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Drake on Drake: ET Life A Certainty
astro writes "Frank Drake, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the SETI Institute applies Occam's Razor to his own Drake equation: 'Life should appear very frequently on other Earth-like planets. There will be microbial life nearby the solar system.' The simplest scenario is that 'Not Life' has a nearly identical number of assumptions as 'Life.' The contrasting view is that experimentation can prove it--but how many times did life independently create itself while the Earth changed through the whole spectrum of what biological forces might conjure up elsewhere. A sample size of 1 is in fact an experimental sample size of many--just here during Earth's climatic history."
A sample size of 1 is in fact an experimental sample size of many--just here during Earth's climatic history
Ummm....Im sorry, but I thought that there was, perhaps many singular events where life was formed billions of years ago, but simple evolution and extinction dont "scale" to be equivalent to non-life becoming life.
Furthermore, I recall reading a book..."Probability 1", that spend several chapters mucking around before submitting a "proof" that there must be intelligent life elsewhere...As I recall, it hinged on one instance of life, which is us.
William of Ockham - "One should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything."
Francis Drake - "My whole life's work, from SETI to the Drake equation to the 1970's Arecibo radio transmission, depends on their being aliens somewhere in the Universe, so I'll pop up every year or so and assert that ET does exist so I won't be a failure.
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I'm just an ordinary man with nothing to lose.
Congratulations! You've just described Fermi's Paradox.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Why would intelligent life want to talk to earth? Indeed, why would it want to talk to anyone? If there is other intelligent life out there that managed to survive more than a few thousand years, maybe they just figured out that staying home taking care of their own planet is a lot more pleasant than traveling around the universe in tin cans or holding conversations with hundreds of years of lag.
"The question, then, is why hasn't anyone found Earth yet, if the probability for life is so high?"
It might sound silly, but perhaps the need to explore is something only us earth-bound folks feel the need to do.
What if, say, a greatly advanced life-form existed on Neptune, but was content to create a "utopian" life on their own planet, with no need to explore?
The one thing we as humans fail in every time is that we assume all these aliens will be similar to us in their needs to explore, propogate, and conquer.
Maybe the answer is that they don't care about us, until we come to them.
Just some random ramblings
Sent from your iPad.
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... no we haven't found any. Sort of a "Men in Green clean up team".
Considering that it took almost no time to get here, it will take even less time to get to point where we would be leapfrogging across the galaxy, colonizing everywhere. Within the next 30,000 years we'll have had more than enough time to have distributed explorers to every inhabitable/explorable planet in the galaxy.
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1. I beleive the "higher life forms" claim is already satisfied if there are worms present. If they are really demanding, think of rats.
2. The earth might have been 'found' and visited, way back when, when they built stone henge and those outlines in the andes, but then they decided that we are too dumb and anyways we have only one opposable digit per appendage, so they left us alone and put a sign up; "Do not Disturb", so all that happens every now and then is a few adolecent aliens swoop by in a flying saucer they stole from their father and abduct a few people of whom they know that no-one will ever beleive them. And about the 'Artefacts', either they are there and we are looking at them, or
3. Time. The biggest barrier in Space. If we are around only since a half a heartbeat, other civilisations might have sprung up, conquered the galaxy and then contracted Space Herpes and died out. Rise and Fall of empires.
4. Life has evolved as many times as they claim, and as many times they have been in half a heartbeat at the brink of leaping from planet to planet, but then decided that they don't like they way the guys from the other continent pronounce "Smoerebrod" and start a war that destroys all inhabitants of the planet. Maybe not getting wiped out is the final IQ test.
I am basically agreeing with you, but there too many factors that could make their theory work.
Flup
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People are more violently opposed to fur than leather because its easier to harass rich women than motorcycle gangs.
It has been brought up several times that an advanced civilization would have propagated throughout our galaxy. It is important to keep in mind the size of our galaxy. I have been brought up believing in the unlimited nature of technology, but what if it really is impossible to travel at speeds greater than or close to c? Using the technology from our sci-fi it is easy to spread throughout the galaxy; but if warp drives and jumping through wormholes isn't feasible, how far is it worth exploring? Another interesting thought, if another civ has advanced to the point of interstellar travel, then clearly their tech is WAY beyond ours. Its pretty cocky to think that we could detect them, we just got to the point where we can detect radio waves (just a little over a hundred years) Perhaps they don't want us to detect them, maybe they don't want to interfere. Maybe they do interfere and we just aren't aware. Just a long shot analogy here, but are ants cognizant of our lawnmower or if we dropped food. We may only be ants in comparison to a an alien race that has mastered interstellar travel.
How about this: Fermi seems to assume exponential growth in the size of the "empires". This is a bad model for just about everything except in the very short term. The best you'll do is linear growth in the long term, which isn't nearly as overwhelming.
It seems logical, that any intelligent alien life, which came across us, would take note, that we are moving along quite quickly with our technology, and who are they to come in and say "You've got it all wrong!" Leave us be, and wait for us to catch up. If these aliens are there, they're simply employing a trait my father taught me years ago.
Give a man a fish, you've fed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, you've fed him for life.
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if the civilisation is less advanced than us, then they can't.
or
if the civilisation is more advanced than us, then they have nothing to gain.
I think.
I recently rewatched "V - the series" and "V - the final battle". For those few here that haven't seen it, a bunch of seemingly humanoid aliens come to earth. However, these aliens end up being lizards who wear human skin to disguise themselves. A group of partisans realize the intent behind these aliens (to steal our water and use us for food).
One of the partisans makes what I consider a pretty good point (and makes this whole post on-topic). He notions the idea that unlike Earth, where some sort of disaster (meteor) wipes out many of the reptile species, the alien planet had no such disruption and the reptiles were free to evolve into sentient human-like beings.
Perhaps this is far-fetched. However, it is possible given our current idea of evolution. Why couldn't reptiles evolve into conscious beings? I'm not very knowledgable about the physiology of the human brain, but I do remember that temperature may have been a big factor in our evolution. The again, the word may implies that no one really knows exactly how evolution occured, and until we do I would say it is possible that reptiles may very well have been a predominent life on this planet if not for the meteor or whatever that wiped out all the dinosaurs.
Why is it that every so-called "troll countermeasure" implemented in Slashcode seems to go out of it's way to curb legitimate posting, while doing absolutely nothing to stop trolling and crapflooding?
Is in Toolmaker Koan. Lousy book, interesting premise. The premise is that progress comes through conflict, and that any society with the social drive to achieve the technology necessary for space travel is - axiomatically - so conflicted that it always bombs itself back to the stone age.
It's hard to argue against. We haven't destroyed ourselves - yet - but then again, we haven't achieved space travel either. I don't count holding our breath while we dash out, touch the moon, and dash back. That's proof of concept. When we get a self sufficient and growing colony on another planet, get back to me.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
This assumption that life must have evolved elsewhere if it did on earth is utterly ridiculous. Consider the chances of the simplest possible single celled life being created. Now try and imagine this happening twice in the same universe. Ridiculous. (and natural selection plays no role since we are talking about the simplest life):
c ie nces39.html
"To claim life evolved is to demand a miracle. The simplest conceivable form of single-celled life should have at least 600 different protein molecules. The mathematical probabilitya that only one typical protein could form by chance arrangements of amino acid sequences is far less than 1 in 10^450. To appreciate the magnitude of 10^450, realize that the visible universe is about 10^28 inches in diameter.
From another perspective, suppose we packed the entire visible universe with a "simple" form of life, such as bacteria. Next, we broke all their chemical bonds, mixed all atoms, then let them form new links. If this were repeated a billion times a second for 20 billion years under the most favorable temperature and pressure conditions throughout the visible universe, would one bacterium of any type reemerge? The oddsb are much less than one chance in 10^99,999,999,873. Your odds of drawing at random one preselected atom out of a universe packed with atoms is about one chance in 10^112--much better. "
http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/LifeS
Intelligent life has clearly evolved many times on earth, from dinosaurs to dolphins, octopi to owls.
Is there any strong evidence that no technological intelligence ever evolved on earth before America was born (irony)? I mean before humans came along?
If we all died tomorrow in an asteroid blast, what evidence would there be of our existence in a mere million years?
There was good article on this in New Scientist once which concluded the answer was 'little'.
Just a weird thought.
-- Of course, Fermi's Paradox assumes that intersteller flight is possible.
Sure.
-- It also fails to take into account that without FTL flight empire building would be impossible.
First of all you seem to be thinking in terms of emipres when federations seem more plausible when we are talking about a space faring life that is going all out on a galaxy mapping project.
-- What you would end up with would be a collection of diverse planets with similar species on who would have little idea of where they came from.
Let's think this through. We have a space faring life form that has the tech to go everywhere...and then you believe they would have sudden amnesia on planetfall??? Do you see how stupid this argument is? Did the first European settlers in the US forget where they came from? I just don't think so
-- These new societies would then have to develop a spacefaring culture before moving on.
No they don't. You wold find it simpler to have a probe that either built new probes that travelled on, or a flyby probe that sent down landing probes. No manned missions are even necessary.