The aliens were tripedal, not bipedal, like we are. That's why.

My reference was to how everything on Rama was in triplicate. At the end of the first book, one of the astronauts was lamenting about how so little time they had to explore Rama before it left our solar system and another astronaut tells him to wait until the next one comes because everything the Ramans did was in threes so the could expect two more ships to pass through.
BTW, as a guy I'm tripedal. It's just that my middle leg is much shorter than the other two.
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But who is to say an alien civilization isn't so advanced that they have already solved the light speed problem.
So, the thing is some barriers are not actually physical. There never was a physical barrier to the speed of sound. It was just a technological problem - one we eventually solved with jets that go faster than Mach 1.
Einstein said nothing in the universe can go faster than light. But. We know the physics of what we know, and I agree, maybe a civilization a billion years older has realized something maybe we and Einstein didn't ... that law is actually not as insurmountable as we think.
In Contact, Carl Sagan concluded ... as have most sci fi authors ... the solution is wormholes. Now, BTW, they may naturally occur in the universe. We don't yet know how to MAKE them. Again, with technology far in advance of ours ... ? [/quote]
The problem is, as pointed out in
Contact, is we need to think like Vegans (aliens). We see space travel problem the way humans see then and not as aliens see them.
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Were the "aliens" in "The Abyss" aliens or locals we hadn't contacted before.
It's never directly answered, but it seems to be implied they were aquatic beings from another planet, and being aquatic in nature, they settled in at the bottom of our oceans.
That they've been observing us for a while, and not sure whether we were a threat to them ... well, that was the plot of the film. [/quote]
My take was they have always been here but keeping their distance from humans until it came to the point humans were on the verge of destroying the Earth. If they were aliens, they hadn't intervened in human affairs before so if humans were going to destroy the world the aliens could have just flow away and leave us to our madness.
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We may receive a signal from another intelligent life for but by the time we reply to them and get a response back we'll be long gone.
Unless, as in Contact, the signal provides the specs for a device to reach them.

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We now know to think in three-dimensions rather than two dimensions.