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Winning the E.T. Lottery
Consul writes "Space.com has a cute story about the statistical probabilities that we have been visited by an alien civilzation. He seems to make a convincing argument."
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The probabilities for either event are infinitesimal, at least in my opinion, yet here we are. Even if you discount the above two occurences and bring up intelligent design or pure creation you're faced with yet one more improbability:
If you look at any of the probabilities they seem to point to a vanishingly small probability that even the simplest forms of life exist, let alone any intelligent life. Yet we're here.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
You can get rid of all of this probability crap by just accepting that aliens actually started life on this planet. Say million and millions of years ago, some aliens were joy riding through the galaxy and saw a nicely forming planet and decided to start up their own personal "ant farm". They spice up our water/air/primordial-soup with some pre-life cake mix and then fly away. They tell all their friends to come and visit when they get the chance, you know, just to look in and see how things are going. Well, then we get visited by aliens for the next few billions years (assume they have long life spans, or collective memories).
Seems this scenario gets rid of all of his improbable probabilities. They started everything off, so they KNEW where to come to find us (well, not us, but whatever did come of their little project).
Heck, he convinced me, if aliens have visited us then aliens must have started life here. Everything else is just too unbelievable.
--David
...is that, either:
1) Faster-than-light (FTL, warp, whatever) travel is possible, and nobody's invaded us because there's some overarching federation of planets that's keeping us protected from outside influence until we're ready, and that's way cool.
or
2) FTL travel is not possible, and so nobody's coming here 'cause it's just not worth the trip. And that's depressing as hell.
Am I missing anything?
The problem with this is that analysis like this are simply interesting reading and speculation. Nothing more. Barely science and really not past the hypothesis stage (there is no evidence he is correct).
I can find good arguments for both why or why not other worlds may have life or intelligent life.
-Sean
All it takes is for someone, somewhere to build an intelligent(ish) self-replicating machine programmed to spread throughout the galaxy - one per interesting star system.
Such a system could cover the entire galaxy in a couple of million years easily (and cheaply after initial design/construction cost). They can do whatever you like; sit and watch, make contact, try to destroy any competitors (The Forge of God style; soon to become a set of movies, yay), and call home (since you end up with a network of them; sure, it'll take a while to get back home, but it's one hell of a cheap way to learn an awful lot about the galaxy).
Given that it only takes one civilization to have done this, and given that our solar system is probably quite interesting given it's layout, I wouldn't put too high odds on there NOT being such a device hanging around near here.
If aliens exist and perfected something similar to cryo-freeze, and had extremely long lifespans to boot, I'm sure nearly all of them that fit into that category would eventually hit Earth on their tour of the Universe.
Pioneer
It should be pointed out that if extraterrestrials are visiting earth, it is highly probable that they have some means of travel that exceeds the speed of light (wormholes or something?). I won't speculate on how this is done, since I'm not a physicist.
However, if they do have the resources to do this, then it would be reasonable for them to be able to set up monitoring stations all over the galaxy (in the space of a few million years) to listen for the radio signature of a new intelligent civilization popping into existance (ours, sadly, was Adolf Hitler). Said monitoring station would use whatever technology allows them to exceed the speed of light, and send a message back to their home base letting them know that somebody just invented television.
After that, the aliens hop into their little flying saucers, head for earth, abduct people, and probe their nether regions.
At any rate, the article is bunk, because the assumptions it takes are a bit too selective, and it fails to explore some very obvious possibilities.
According to the most popular view of this matter, extraterrestrial craft have been flitting across our skies since 1947.
...not for billions of years)... maybe thousands, but not millions. The ratio part: A few dozen to us may be .000000002% of our population, but a couple thousand of them might be the same percentage... Who cares about boreno? Earth probably holds a great intrest to them... more than borneo to us.
I thought the most popular view was that they have been visiting for thousands of years... depicted in writing and art all throughout history...
That's 55 years in a planetary history of 4,600,000,000 years.
What about their planet's history? It's possible that they havent been able to travel to other planets for that entire time... more like a couple thousand years? Then the ratio is more realistic. (I just love misleading journalists...)
it implies that there have been millions of expeditions to Earth! We may send the occasional anthropological research team to Borneo, but we don't send millions.
Think ratio and intrest... first, it doesn't emply millions (how long have they been able to get here?
And it's a lot easier to get to Borneo than to traverse hundreds or thousands of light-years.
Before our technology developed, we couldn't even get across the damn ocean... so boreno would be a pretty hard place to get to for us thousands of years ago (...from the US). It's probably pretty easy for them to traverse "hundreds of thousands of light-years".... if they even have to go that far. I doubt they come from the other side of the galaxy...
Let's set aside the question of whether advanced galactic societies would have the slightest interest in our wars, our pollution problems, or our reproductive systems.
Why do you think humans research organisims on our own planet? We even hold a great interest in organisims at the bottom of the sea where we thought that life couldn't exist... We're different from them, and they have a hunger for knowledge...
The real question is, how would they know about us at all?
...telescopes? Passing by one day? Sub-atomic microtransponder galactic scanners that they have and we havent even imagined up yet? There are plenty of ways to find us...
I'd comment on the microwave signals we've sent out and your opinion on that... but there are other ways of them knowing we're here... (that takes care of about 3 paragraphs)
One sided journalism gets to me... so now I had to go and balance it out...
Statistical Probabilities = 1
Actual Cold, Hard Evidence = 0
Math Nerds REJOICE!
Science Geeks LAUGH!
"And like that
Sometimes I feel as though one should need a license to practise maths.
It makes little sense to calculate the probability of something that has already occurred. If we have been visited (and as a self-described space nut, I'll admit I find the possibility positively knee-weakening), then that stands as evidence on its own that our being visited is possible.
I have heard similar arguments for why the end of the human race is very near. The reasoning goes, that since the human population is always growing, it is more probable that I would be born in the 20th century than in any century prior. But wouldn't it then be even more probable if I were born in the 25th century? In fact, the chances of my being born in the 20th century would be vanishingly small. Therefore, it is safe to assume that there will be no people in the 25th century.
You can prove nearly any crazy idea with this kind of "thinking."
"I'm a rocket man / Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone." - Sir Elton John
Along with the other holes pointed out in the article, one big one is that the author has apparently never read 2001.
Perhaps "They" visited us some time ago, and decided the planet was interesting. This decision may have occurred millions of years ago; scientific optimism aside, I have a hard time swallowing the idea that Earth is a perfectly normal, usual planet with nothing exceptional about that fact that it is teeming with billions of varieties of life. So they leave themselves a probe that can be triggered by something, probably the same radio signals that everyone points out. (Detectable, and much easier to be certain of intelligent origination then nuclear blasts, which can look an awful lot like asteroid strikes from far away. You can do signal analysis on the radio...)
Then they pushed a grant through the Galatic Science Foundation, hopped into their FTL spacecraft, came here, and started anally probing lots and lots of drunk and mentally distrubed people.
Don't believe in aliens myself, but this scenario is a major gaping hole in the article. In fact, any intelligence half as curious as us would need some good reason not to leave a probe around something as interesting as Earth...
It appears, depressingly, that modern physics is telling us that FTL travel is not possible, and never will be.
Actually, our existing understanding of physics suggests several interesting possible approaches to FTL travel. These are already being studied to some extent; time will show whether they're practical or not.
We also have enough gaps in our understanding to leave room for potential methods of FTL travel. We just know that it isn't terribly easy, if it is possible.
I think that is the most likely explanation. No civilizations make routine interstellar trips simply because it is so expensive.
That's one possibility.
Another is that life is uncommon enough that even frequent-FTL-travelling civilizations wouldn't be near enough to us to have found us.
Another is that the active lifetime of civilizations tends to be short enough that nobody happened to be alive (or at least interested in contacting people) during our history to contact us.
Or a combination of the above.
It will be interesting when we finally have enough information to be reasonably sure which is the case.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
I go for your #1, because of what I call the Bombs-to-starships gap.
Even today with the paltry stuff we practice, space travel is horribly energy-intensive. While it's believable that we'll get more efficient, we still don't have much interplanetary travel, much less interstellar. We will have to acquire the ability to control more energy.
My premise: If a species has more than the slightest tendancy to use weapons against itself, it will not survive to build starships. That includes us. We have the next few centuries to burn some of our most terrible aggressiveness out of ourselves, or else we'll use that same energy to blow ourselves up. Actually, the Cold War was a great success story, since we *did* develop a survival mechanism that held us through half a century. We've more work to do, because greater energies are on their way, with more chance for abuse. Moreover we've got to improve the common man, as rather common men turned relatively safe transportation devices into bombs last year.
One hole in the theory - alien psychology such as a highly xenophobic hive-mind.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
You should better evaluate whether your hypothesis about coin being fair is true much earlier than 10000000 tosses. Suppose that your "quarter" actually has two heads side, and you would notice such an oddity with 0.9999999999 probability. Also there is 0.000000000001 probability that coin is rigged in some other way. What can be said about outcome of next toss? p(Heads)=1. With an unlimited precision maths library you can have a lot of 9s, after "0." instead of a boring "1", if you are so inclined.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
Aliens visit us all the time. Those nasty grays are always letting their El Chupacabras run loose.u ncoveror.com/chupa2.htm/ chupa3.htm
n coveror.com/martians.htmm /mars2.htmh tm
. uncoveror.com/microunix.htm
One in California bred with a dog, and a Chupa pup is wreaking havoc in Massachusetts.
http://www.uncoveror.com/chupa.htm
http://www.
http://www.uncoveror.com
http://www.uncoveror.com/chupa4.htm
They have attacked us with Solaranite.
http://www.uncoveror.com/invaders.htm
The Air Force and NASA know it, and are covering it up!
http://www.uncoveror.com/ufos.htm
http://www.u
http://www.uncoveror.co
http://www.uncoveror.com/zhtitikofft.
And we got UNIX from the computers on the Roswell UFO! Microsoft has even used this alien technology.
http://www.uncoveror.com/aliens.htm
http://www
We report this stuff on The Uncoveror all the time, but people still don't seem to know about it!
(music)It's my website, ans I'll deep-link if I want to!(/music)
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
>>Are you ready for the answer? ... 50%
50% NOT - because probability is based on the facts - how a certain entity has behaved in the past and not on how *you* think it should behave.
How about this scenario? We've only been 'civilized' for about 10,000 years, and already we're on the cusp of medical, computer, nanotechnology, and other breakthrus that will transcend us far beyond being mere humans. That means the window of 'pre-advanced' civilization is extremely small. Intelligent life basically goes from nothing to beyond everything in a very short time. This means if an advanced civilization should accidently happen upon us while we're in that 'pre-advanced' state, we would be VERY VERY interesting to them. They would try not to interefere, so they could continue to study us, but just couldn't help sending as many researchers as possible. I think it's a great explanation for why we never really are able to prove we've been visited, but why bumpkins in the backwoods keep reporting lots of encounters.
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
Leave it to an article on alien visitations to bring out the most hilarious and illogical opinions on everything from probability to theology. I have been studying, nonacademically admittedly, the idea of the presence of nonhuman intelligence on Earth for a good 40 years, and no-one ever seems to really get the point. There is only one set of primary conditions that would lead to such a reality:
1) Detection--there must be a way, not necessarily technical, to determine from afar that Earth is of some interest to visit--random discovery just doesn't cut it in terms of a very large universe, and
2) Means--it must be possible to get here from there. This implies a way around special relativity or its disproval, or it implies close physical proximity, a case ignored by most researchers since Donald Keyhoe claimed there were aliens based under the surface of Mars.
Those two conditions are both necessary and sufficient to guarantee the presence of aliens on Earth. Everything else is just blowing smoke rings.
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
...And instead gives the improbable scenario of aliens stopping by tens or hundreds of millions of times over the Earth's history. This would take a significant expenditure of resources, to little end
Why not just drop a probe in orbit after they dump the cake mix? E.T. phone home...
It's a heck of a lot easier, plus NORAD probably can't even detect them today. Heck, we can barely find grazing asteroids. Stick one at a LaGrange point, and I doubt we'd ever see it.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The age of the earth doesn't matter for this kind of calculation. What matters is the propensity for space travel of aliens, the duration of trips, the prevalence of earth-like planets, the expected lifetime of spacefaring civilizations, and the ability of aliens to detect earth-like planets.
We have not visited you. Really.
Thanks.
-- AC
A probability this complex can only be observed, not computed. Observed probabilities are meaningless with a sample size of one.
It is true, of course, that if we see, say, 1 visit per year (the same spacecraft flying around the planet a few times, resulting in many sightings), there must have been 1 million visits over the last million years, but so what? A million years is a long time.
Of course, more likely, aliens pick planets to visit based on whether they might harbor interesting life forms, which means that the frequency of visits probably has increased greatly over the last hundreds of millions of years.
It seems pretty unlikely that aliens frequent our modest little sphere. I just can't see what they would get from a field trip, that they can't get from our broadcasts for free. To say nothing of what they might think of the broadcasts that deal with the what ifs surrounding our discovery of their excursions.
I suppose I wonder what void does this willingness to believe in E.T. fill? Does God seem remote and unbelievible to some, and they have this need to believe in something greater? Or does it flow from our secret belief that we are infinitely fascinating and deserving of attention? Now that we know our tiny blue home isn't the geographic center of the universe are some people trying to reinvent it as the social center?
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
Well, since we have yet to discover what exactly makes us sentient
This is not strictly speaking true evolutionary science has a pretty good hypothesis.
Evoloution is a balance between Natural Selection (survival) and Sex Selection (propagation). When a species achieves top carnivore status it is no longer predated it become possible to seek out alternative strategies. Natural selection become relatively less important than sexual selection. One such strategy is the development of intelligence, communications ability, even altruism. In the same way that Natural Selection can cause an arms race, Sex Selection drives a similar race in intelligence, communications ability and altruism.
A similar features appear in many top carnivores, Whales and African Wild Dogs for two examples exhibit a very high intelligence, unusual communication abilites and altruism.
His analogy about the aliens having to make millions of trips to earth on a regular basis being unlikely since we don't send millions of teams to borneo is faulty, since (1) we're talking about an extended period of tens or hundreds of thousands of years, over which a million trips to borneo for your entire civilization might not seem so unlikely, and (2) the alien civilization, being older, is likely to have more common and easy access to interstellar travel than we can conceive, so comparing our difficulty in getting to borneo and their difficulty in getting to earth might not be compatible. Consider your difficulty in getting to Paris from New York in a concorde, compared to the effort our Neolithic ancestors would have to take to walk even a few dozen miles, even with shoes, clothing, and other tools to aid them. We can only speculate as to how difficult or easy interstellar travel might be for the average extraterrestrial.