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Looking For Intelligence
Calgacus writes "We've all read stories about extra-solar planets being found by gravitational wobbles. The Scotsman has a story here about a planet in the Fomalhaut system being discovered because of its wake through a dust cloud. It's further out than other recently discovered planets and astronomers are saying it means there's an odds-on chance of intelligent life being out there. If only there was more on Earth..."
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;-)
If only there was more on Earth...
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Someones had to replace a coffee cup holder recently, haven't they?
As far as I can tell, the article has nothing specifically to do with the search for life, much less the search for intelligent life. All it is really about is the detection of a planet with a much larger orbital radius than previous extrasolar planets. According to the team in the article, this makes it "much more likely that other solar systems exist." Well, duh. The only bearing this has on life is as more confirmation that there are indeed extrasolar planets. Which I think we already knew. So, yes, it's an interesting detection technique, but life? Intelligence? Including these references is sensationalistic and dumb.
So according to this article, we have bigger chances to see intelligence through the fact that there's a planet "eating" up a whole mess of dust and comets... That's VERY interesting. Now /.-ters, just close your eyes and imagine - a planet roaming around a whole mess of dust and comets. Every second millions of tons fall into this world, from time to time we see Comet-Shoemaker-like fireworks shining from its surface. WELL, THAT'S A VERY GOOD CHANCE TO FIND INTELLIGENCE!
That's a whole lot of intelligence to look into one of the last places capable to harbour Life and state that "we can find some intelligence"... Couldn't they count yellow stars and say we have lot of chances to find intelligence?
Or maybe there is some intelligence out there? Exactly on that star system? So I hope that the dust will cover Earth from their view. We are a paradise compared to these Armageddonians...
There is a theory that says the chances of discovering intelligent life approaches 1 the less intelligent they get, and approaches 0 the more intelligent they get, when compared to humans.
That is to say it is guaranteed that life exists with no intelligence, and is guaranteed that life does -not- exist with infinate intelligence
All life is on a scale somewhere between no intelligence and infinate intelligence. Hence the odds are that if/when we find extra terrestrial life they will, in fact, be less intelligent.
I agree with:
but using humans as a standard is somewhat close minded (although I guess we don't have any other standard at this time)
Honestly, I believe the odds are closer to 1 than they are 0 that we'll find life more intelligent than us
Some additional food for thought
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The simple answer is relativity. Despite worm holes, warp drive, hyper drive, tachyon fields, and all the other SF solutions, nobody has ever come up with a mathematically viable solution to Einstein's limitation on travel speeds in the universe. To put it country simple, if they could have gotten here, we'd be living on a reservation already. The only other obvious answer is that habitable water covered planets are a dime a dozen in the cosmos.
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
I work for the Joint Astronomy Centre, who operate both SCUBA and the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope. Hubble is a telescope that operates in an entirely different wavelength range (optical, infrared), whilst the JCMT and SCUBA work at submillimetre wavelengths. SCUBA's looking at interstellar dust particles. At Hubble's wavelengths this dust just has an absorbing and obscuring effect, so you can't see it properly. However, SCUBA sees the heat glow from it.
If you go out on a clear night and look at Sagittarius, you're looking towards the centre of the Milky Way. You'll see lots of dark patches among the brightness, which are caused by the extinction of starlight by this interstellar dust. Because it's dark, you can't properly see it. However, if you could see with SCUBA's eyes you'd see this stuff glowing brightly!
This post is strictly my own opinion and not necessarily that of my employer.
It's right up there with the (earlier) idea that because we were finding supergiant planets so close to stars, it must mean there aren't many Jupiter-sized planets out there in mid-range orbits to suck up comets in their gravity wells -- so there must be less chance of life, right, 'cause all those comets would scour inner planets clean? That one got floated when they were first finding the big whoppers that caused stars' images to wobble. 'Course, it was based on assumptions about the fundamental role of comets in planetary life -- the whole dinosaur thing was in the news then -- and about how every star system must look like ours, and so on.
We're still in the data collection stage of figuring out extrasolar planets. Our means of seeing them are dependent on flaky situations -- planets that travel through dust trails, planets that are so huge they cause stars to spin funny, stuff like that. We can't say anything really solid about the frequency of different types of planets, because our methods of looking for them are still picking around the edges, seeing the outliers rather than getting any sense of the norm.
(Personally I think some of the outrageously adaptive bacterial life on earth argues pretty strongly for life wherever there's the slightest opening. If you wanna argue the likelihood of extraterrestrial forms, take a look at the conditions bacteria can get by in. Life can get by.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
but it's funny how most people are really trying hard to get to the US.
Nothing new. Particularly Europe, but most of the rest of the world feels a lot of frustration that their opinions are basically irrelevent in what happens in the world. They take this frustration out in foolish (one might say childish) criticisms of anything the US does.
But you know what really galls them? That the US cares so little what the rest of the world thinks. This particularly irritates countries like France who still want to think of themselves as a world power.
Then you factor in the fact that Europe enjoys what freedom they have through the power and defense of the US (they would be speaking Russian right now without the US, and probably would have had several more world wars by now) -- not to mention that we rebuilt the place after WW/II -- and it's inevitable that resentment builds up in many people. Particularly younger people who don't have any historical perspective.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.