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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.
---
I'm just an ordinary man with nothing to lose.
I'm always leery of the term "Certain" when a key premise is time on the order of billions of years.
The assumptions presented in the article cannot be proved or disproved. What does it help us to state "Not Life has as much chance as life" or "Consider our existence as proof".
Although I tend to believe there is intelligent life in the universe outside of Earth, I'm not sure this argument serves as proof or even a good starting point for a proof.
I think we ought to just be content saying there might be a chance that other intelligent life exists and we'll get to proving it through empirical data. Then if everything checks out we can go applying theory, probability, and predictions. Until then, this stuff is simply philosophy - the earth was flat until we found out it was not.
If you play it by the numbers, then yes, life should occur frequently. By even the paltry data we've already collected, life should be abundant and soon even reachable.
This has a unintended but frightening implication, however.
Humans have existed as a sapient, technological species for approximately 30000 years (and that's generous, really). That means that in the cosmic equivalent of a the beginnings of a heartbeat, we've gone from caves to extraplanetary exploration, and our technology curve will only accelerate from here on out.
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.
The question, then, is why hasn't anyone found Earth yet, if the probability for life is so high? Either every civilization gets wiped out long before they can begin galactic exploration (without exception--a pretty difficult thing to imagine, unless you're an apocalyptic environmentalist), or, perhaps more frightening in an indirect sense, there simply aren't any other intelligent civilizations in the galaxy.
You'd think that even if ancient astronauts had found Earth, we would have uncovered at least SOME sort of artifact. After all, playing the probabilities, if one civilization found us, it would be overwhelmingly likely that many, many others would be able to, and would. So far we've got nothing.
It's a difficult reality to accept, but it may very well be that we're alone in the galaxy, and perhaps even in the universe.
I am always amazed at the extent of humanity's arrogance, or at least our blind optimism, when I read about the logical arguments about the likelihood of intelligent life outside the solar system.
Perhaps there is, but I can't imagine limiting ourselves to looking for multicellular, carbon-based, or RNA-based life, or for that matter any form of life patterned upon that on Earth. It seems to me astronomically more likely that highly organized or self-conscious matter found elsewhere would not be recognizable to us as what we would call "life".
I have slowed down my participation in the SETI@home project because I have become increasingly skeptical that other life forms would happen to care enough about radio frequency communications to build a transmitter. I consider it at least equally likely that extraterrestrial life forms are more interested in gazing at their own navels than evolving the means for the complex physical arrangements of materials necessary for instrumentalities designed to emit radio signals.
The yearning to communicate with other beings is both honored as a deeply "human" characteristic, and asserted as a likely goal of extraterrestrial life, but I think we have to choose one or the other, and get realistic about the chances of finding other societies sufficiently similar to us that we could detect each other.
Making assumptions based solely on a knowledge that we, intelligent beings posses, seems wrong, though. Why does the life/intelligence have to be in a form known to us? Wouldn't this make a possibility of ET Life even greater then?
That either FTL (faster then Light) travel is utterly impossibly, or that civilations that discover FTL are few and far between.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
Occam's Razor, that 'The simplest answer is most often the correct one.' has no actual logical value behind it. I don't think it should be used in an logical argument. Think about how often a complex solution is the answer. Quantum Physics vs. Classical Physics, for instance. Heck, Science in general has shown that the world operates in way that are often more complex then they seem.
We have a sample size of only one, and that this sample resulted in intelligent life is a given (else we wouldn't be here to make observations on it.) We do however have some timing information. From this we see:
1) Life evolved on Earth pretty much as soon as conditions were stable enough to allow it. This suggests that bacterial life is highly likely.
2) It took at least hundreds of millions of years to develop Eukariotic life (big cells with a nucleus, such as we are made of, as opposed to bacteria.) This means that this step might be rare.
3) It took about 3 billion years to evolve differentiated multicellular life. This means that this step could be exceedingly rare.
4) Multicellular life evolved into a vast array of designs in a just a few million years (the 'Cambrian explosion'.) This means that once multicellular life starts, it will quickly produce complex forms.
5) From the Cambrian explosion to us is something like 500 million years. This is an intermediate time scale that makes it hard to judge how likely intelligent life is.
Disclaimer: I'm not 100% sure of some of the timescales above. It is all from memory.
Disclaimer 2: The Edicara fauna complicate the picture above on the origin of multicellular life, depending on how you interpret them.
Disclaimer 3: All the above is merely probabilistic. E.g. if the evolution of bacterial life is very rare, there is still a 5% chance that it will have occurred during the first 5% of the available time. Therefore we can't strongly exclude the possiblity that the evolution of bacterial life is hard.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
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.
When it comes to Drake related wonderings.
There's the thought that its almost an absolute certainty that intellegent life has evolved elsewhere, and probably in vast numbers of individual civilizations.
On the other hand, the theory goes that within a few hundred years, we'll have the ability to (and therefore probably will) send generation ships to other solar systems. If we are to assume that 500 years after each colony is settled, it launches its own generation ship to the next solar system, the entire galaxy could be colonized in a matter of a few million years. This is of course assuming that most of the colonies don't manage to kill themselves off.
The point being, since a few million years is a cosmic blink of the eye, if any intellegent life DID exist, either it should be everywhere already, or all previous incarnations have wiped themselves out before they've had a chance to travel beyond their home world. Either that, or they're leaving us alone. After all, we ARE rather far away from anything. Its possible that a 4.3 lightyear stretch is too far to consider useful. And its also possible that we're the result of such a colonization project and everyone forgot about it, or were dumped here without knowing to begin with. Or maybe they knew and simply never passed it on. Its not like a lot of folklore has lasted for 30K years.
So, to recap this rant. Assuming there IS intellegent life, its already everywhere it wants to be, and either we're a part of it, or it's decided to completely leave us alone.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Personally, I find it hard to get worked up about ET algae or whatever. I mean, it's a good thing in terms of implications for habitability of other worlds, terraforming, etc. But every time someone trots out an argument about how easy it is for life to arise in the universe, people assume that once you have life at all, you have intelligent life.
If life has arisen independently on Earth multiple times, how many times has it produced humans? And by this I mean, how many times did humans evolve, from scratch, our of distinct gene pools? I would have a hard time believing any answer greater than 1 (or less than 1, for that matter). So the more times life has formed and *not* evolved into sentience, the worse the odds are that it will have done so in other environments.
And even if sentient life has evolved on some reasonably nearby planet, what are the odds that we'll inhabit the same slice of time as them? Human beings have been a technological species for an infinitesimal time slice compared to the age of the galaxy, and at the rate we're going that time slice may not last much longer. If this is representative of sentient species in general, it would be very rare for two species to chance upon the necessary coincidence of space and time to actually meet each other. Sad but true.
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Or there's a third theory... that we have been discovered by a radically advanced civilization, the likes of which we cannot comprehend, and they are choosing not to make us aware. Why would they do this? Who am I to judge the motives of a superior mind?:)
This has been thrown about by techno-prophets such as Ray Kurzweil, who proposed that when aliens do arrive (or maybe DID arrive) they would arrive not in Roswellian spaceships, but rather through nanites controlled by a vast computer system that had actually evolved from the original biological species.
And what would it want with a drab civilization like ours? Better to see it play out.
Maybe we are their playthings.
I am not at all convinced that there are such things as "natural" rights, especially inalienable ones. Constitutional rights are another issue and far more deserving of defense. On the other hand, as a statment of an ideal of equality, then "rights" become essential in understanding just how equal an idealist thinks we should be.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
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.
Unfortunately it's hard to find on /. :P
However, a lifeform that engages in exploring, propogating and conquering (aka rape, pillage and plunder) would be effective at replicating their genes.
Would it not be likely that these traits would appear in alien evolutionary environments? Many examples exist of evolutionary convergergence traits such as wings (birds, bats, insects).
The galaxy is over 14 billion years old and only 100000 light years across. That means light could have crossed it over 100000 times so far. Even if a civilization could only manage 1% the speed of light, there is enough time for a spaceship from every star in the galaxy to have crossed the galaxy 1000 times.
I believe that your numbers are suspect in several ways. First, there is no guarantee that faster than light travel is possible. If it isn't, then the human exploration of this galaxy will take far longer than 30 ky. Next, while life may be very likely, there is nothing to say that "intelligence," as we know it, is common, or even an adaptive advantage over evolutionary spans of time. Piers Anthony IIRC suggested in The Macroscope that most intelligent life simply failed to survive the industrial period. The book was fiction, but the suggestion is appropriate.
Cultural and technical changes - progress if you will (but I won't) - require lots of head space. "Traditional" cultures are traditional because they are stored solely in the heads of their carriers. Traditional cultures are extremely vulnerable to the loss of members, if the society is too complex. Thus simple cultures survive by redundant storage of the essential information that defines the operational aspects of the society. Once the ability to store information "extrasomatically" comes along (i.e. writing) more complex civilizations become possible and technical change can occur more rapidly because a literate civilization can support intellectual as well as craft specialization.
If you consider it, it is fairly obvious that population growth rates and technical advances heterodyne on each other. The problem that can affect the number of intelligent species (as we understand intelligence) that can make into space comes as the growth of population passes the "knee" in a yeast growth type curve. At that point we have entered a race between environmental degradation, technological advance, and the exhaustion of critical resources. If and only if technological advance can establish a population off planet, if and only if technological advance can offset environmental degradation and resource scarcity can species then start to really explore space.
You can imagine from this that some intelligent species with very slowly growing, or stable populations probably have little reason, except perhaps curiousity, for leaving a planet. More might reach the yeast growth stage, fail in the technical-environmental-resource arena and become extinct or under go drastic reductions. Another few may actually make it off their home planet and into interplanetary or perhaps intersellar space.
Probably on a majority, nothing we could recognize as intelligence ever appears.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
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.
Yours isn't a silly explanation for the great silence, but consider this. Several proposed solutions to the Fermi paradox assume that the aliens build utopias, or destroy themselves, or have a 'prime directive' preventing them from contacting our primitive world. The problem is, any one civilization could sweep through the entire galaxy on a time scale of millions of years. So any behavioral explaination of the aliens' absence requires that ALL the alien civilizations in the galaxy have one of these reasons for not spreading through the rest of the galaxy. If there are hundreds of thousands of other civilizations in the galaxy (which some 'optimistic' Drake followers have calculated) then the odds that NONE of them had the drive to have colonized, explored, or, heck, even eaten Earth (for you Greg Bear fans out there) Earth is very very low.
I personally believe that the development of tool-using, communicative intelligence is very difficult in evolutionary terms, and is thus exceedingly rare. Remember how quickly unicellular life developed on earth, and how late intelligent life arose. At most, there may be only a few civilizations scattered through our galaxy; but it is very possible that we are the first, the only technical civilization in the galaxy.
Amazing. In once sentence, you question their science, and then follow it up with some of your own brand of mythology.
"No alien-Jesus, no aliens."
Now seeing you are not an alien, I doubt you can testify to the fact that no "alien-Jesus" exists or ever existed. Alien-Jesus never visited you, or got some drunken buddies to write a book about him that you have read. So by you own occams razor, alien-jesus doesnt exist, and thus, aliens dont exist.... well done Cleetus, you have solved the worlds greatest question, back to the mountains with you.
I've never seen your brain, and you have never seemed to have used it, so by your own version of occams razor, you don't have one.
Insert something insightful here, or I'll insert something painful there.
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.
All statements of the kind in the posted article need to be taken with several grain of salt. Drake, and the recent Lineweaver (Nature) article, are significantly biased toward the optimistic viewpoint. "Rare Earth" is biased toward the pessimistic.
There is a middle ground. Despite working in the field, and having beliefs that life may be common, I would not expound those belief as a scientific truth. Both the optimists and the pessimists are baised by the anthropic principle. The anthropic principle states: the environment/universe appears biased toward the production of intelligent life because if it were not, intelligent life would not have arisen.
The "Rare Earth" types are biased toward the pessimitic because they see many coincidences in the way inteligent life arose here (i.e. the anthropic principle). They don't or won't recognize that they are biased by the unscientific belief that those are the only circumstances under which life can arise.
The "life is everywhere" crowd usually points to the rapid appearance of life on earth as evidence that life should be common in the universe. Of course it is possible that rapid appearance of life is a prerequisite to the appearance of life. It could be that atmospheric or oceanic changes could have made late appearance of life impossible. What some call the "reasonable assumption" that the probability of life arising on a planet is constant with time is both an unreasonable assumption and not a scientific basis for much of anything.
The real science is in the middle ground. Observe, don't assume. We should experiment, not pontificate.
Support SETI@home
That's why my CPU utilization is always 100%!
Ob OnTopic Tie-In: Because I'll get cancer long before you'll chat with aliens.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
oh, you mean like emacs?
Look, this is an old argument that has the informational gene for immortality -- it just won't die, but it should (or at least hibernate until truly new data shows up).
... perhaps our philosophy about the SETI will also change.
The Earth radiates like a small star in the radio region, from our civilization's emissions. Yet we don't hear a peep of anything like that out of the rest of the universe, and there's no obvious evidence of stellar engineering to be seen either. Where are other forms of intelligent, information-exchanging, perhaps macro-engineering life? Well, it could be they aren't macro-engineers, or that they don't pass information like we expect them to.
But it could also be that there isn't any other life at all, or just low-level forms that we won't be talking to.
We only have one assured point of data to answer the Life question, and that's not good enough. One point doesn't "trend"; it has an infinite number of slopes; you can fit any curve to it. You can hardly expect to win your case for universal life without evidence of detecting anything outside of the Earth. Even other planets in the same system show no evidence of engineering or biochemical activity, and we've been looking at them for decades with some pretty good instruments.
We must keep looking, sure, but the evidence is pretty well on the side of a lifeless galaxy. Be scientists for once, and ditch that superstitious need for alien races and galactic empires. The facts are overwhelmingly against alien life, and until we expand our methods of searching, that's how we must judge it if we are to pay any due respect to logic.
On the hope side of things, our methods and assumptions can change with more data. For instance, it was taken for granted (although well-enough thought out) that if aliens existed, biochemistries between two such races would almost always be dissimilar. One race might settle on carbon, oxygen and sunlight, and another on silicon, hydrogen and geothermal energy. But recent theories and observations suggest that cosmic gas clouds harbor molecules that can start biochemistry upon planets. Since such clouds are large, it could be that this seeding process could produce similar biochemisty across different star systems. Hence, across the lightyears, biochemically-similar lifeforms might be able to arise if the seeding process has the potential we theorize. So the basic philosophy about alien differences has changed
Myself, personally, I figure we will need Jodie Foster {tm} to take up radio astronomy before we get the signals we are looking for.
[also misbehaves on Kuro5hin as Peahippo]
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?
Betcha a nickle yer wrong.
A steaming cup of soykaf would be real wiz right now.
First, I noticed some discussion as to Quantum Physics being far more complicated than Classical Physics, so Occum's Razor doesn't really apply -- well, actually it might not be. It turns out there are many relationships that exist between current string theories and 11-dimensional supergravity, suggesting that these various theories (Heterotic 0, Heterotic E, I, IIA, IIB) are all expressions of the same thing. Perhaps a single M-theory exists that can describe our universe. Second, I'd like to mention that this talk about FTL travel is futile. Besides the problems with mass and energy and time slowing, there are plenty of other options that actual physicists such as Stephen Hawking (i.e. not ones holding up a lightbulb they call "The Doom Machine") have discussed. For example, there is the bending of space-time fabric to move quickly from one point to another. There is even the possibility of so-called wormholes or Einstein-Rosen bridges being constructed and prevented from being closed by a negative energy force such as that is present in the Casimir effect. Of course, this is predominantly theoretical, and at least a couple hundred years off in this author's humble opinion. Oh, and anyone interested in Drake's Equation (a.k.a. the Sagan equation), you can try Eric Weisstein's World of Physics at: http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/astronomy/DrakeEqu ation.html [scienceworld.wolfram.com]
- Entropix
I know Karate, Kung Fu, and 47 other dangerous words!
So why's there no tragedy of the commons with these brains? They're advanced remember; we're just ants in comparison. :-) Just like how the richer/smarter nations on Earth tend to have lower population growth, so too might the MBs have achieved a virtual zero population growth zen.
Anyway, give Bradbury's paper a read, but fair warning: it might be a bit harder to suspend your disbelief when it comes to far-future hard sci-fi with conventional humans at the helm (Star Trek doesn't count). It's only human to anthropomorphize the future I guess...
--
Power to the Peaceful
that life on earth was actually a programmed thing. Its clearly given in the Hitch Hikers Guide to the galaxy that Mice wanted the answer or rather the question to the ultimate question, and it was then that the Magratheans created planet earth and humans and all. So the question of wether intellegent life exist or not does not exist! Sop arguing.
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Typical Atheist.
You sir, are an ignorant fucking moron.
Typical answer of someone who just lost an argument. The moment one resorts to personal attacks, one has already lost the argument.
Personally, I find it offensive that you assume all Atheists are morons.
I am an Atheist. What does that mean? It simply means I don't believe in a god. Not yours, not someone else's. None. That's what the word A-theist means. Christians are Monotheists. They believe in one god. Comments like yours, are one of the reasons I don't like those who think their beliefs are better than mine.
Remember the 11th commandment: Thou shalt keep thy religion to thy self.
Religion and science both strive to do the same thing: explain who we are, where we came from, where we're going and why we're here. The difference is that science doesn't have the arrogance of claiming to already have the answers.
No matter what... this is still off-topic.
-- This sig for rent.
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.
I do think sentient life exists in the universe. Rare conditions for life forming aside, space is...big. Bigger than any one of us can possibly fathom. The thought that one single, tiny, infintesimal speck of dirt harbors the only sentient life is ridiculous, IMO.
Anyway, the point that's rarely brought up. Is it not entirely possible that humanity is the most advanced race (currently existing) to date? Perhaps the reason, aside from the fact that OUR decection methods aren't too great, is simply that we're trying to listen in and broadcast to species that are far less advanced than our own.
And of course, a similar, but more considered option is the fact that, since space is still Big, races roughly on par with out tech may not have heard us calling yet, just as we may have not heard their calls yes. Wait a few thousand more years, maybe we'll hear something.
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.
Given our tendency to blow the daylights out of each other at the slightest provocation, I don't blame any sentient alien species for keeping quiet.
Either that, or they could just have a "Prime Directive" law of their own, which would also make sense. When considering ET contact theorems, who says that the aliens in question actually want to talk to us?
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Ah, yes, the great nation of the US of A, founded upon a single religion, recommending that people follow it, punishing those that don't, assuming that everyone can be herded into blind obedience...
Can't see much difference between that and the Axis of Evil, really..
Thankfully, where I live, the church is dying, slowly but surely.
Ps. As much as I like to rant, please keep the posts on topic - thank you :)
I miss my rubber keyboard.(Homepage)
What joy much less profit would ETIs get by making contact with us? I can't find one single reason why they should. Except maybe one: what different ways there exist to solve and represent certain problems, like grand unified theory or if our version of general relativity is more accurate or otherwise useable, etc. To keep us pursuing our own goals and not consentrating on alien study, it'd be important for them to stay unnoticed.
Preserve old classics: copy your collection onto all hard drives.
OMG, it just dawned to me that compressed and/or encrypted transmissions get close to being random data. How are aliens supposed to notice us if all they see are almost random transmissions?
Preserve old classics: copy your collection onto all hard drives.
No, you just didn't understand Fermi's paradox. Nowhere does it say that the species in question has to travel in their own person. You can send unmanned probes, spanning the entire galaxy in a network that would report on life it it were there or if it later appeared.
And who is talking about mortal beings?
FTL is also a bogus argumant and Fermi did not need it. You just need 10 million years.
Oh, and if a catastrophe vipes out all technology, how come then someone will survive to become a cave man??
All in all you have made it painfully clear you have not bothered to read nor understand Fermi's paradox.
Except that science is doomed to fail! The entire principle of cause and effect, upon which the entire scientific method is based on, breaks down when one looks at the origin of the Universe. "Where we came from" in science is simply the effect of some previous cause, so we can go all the way back to the Big Bang (or even a previous point of origin), then thats it. Christianity is actually a super-set of science, claiming that an eternal Creator, who exists outside time and space, created the Universe and later man, and has domain over scientific laws. There are no real conflicts of interest that haven't left the realm of scientific debate. A very applicable passage that in my mind that characterizes God in this way is Exodus 3:13-15:
The Moses said to God, "If I come to the people of Isreal and say to them, 'The God of your fathers has sent me to you,' and they ask me, 'What is his name?' what shall I say to them?" God said to Moses, "I AM WHO I AM." And he said, "Say to the people of Isreal, 'I AM has sent me to you' "
Athiests aren't morons, many of them simply haven't taken the time to understand what Christians believe.
Dear Sir,
Quite right too,
It's not the Buddhists out bell-ringing,
You don't get Shintoists singing in the shit-
house or shouting slogans
You don't get Hindus harmonizing in the hall.
When I get my cap and Blazer badge back from
the League of Agnostics I will urge the
executive to file a complaint.
Apologies to Python (Monty) ltd.
From my Autobiography - "Lifestyles of the Sad and Desperate"...
Asimov also touches on this concept in The End of Eternity. Time travelers "take care" of humanity by altering timelines to stop conflicts. However, mankind never seems to get anywhere - is it worth the risk of destruction to finally make progress? Interesting story.
The entire principle of cause and effect, upon which the entire scientific method is based on, breaks down when one looks at the origin of the Universe. "Where we came from" in science is simply the effect of some previous cause, so we can go all the way back to the Big Bang (or even a previous point of origin), then thats it.
You are assuming no infinite regression of causes. There is no reason to believe that the universe did not exist forever. Really: Why must it be bounded by a beginning or end?
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
-1 Offtopic, in a good mood, karma running over my dogma.
Hitler, he only had one ball,
Rommel, had two but very small,
Himmler, had something sim'lar,
But only Goebbels, had no balls, at all.
--heard this was a British infantry bit in WWII
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
> And anyway, nowhere in the Bible does it mention ET life. If there really were "aliens" then Jesus would have had to come and die for THEIR sins too. No alien-Jesus, no aliens.
> It sounds like this guy is just some crackpot...
Oh, the irony.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
There are quite a few chilling ones out there...
One of the standard arguments against the existance of ETI are 'von-Neuman' probes - self reproducing probes that go to a star system, use local resources to make more of themselves, then head off to other systems. Repeat until you've explored the whole galaxy. This can take as little as 15 million years. The absence of von Neuman probes in the solar system was used by Frank Tipler to argue against the existence of ETI.
A simple change to this idea leads to 'Beserkers' - von Neuman probes that don't just look for life, but hunt it out and destroy it, to remove competition for their builders. This idea was originally described in Fred Saberhagen's Berserker books, and something similar comes up in Greg Bear's Forge of God and Anvil of Stars, Alistair Reynold's Revelation Space and other recent work, and elsewhere. This also could explain the failure of SETI to detect radio signals - if you make yourself obvious, you get wiped out.
An alternative to this is that its not the probes that kill you, but colonising aliens, who use up all the resources in a part of the galaxy and then expire, making way for a fallow period and then another round of colonisation. Stephen Baxter's Space addresses this idea.
The basic message of these theories is that the galaxy may be like a quiet forest, but its not quiet because there's nothing there, its quiet because there are wolves in the forest.
And that's quite scary...
In this same time scale, we will have space-based telescopes to find earth-sized planets within 100 light years and measure spectra to determine signs of at least primitive life.
I thing the Wolfram book A New Kind of Science talks about it. I'm not up on cutting edge theories of everything, so we'll see what happens in the next 50 years. But keep in mind this kind of theory goes against all knowledge ever directly observed - all things have a beginning, all things have an end. As it stands this exact moment, there are plenty of reasons (data like Doppler shifts) to believe the Universe is expanding forever and only theory to describe why there will be a Big Crunch.
Or even more so, our fundemental basis of preceving objective reality, rests in our own fundemental preceptions.
Wittgenstein and Kant touched on this a lot without even brining up the question of alien life. (Kant in the basis of objective preception and Wittgenstein in language games..)
It's an question of wheter our view of the universe is determined by the universe, or by our own structure (both mentaly/socialy and biologicaly)
Where we might see patterns and distingushing things on the basis of shading textature and space (It's a question of how a person ultimately distingusihes a vase from the table top it is on.) another "creature" may have a completely differnt methodolgy that we would fundementaly preceive as random.
An even greater question that rises is wheter the universe is "truely" reduciable to the base parts and laws and probablities that we and our instruments sugest it to be, or wheter our objective "reality" is no more real then the fairy tails we tell ourselves about the world as children.
This is not to say we question reality or our findings. Only that we question wheter our finds are universaly true and only understandable in our limited manner.
A given intelligent civilization probably first achieved intelligence through evolution by natural selection (later intelligence could be artificial or genetically modified). That means that an intelligent species will most likely have at least 2 tendencies:
1) They have a tendency to expand their territory.
2) They have a tendency to learn about their environment.
These traits give such a significant advantage in evolution, that working on the assumption that alien intelligences have these traits is fairly safe. There are exceptions, of course. If a creature lives in a particularly dangerous environment, being expansionist and curious can get you killed. It would have to be really dangerous though, since Africa 3 million years ago was dangerous, and we're expansionist and curious.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
Really: Why must it be bounded by a beginning or end?
Entropy. HTH.
Dragging people kicking and screaming into reality since 1996.
Entropy so does not insist on an end point, or a beginning. Within an infinite system the (2nd?) law of thermodynamics does not necessarily apply. Indeed it may be no more than a convenient approximation within our corner of the Universe, and would seem to strictly only apply when the arrow of time is constant.
As I understand Christian thought, God is eternal, here is a suggestion that the Universe is eternal, surely if you exclude an eternal Universe as being nonsensical, then God goes along with it, and I'm pretty sure that's blasphemy. I appreciate that the Universe is not required for Gods existence, I'm simply saying that one hypothesis is just as valid as the other within their respective frames of reference.
You mention in a previous post that Athiests simply haven't spent the time to understand Christians, well some of us are ex Christians, who really sat down and thought about it very hard. I do not wish to attack your religion, if that's what you need to get through the day, but when you are saying that God is eternal, and exists outside of space and time (previous post) on the one hand, but that the Universe MUST have a start and end, and it's foolish to consider any other possibility, well you are proving that you have faith, not that you've thought about it.
Sorry I've really bitten this time, and I don't think you're even trolling.
I think before asking if other 'intelligent' life exists in the universe.. we need to define what intelligence is. If it can be defined. Are we truly intelligent? We as humans define our own intelligence. Who's to say that little white mice hold more intelligence than we do and us humans may be an experiment of theirs? :) Ok ok.. too much Hitchikers Guide. Still, are humans truly intelligent? If we encounter a higher or different intelligence, how will we recognize it? Does an ant look up at our big feet and say 'look, he's more intelligent than I am'. No. They do their thing, we do ours. Sometimes we step on them and we don't think twice about it. Whats to say some other more intelligent organism will come into our midst. We'll be too lowly to even recognize that something more advanced is present, and they'll just step on us as they go by. Not thinking twice about our so-called intelligence. In our perception we may explain the event in some different term that we can understand. Maybe humans sneeze when a more advanced lifeform comes near. Maybe we don't see them because we just aren't able to see them. For example, we react with a sneeze. Maybe i'm shooting a bit far here.. but maybe we have already encountered something that could be defined as 'a higher lifeform' but we were too lowly to recognize it. Our perception of the universe it limited by our senses and our knowledge. If our senses and knowledge are limited. Whats to say that we aren't missing something?
It would be regarded as quite out of the question to study the movements
m bryonicCosmo.html
t ml
of a magnet-needle on the Earth's surface in such a way as to try to
explain these movements solely out of what can be observed within the
space occupied by the needle. The movements of the magnet-needle are, as
you know, brought into connection with the magnetism of the Earth. We
connect the momentary direction of the needle with the direction of the
Earth's magnetism, that is, with the line of direction which can be
drawn between the north and south magnetic poles of the Earth. When it
is a question of explaining the phenomena presented by the magnetic
needle, we go out of the region of the needle itself and try to enter,
with the facts that have been collected towards an explanation, into the
totality which alone affords the opportunity to explain phenomena, the
manifestations of which belong to this totality. This rule of method is
certainly observed in regard to some phenomena, - to those, I should
say, the significance of which is fairly obvious. But it is not observed
when it is a question of explaining and understanding more complicated
phenomena.
Just as it is impossible to explain the phenomena of the magnetic needle
from the needle itself, it is equally and fundamentally impossible to
explain the phenomena relating to the organism from out of the organism
itself, or from connections which do not belong to a totality, to a
whole. And just for this reason, because there is so little inclination
to reach the realm of totalities in order to find explanations, we
arrive at those results put forward by the modern scientific method in
which the wider connections are almost entirely left out of the picture.
This method encloses the phenomena, whatever they may be, within the
field of vision of the microscope; while the celestial phenomena are
restricted to what is observable externally, with the help of
instruments. In seeking for explanations, no attempt is made to consider
the necessity of reaching out to the surrounding totality within which a
phenomenon is localised...
(Rudolf Steiner, Lecture Lecture X, January 10th, 1921)
http://home.earthlink.net/~johnrpenner/Articles/E
--
Suppose someone looks at the needle of a compass, finds it pointing from
South to North, from North to South, and then decides that the forces
that set the needle in the North-South direction lie in the needle
itself. He would certainly not be considered a physicist today. A
physicist brings the needle of the compass into connection with what is
called earthly magnetism. No matter what theories people evolve, it is
simply impossible to attribute the direction of the needle to forces
lying within the needle itself. It must be brought into relation with
the universe.
In studying organic life today, the relationship of the organic to the
universe is usually regarded as quite secondary. But suppose it were
indeed true that merely on account of their different positions the
liver and the brain are actually related quite differently to universal
forces outside the human being. In that case we could never arrive at an
explanation of the human being by way of pure empiricism. An explanation
is possible only if we are able to say what part the whole universe
plays in molding the brain and the liver, in the same sense as the earth
plays its part in the direction taken by the needle in the compass.
Suppose we are tracing back the stream of heredity. We begin with the
ancestors, pass on to the present generation, and then to the offspring,
both in the case of animals and of human beings. We take into account
what we find -- as naturally we must -- but we reckon merely with
processes observed to lie immediately within the human being. It hardly
ever occurs to us to ask whether under certain conditions in the human
organism it is possible for universal forces to work in the most varied
ways upon the fertilized germ. Nor do we ask: Is it perhaps impossible
to explain the formation of the fertilized germ cell if we remain within
the confines of the human being himself? Must we not relate this germ
cell to the whole universe?
In orthodox science today, the forces that work in from the universe are
considered secondary. To a certain limited extent they are taken into
consideration, but they are always secondary. And now you may say: "Yes,
but modern science leads us to a point where such questions no longer
arise. It is antiquated to relate the human organs to the universe!" In
the way in which this is often done, it is antiquated, but the fact that
generally such questions do not arise today is due entirely to our
scientific education. Our education in science confines us to this
purely sense-oriented empirical mode of research, and we never come to
the point of raising questions such as I have posed hypothetically by
way of introduction. But the extent to which man is able to advance in
knowledge and action in every sphere of life depends upon raising
questions. Where questions never arise, a person is living in a kind of
scientific fog. Such an individual is himself dimming his free outlook
upon reality, and it is only when things no longer fit into his scheme
of thought that he begins to realize the limitations of his conceptions.
http://wn.elib.com/Steiner/Medicine/19221026p01.h
--
You mention in a previous post that Athiests simply haven't spent the time to understand Christians, well some of us are ex Christians, who really sat down and thought about it very hard. I do not wish to attack your religion, if that's what you need to get through the day, but when you are saying that God is eternal, and exists outside of space and time (previous post) on the one hand, but that the Universe MUST have a start and end, and it's foolish to consider any other possibility, well you are proving that you have faith, not that you've thought about it.
I never said it's foolish to consider a cyclical universe - for a while it was foolish to believe the Earth revolves around the Sun. All I said was that the theory behind such a notion is rather new, and hard (if not impossible) to test, and that we'll see what happens. I definitely think the Universe had a beginning, and there is hard evidence to support a Big Bang theory, but no evidence to support that the three minutes before the Big Bang were the three minutes of another Universe's Big Crunch. I simply find it highly unlikely that the atoms in my body (which at one point where about six inches from the atoms in your body) got here without some help from Intelligent Design. Speaking of which, its a good thing all this universal constants are what they are, or matter would not have even been able to coalesce into atoms!
All I'm saying is that the universe, cyclical or otherwise, screams "Intelligent Design" - Romans 1:20
For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature--have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.
I am sorry you have lost your faith. Being an athiest would take more faith than I could ever possibly have.
The galaxy may have been born roughly 14 billion years ago (I thought the universe was roughly 14 billion, not the galaxy, oh well), but I doubt all the planets and stars were fully created, much less life. Our own planet (which, last time I checked, was in the galaxy) was only formed a couple billion years ago. Life didn't start until a little while after that, and intelligent (to understand the concept of even primitive space travel) life has only recently come about.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
I'm not so sure that it matters whether or not there have been total extinctions early on in Earth's history. If conditions were right that life would self-assemble once, life would come right back.
The barrier to life here is that other planets may not have the right conditions at all, meteors nonwithstanding.
Just between you and me, I do hope life is common. Where the *&#@$^ are they?
So your idea of an advanced civilization is a bunch of inconsequent conquerors who go about launching terraforming robots towards other people planets?
My guess is that if such a civilization ever appear among a group of starfaring species, it will quickly be made extinct by its annoyed neighbours.
By carping about this, all you guys are doing is proving my point for me.
The point being: nobody knows anything about the origins of the universe; everything is speculation at best. Scientists have never said "this is the way it is, and if you don't accept it, we will round you up and kill you." like many religious zealots have.
Bottom line: religion pretends to have an explanation for everything, science doesn't have the explanations for everything (and probably never will simply because of the vastness of the universe) but at least they're looking for the answer rather than saying "this is it, let's stop looking!"
-- This sig for rent.
One possibility is that one civilization already has taken over, and doesn't like competition. In which case we should expect to see an asteroid traveling at 0.5c headed our way sometime soon...
There really is no reason to _expect_ any other intelligence to be friendly. We probably wouldn't be if we were on top...
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
Hey,
/. article about the guy whose PC fan died and nearly burned down his house...
/. story - very good one - from the scientist who said that SETI probably was a waste of time because any civilization that uses radio frequencies would probably quickly evolve onto something better; thus there might be many many civs out there but they might miss each other as they each pass through their radio wave phase {or any other phase} at differing times.
Sorry to hear you are scaling back on SETI. My home PC is cranking away right now while I'm at the office - even after I read the
I also read the
With all that said I'm still trying because, frankly, I'm stuck on a world of mostly religous nutcases and it appears that somewhere between corporate fraud, government stupidity, born again 'holier than though' christian psychopathy, Zionism, Islam, terrorism, and general human ignorance and hubris I find myself "living in interesting times". I want off this rock - and YES I keep a towel, some beer, and some nuts in my trunk!
--Richard
P.S. More on ignorance: The U.N. routinely does polls of citizens from many countries in the world. As of 1990 a whopping 90% of responders were aware that the earth is not flat...
Umm, I still think it *is* relevant.
The example of it making little difference whether a Spanish ship traveled at 2 knots or 20 isn't a good analogy.
When you scale the distance traveled up as high as is required when you're talking about colonizing a new planet - you run into the issue of the travel taking longer than a human's lifespan.
Theoretically, yes, you could construct a traveling "world" of sorts - where generations of people live and die, but the man-made "planet" continues on a slow course towards a new plant to colonize. In reality, it seems like this would raise quite a few issues and stumbling blocks.
For starters, by the time the ship makes it to the new world - will the people on board know what to do? Will they care? After all, you're talking about many generations of humans that made this ship their home. Will there really be incentive to disembark and risk death trying to colonize some other planet?
By contrast, if the people *do* long for colonization of a new world - I'd argue that it would only happen if they were lacking a number of things on their ship that couldn't be simulated/recreated. If that's so, it's questionable whether man would even survive for the thousands of years required for the ship to reach its destination in the first place. (EG. Issues of malnutrition because of the limited types of food and drink available on board.)
4. POPULATION: None.
It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefor, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.
is what I read about what they'd do once intelligent life is found.
See Declaration of Principles Concerning Activities Following the Detection of Extraterrestrial Intelligence : "No response to a signal or other evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence should be sent until appropriate international consultations have taken place."That must be why radio telescopes don't have a 'reply' button. Also makes me think our many years of transmitting radio signals should have been accompanied by 'do not reply to this message' disclaimers to avoid huge amounts of radio spam in 100,000 years.
Given the time scales involved in round-trip transmission, why would they even think it mattered?
Now, the combination of molecular events leading to the first replicating cells on Earth is COMPLETELY UNKNOWN!!!! Let me repeat that: There is absolutely no specific model for the origin of the first replicating cells on this planet which is detailed enough to allow for computation of a probability from a combination of molecular events.
Therefore, until this probability is determined, it is completely pointless to talk about the number of galaxies, stars, planets, etc, because as long as the 'fi' term in the Drake equation is utterly UNKNOWN, the final product is UTTERLY unknown as well.
mhack
Building a better ribosome since 1997
This is what happens when you get your eyes crossed trying to preview
:) I just thought this would be an interesting place to interject.
Anyhow, to wrap up...
Because of the internecine nature of modern warfare, globalization's mechanism will be the absorption of culture (or so I suspect) and the end of the dominance of western culture will come when it is absorbed and subverted into a broader global culture (as we are seeing now). I truly believe that we've reached a plateau where nations don't really destroy each other anymore, but rather swallow each other whole as capable or slowly chip away if not (of course this only applies to first world nations). The War of the new millenium is a war of cultures (which eclipse beliefs) and not a war of people.
Just look at the whole terrorist debacle. This obviously wasn't a traditional act of war in that they want no land, aren't seeking money, and they aren't trying to conquer us per se, but rather the terrorists look at it as retaliation for the growing western influence upon the middle east.
Sorry for rambling so badly and flubbing on the post, AND for being off topic
MachineGestalt
I dont believe the existence of aliens would contradict the Bible. Just because the Bible doesnt mention other life forms doesnt mean God couldnt have create other life forms on other planet, even intelligent life forms. I do believe we are His only creations that are created in His "image," and so we are indeed the only ones in this universe. However, I am open to the idea that He could have created others.
What would be interesting though is that if we indeed have contact with other life forms someday, and they have the same religion we do. That is, their god is the same god that created us, and he spoke to them the same message he gave to us. Wouldnt that be interesting to have two totally different aliens culture, but the same message from their creator. Of course, specifically I am talking about the message of Christ in the Bible, but theoretically, the argument of the same god between the two life forms can apply to other faiths. Note, I am not saying all faiths are the same.
On another note, about Occam's Razor, evolution, I dont think, is the simplest answer. Evolution IS NOT a fact, but still theory, and takes just as much faith to believe in it as any other faiths with validity. Science can only explain what it observes, and not the supernatural, so that is why it can not accept creation, because it cant be observe. But that doesnt mean it cant happen.
Back to Occam's Razor, which is simpler to believe in? That there was a Big Bang, galaxy evolves, planet earth formed, life spontaneously existed, we evolved through millions of years from one cell amoebas through complicated formulas and lots of random chance....or to say a Creator just created us?
As for your hint: Duh. You can go anywhere slowly, but if you want to populate the galaxy you would need at least a large fraction of light speed. Or did you not read the parent?
Sure it's correct, but it depends on what your definition of simple is. There are countless examples of when the complicated answer is the right answer to explain something. But either it is actually simple according to someone else's perspective, or we have a contradiction to Occam's Razor. Oh, indeed it is a razor.
And anyway, nowhere in the Bible does it mention ET life. If there really were "aliens" then Jesus would have had to come and die for THEIR sins too. No alien-Jesus, no aliens.
You've just discovered another flaw in the bible: it does not take a position with respect to alien life one way or the other. You'd think a book that so many claim to contain "the truth" would make a statement on this issue. But the fact that it doesn't demonstrates that the bible is just a collection of myths and fables written and codified by superstitious old men who couldn't conceive that the earth was round, much less the tremendous amount of knowledge we have about the solar system and the universe today.
Calaf
He argued that since bacteria are so radiation resistant, and that impacts would have thrown rocks away from Earth, after any sterilization Earth would have been reseeded by bacteria thrown out by asteroid impacts! There should have been serious selection for rad tolerance among bacteria in the early solar system...
Also, he argued, with gravity sling effects from the big planets of the solar systems, rocks containing bacteria could have reached other solar systems before being sterilized... If other solar systems had relevant planets, Earth's bacteria could have infected/colonized the whole galaxy!
But, almost certainly, if so -- then Earth was itself seeded from bacteria from other stars. DNA might be standardized across the whole or most of the galaxy. (-: Pity future exo-biochemists -- what a boring universe! :-)
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
Dear anonymous coward, nice to see you dont have the guts to attach your name to this loose collection of misguided(probably misquoted too) opinions that mean nothing to anyone except religious fanatics who pop them out to prove a point.
As is the case ive found with fanatics(like yourself), they find it easy to point to someone elses opinion as justified fact of their point of view. An opinion, no matter the source, does not equal instant fact. Do me a favour, dont think for yourself, dont attempt to deviate from the course set by your betters, and keep washing my car.
And if you dont like my sig, you sir, can kiss my halfling.
Insert something insightful here, or I'll insert something painful there.
Strange timing. The latest issue of Scientific American has an article that discusses the Drake equation, specifically the L quantity which is the lifetime of communicating civilizations.
Before any of this changes, a lot of taxpayers somewhere have to be convinced of the need to commit the resources in question. That'll make for an interesting societal debate - NOT! There's so little interest in this kind of thing in the general population of Earth, that an interstellar exploratory mission is effectively impossible - let alone a colonization mission. Committing funds today with a miniscule chance of receiving a return hundreds or thousands of years from now is just not a concept that any politician who wants to get re-elected is likely to support.
I'm not arguing that this is right, but it's realistic. The only way interstellar travel is likely to happen is if the necessary technologies reach price points where an group of mega-billionaires can get together and do it privately. Maybe that could happen in a few hundred years time, but I wouldn't count on it.
It's a problem that may be too tough for natural selection to solve. In this comment, I explain why humans aren't likely to expand beyond their planet. Similar logic applies to any species. For a species to expand beyond its planet, it would need the ability to direct a substantial fraction of the resources available to it towards interstellar colonization. That's likely to require a great deal of cooperation. (Imagine a debate about this in, say, the US Congress!)
Natural selection favors competition, and only favors cooperation when there's an overall competitive benefit to the organism's direct reproductive success - often measured in terms of how many grandchildren it has. Natural selection doesn't apply here because the motivation to take actions with goals measured in centuries is non-existent, except possibility amongst very highly evolved intelligent creatures of a certain kind. There certainly aren't enough such creatures on Earth.
The overall logic of natural selection still applies, of course - you're correct when you say "Only the life forms that breed from planet to planet are likely to survive in the long run". But you can't assume that it's possible for life forms to reach this level of success. Intelligent life may be quite common in the universe, but they're all too busy dealing with their own petty day-to-day concerns and survival to fund credible interstellar colonization attempts.
I think they are quiet because they are waiting for the dollar to bounce back. Because of the recent Wall Street crash the dollar is weak, so the US market would not be able buy many imports. They may be holding out for the stock market to reach a more stable level to support true intergalactic commerce also. When the Dow Jones reaches the comfort level of 100,000 the economy should be good enough for us to trade with other friendly aliens. Otherwise I think that they are just going to stay home and invest in government bonds at home, no reason to cross the galaxy to trade here.
It should be noted that complex life probably evolved not once but at least twice on Earth. The Ediacarans (Check it) are believed to be the first multicellular organisms, but they are not the ancestors of any currently-living kingdom. They first showed up about 50 million years before the Cambrian explosion. They vanished somewhat mysteriously. Some believe they were gobbled up by the first animals.
All it takes is nukes and nerves.
I've never heard this idea before, but what if time has no meaning? I mean, what if it is infinite? Say the universe lasts 100 trillion, trillion, trillion years and it took us only 20 billion to come about. Then say that the big bang happens again and creates a universe that lasts just as long... but does this an infinite number of times. How significant would we feel?
An interstellar colony ship wouldn't need to be anywhere near the size of a planet to be reasonably self-sufficient. The only things you'd really need to worry about would be propulsion and energy, as with sufficient energy you could grow food under artificial lighting.
And propulsion and energy aren't all that hard to generate. First of all you could pack lots of antimatter (manufactured on Earth or wherever). Failing that, you could pack deuterium and tritium for fusion reactors. Failing that, you could pack Uranium-235. If you wanted you could build a big sail around the asteroid. Mirror-coat one side and put solar panels on the other.
And people most certainly would want to disembark at the destination. Why? Overcrowding. Plus they'd be running out of antimatter/deuterium/uranium.
All it takes is nukes and nerves.
"universal forces"
Umh, yeah. May the force be with you as well.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
It's interesting that most people assume that intelligent life has to be a sack of water, and that independant human-style thought is the way to go. It also is a much closer fit for observed data.
..don't panic
Good point, I guess we are more in a situation where we are not sure if we have one sample or two or three.
The "rare earth" people that Drake is debating actually assume that such bacterial life is very common, but that multicellular life is very rare, so it's presense on primordial earth prior to mass extinction events does nothing to dispute their claims. (indeed, it is one of their explicitly stated expectations)
It should be pointed out though that if we are talking about complex life we DO have a larger sample than 1 right now. Both Venus and Mars are "earth-like" in astronomical terms. They are about the right size and about the right distance from the sun. But they are not *quite* right. Mars has frozen and Venus is gripped with runaway greenhouse gases, they are each a "little too close" and "a little too far". Though if they had gotten the atmospheric chemistry right I think their distance from the sun could have been compensated for - imagine if their positions were reversed, if Mars had the thick atmosphere with a lot of greenhouse activity and Venus had the thin atmosphere - who knows? As it is they are fairly good examples of what happens if just a few variables on your "earth-like" planet are wrong by just a little (in astronomical terms). Even Mercury with no atmosphere is an example of not only being too close to the sun (and thus too hot) but of being caught in tidal lock (so despite the intense heat on one side the atmoshpere freezes out on the other) This would presumably happen to any planet so close in, even if the star were smaller and a mercury type planet was only getting as much solar energy as earth is getting further away from a larger star.
It is not unlikely that if we could start visiting other systems we would find a *lot* of planets that were candidates to become truly earth-like but failed because they got just a few variables wrong by just a little bit. Even a nearly identical planet to Earth - exactly the same size, exactly the same distance from exactly the same sized star, with exactly the same chemical composition would have a high probablity of succumbing to either runaway greenhouse gases or having it's atmosphere freeze out if it's atmospheric composition was not regulated by the action of plate tektonics & continental weathering or if it's tilt was not regulated by an oversized moon or if it just had the bad luck of being hit with a really big comet (a very likely occurance without a "jupiter" nearby sucking up or pushing out all the debris).
Aliens might know lots of stuff. But how would
they no about human biology and its failings without already being here. Aliens might send us
warp drives. But its up to us to fix our human
failings.
I am who i am? So what is saying is God was Popeye
sailor man.