivalent of the UFP or the star ship Enterprise I think the expectations are totally unrealistic. The idea of colonising another Earth like planet is equally unrealistic as is terraforming another panet if for no other reason the time scales involved in terraforming if not the actual distances needed to be covered. I love to read science fiction and watch science fiction TV and movies but the more realistic ideas of slowly mining the galaxy for materials to build artificial habitats in the not so empty space between the stars doesn't really make for snappy episodes of tv or movies. Even small discrepancies in the parameters of another planet would make them uninhabitable to humans without some serious Genetic modification. Once you get past the idea of scouting the galaxy for habitable worlds and get down to building our own worlds the idea becomes much more realistic if more than a bit slow and boring. Colonising the galaxy in a few million years does not make for good drama but it does make sense. I have my doubts that any other civilization will want to do anything with alien worlds other than avoid them. The possibility of biological contamination in of itself is worrying if not the ethical issues of invasive species wiping out other ecosystems. Humans have done rather badly by doing this on Earth by allowing species to be spread outside their natural boundaries here in Earth and we share all our DNA with them. I can see the possibility of occasional visits by their equivalent of researchers but I would expect them to be few and far between and their presence would almost certainly mean they are already nearby and exploiting the raw materials of our own Oort cloud. I would expect such expeditions to only be sent out long after the Planetary system in question already has a long term colony of space habitats operating in the outer reaches of the worlds in question. While the revelation of this would probably not be as Earth shattering as some think it would be disturbing to our own future plans of expansion. IMHO even if UFOs do not represent an alien civilization visiting us they still have a potential tale to tell about how the human minds works and possibly even how mythology and religion originates. Another rather long shot is that UFOs themselves represent some sort of unknown natural phenomena that that has it's own value as furthering our knowledge of the universe... There are many reports with actual evidence that either represents something real or some sort of widespread natural tendency or conspiracy of human perception... There are reports that are either complete hoaxes or an actual extraordinary event, no third possibility exists... Firmenant? What exactly do you mean by firmenant? One possible explanation for the Fermi Paradox is that star travel is not reasonable unless the resources of the original planetary system has been turned into a Dyson Swarm. Even if controlled fusion never becomes possible we already have a fusion reactor nearby and we could break up the planets to make a dyson swarm consisting of the equivalent of a billion times the surface area of the Earth. How long would this take? would it ever really be over? Is there really any motivation to star travel?

I have to say me too! That is why i mostly fixate on old reports, youtube is full so full of fake stuff I think I'd have to be on the spot and see one land on the white house lawn and then I'd how it was faked... There is a guy near where i live who flies a lighted drone at night, I keep expecting to see it on youtube at anytime. The fact remains that something is going on or was and most arguments to the contrary were fixed by disinformation and unrealistic expectations...

It is important to note that the "me too" syndrome is a big part of UFOs but cherry picking reports is also a big part of the UFO phenomena. None of the pics you posted are impressive, all are easily explained. Why would someone looking to figure something out pass up the difficult for the easily explained unless they were looking for a predetermined explanation? I am not accusing you of that but that is how it has worked since the US Air Force "Project Sign" concluded that UFOs were likely interplanetary spacecraft. What would you have said if you were talking to this pilot? I was once asked that if UFOs were really alien spacecraft why didn't we ever find pieces of them. My reply was " I live under the flight path of an airport, dozens of airplanes fly over my house everyday, some so low I can see the faces of the pilots. Interestingly I have never seen or found a piece of an aircraft that fell off... The number of sightings that are extraordinary are not numerous but they are really interesting.

Here we go again should be tempered by the quality of the sighting but yeah the human desire of "me too" is rampant. I've tried it myself. several times when i was on the end of a fishing pier I would shout "he did you guys see that huge fish jump?" of course no fish jumped but the majority of the people would say "yeah i saw it" and start describing it in great detail. It works nearly every time. Herd mentality is a very strong thing in humans. I agree that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence warp drive is not required to colonise the galaxy. People who are used to living in O'Nell cylinders would be free to travel anywhere and when they find a chunk of matter they can top up volatiles or even stop and construct another habitat. Interstellar space is full of rocky/icy bodies and if you are using carbon as your main construction material the old one makes two and those make four and so on builds up quickly. All the photos you posted are low hanging fruit and easily explained, there are photos that defy explanation and sightings that really do make you go hmmm. I don't waste my time on reports that are either clear or obviously natural phenomenon. My hypothesis is that aliens avoid gravity wells unless they need something that only exists there or are studying a new intelligent species. Not wanting to interfere with impressionable savages is enough of a reason for them to not contact us and we only get fleeting glimpses of them. My own little dog and pony show is that civilizations ignore planets, too difficult and time consuming to terraform, bodies in the Oort clouds of stars are far more desirable and contain everything needed. And yet the 1952 sightings remain and only one has to be real. The first air force study of UFOs concluded they were interplanetary space craft. The Air Force brass shit a litter of kittens and demanded they come up with another explanation and that all sighting must be debunked.