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Winning the E.T. Lottery

Posted by michael on from the offer-them-reeses dept.

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."

8 of 80 comments (clear)

  1. Vanishingly small probabilities by eXtro · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I'd counter with two initial questions:

    1. What's the probability that primitive life evolved?
    2. What's the probability that intelligent life evolved?


    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:

    1. What's the probability of the spontaneous existance of a supreme being?


    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

  2. He ignores one possible solution... by Bobo_The_Boinger · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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
  3. The way I like to look at it... by dschuetz · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ...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?

    1. Re:The way I like to look at it... by Strange+Ranger · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Apparently gravity travels much faster than the speed of light.

      A href=http://www.metaresearch.org/cosmology/gravity / peed_limit.asp>The Speed of Gravity

      Way cool stuff.

      --

      Operator, give me the number for 911!
  4. Bit unimaginative. by Fweeky · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  5. What is 'time' by hackwrench · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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

  6. Wrong numbers... by Transcendent · · Score: 2, Interesting

    According to the most popular view of this matter, extraterrestrial craft have been flitting across our skies since 1947.

    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? ...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.

    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...

  7. So how common is life in the universe? by Lars+T. · · Score: 4, Interesting
    This tries to give the answer - almost. For those to lazy to read the whole paper, these Australien scientists conclude that:
    It is sometimes assumed that the rapidity of biogenesis on Earth suggests that life is common in the Universe. Here we critically examine the assumptions inherent in this if-life-evolved-rapidly-life-must-be-common argument. We use the observational constraints on the rapidity of biogenesis on Earth to infer the probability of biogenesis on terrestrial planets with the same unknown probability of biogenesis as the Earth. We find that on such planets, older than ~ 1 Gyr, the probability of biogenesis is > 33% at the 95% confidence level. This quantifies an important term in the Drake Equation but does not necessarily mean that life is common in the Universe.
    Warning: uses math heavily, and thus can be derided as simply theoretic. Hah-hah.
    --

    Lars T.

    To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck