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Are We Alone in the Universe?

Posted by michael on from the lonely-out-there dept.

cynic10508 writes "CNN is running a story about how ours might be a unique solar system. Of the 100+ systems currently known to contain planets, all contain seemingly only gas giants. However, this may be a case of current technology and techniques being unable to detect planets similar to Earth." There are also BBC and Space.com stories.

32 of 759 comments (clear)

  1. We/they may be better off alone for now by erick99 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I think most people have an intutive sense that we are, indeed, alone in the universe. We have been looking for "life" outside of our planet for quite a while with nothing even approaching a hit. I participate in the SETI project via BOINC but that is out of a hope that maybe life is way far out there and not quite what we would expect. Maybe we are looking for the wrong sort of thing. Who is to say another life form even has a physical body. I am not optimistic that we will find life out in the universe in my lifetime (I'm 46). On the other hand, I am not so sure finding another form of life outside of Earth is such a good idea. We have a hard enough time getting along with people on the other side of our own planet. Well, this is all one man's conjecture. I am looking forward to reading other /.'s opinions and thoughts. I support whole-heartedly anyone who disagrees with me, it would be fun, in this case, to be wrong.

    Cheers,

    Erick

    --
    http://www.busyweather.com/
    1. Re:We/they may be better off alone for now by meme_police · · Score: 5, Insightful

      We've been looking how long? How old is the universe? How big is the universe? There is life out there, it could take a looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong time to find it, though.

      --

      The meme police, They live inside of my head

    2. Re:We/they may be better off alone for now by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 5, Insightful

      On the other hand, I am not so sure finding another form of life outside of Earth is such a good idea. We have a hard enough time getting along with people on the other side of our own planet.

      I suspect that getting alien radio signals would make our differences look rather trivial. Nothing like a common threat (and it would be seen as a threat) to make people stop fighting each other.

      --
      The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
    3. Re:We/they may be better off alone for now by techno-vampire · · Score: 4, Insightful

      SETI isn't just looking for Extraterrestrial life, it's looking for advanced Extraterrestrial civilizations. If there are other inhabited planets but none have been using radio/TV long enough for the signals to reach us, SETI won't find them. We won't know for sure if there's life on other planets until we go and look, and even then, if we don't find any we still won't be sure because we might not have looked in the right place.

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    4. Re:We/they may be better off alone for now by RazzleFrog · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Man I screwed that up. I meant that 1 out of 1 x 10^500000 suns. My point seems kind silly the other way around. Spent too much time with the scientific notation.

      How about looking at it this way. I have a mix cd here with 20 songs spread out over the last 60 years (big band to Korn - don't ask). Now based on the huge number of cd's that have been burned since cd-burners have become common place I believe that someone must have created the identical cd (same songs and order of songs). But based on my sample size of one I will never know until I find someone with the same mix.

    5. Re:We/they may be better off alone for now by TGK · · Score: 3, Insightful

      As an adendum, we're looking for civilizations that have the will to communicate.

      We're not trying to communicate right now. If ET is out there listening to Earth like we're listening to space he won't hear us.

      Factions of SETI have talked about building the VLA (Very Large Array) which would be a 1km square array of C-Band sized dishes spaced almost side to side. With this they could pick up transmissions from distant worlds about the strength of a TV broadcast.

      As is, unless we've got a radio telescope pointed at us with enough juice going through it to vaporize an airliner we're not going to hear them calling.

      --
      Killfile(TGK)
      No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
    6. Re:We/they may be better off alone for now by dargaud · · Score: 4, Insightful
      What the hell is [religion] going to do when we fight intelligent life that wasn't created in what our cultures felt was "God's vision"?

      My silly hope is that they are gonna go: "There are aliens ? Really ? And they don't believe in $Deity ? REALLY ? Well, I guess we were wrong all along. Sorry guys".

      But I know full well that the responses will range from: "Then we must show them the way of $Deity", to "They do, they just don't know it", to "Who cares, let's keep fighting here."

      When you see that the same line in some dumb old book can be interpreted as "kill them all" or "god is love, though shalt not kill", by the same religion at different times, I'm very pessimistic.

      --
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    7. Re:We/they may be better off alone for now by Total_Wimp · · Score: 4, Insightful

      What if our situation is unique or we are the first?

      The idea that we are the first is very intriguing. If you assume the big bang theory is accurate then there is a leading time for it to be possible for life to exist. Furthermore there is a leading time for it to be likely that life exists. Has anyone made any attempt to find those leading times?

      For example, you can assume that planets made out of elements more complex than hydrogen and helium are necessary to support life. When is it theorized that these elementally-complex planets were possible? How long ago was that compared to when Earth was formed? If it was a long time before earth was formed, then we can go about making some calculations about how many other civilizations might have existed before/with us. If it was around the same time that Earth was formed, then there is the very real possiblity that we are on the "front wave" of life in our universe.

      It may in fact be very unlikely that we are first. But someone wins the lottery every week. People must remember that unlikely events are almost guarenteed to happen to someone if the numbers involved are big enough. In this case, even if we aren't first, it's a certainty that some civillizaion was.

      TW

    8. Re:We/they may be better off alone for now by RWerp · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Granted, if the aliens look fairly similar to us and have the ability to communicate with us it will probably all work out fairly well, eventually anyway.

      Or not. Aztecs were very similar to Pizarro or Cortez, but this did not prevent their demise.

      --
      "Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
    9. Re:We/they may be better off alone for now by CreatureComfort · · Score: 4, Insightful


      Except to push your analogy a little farther, not only have the SETI people not found a CD with the same mix, they haven't even found anyone else with a CD burner.

      --
      "Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
      Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
    10. Re:We/they may be better off alone for now by RatBastard · · Score: 5, Insightful

      We may be the first intellegent life to exist in the universe. Or we may be the first ones to live past the developement of nuclear weapons. Or we might be the first ones not killed off by a asteroid colliding with our planet, or a plague, or a massive volcanic eruption, etc... It doesn't take a whole hell of a lot to kill a species off. We can't even count the number of near misses the human race survived.

      The universe is massive and ancient. It is also heartless and dangerous.

      --
      Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
    11. Re:We/they may be better off alone for now by luna69 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      > one of Christianity's greatest qualities is
      > the adaptability and universality of its
      > message.

      read: its willingness to CHANGE its message when inconvenient facts present themselves (i.e., evolution, heliocentric solar system, women not made from ribs, etc.)

      Mod me troll, I don't care. I think that it's high time that we all called a spade a spade and recognized religion for what it is.

      --
      No gods, no demons, and no masters. Secular Humanism!
    12. Re:We/they may be better off alone for now by QuantumFTL · · Score: 4, Insightful

      My personal belief is that believing the Bible does not preclude belief in other life forms. Nowhere in the book of Genesis does it specifically say He didn't create life somewhere else. Though I don't think many other Christians share my viewpoint...

      Actually I don't think it's that unpopular... I've heard my rather fundamentalist (with a lower case f) pastor talk against many things, from evolution to homosexuality... but never against finding life elsewhere in the universe. I think that most of the christians that I know would consider aliens to simply be another amazing creation.

      It disturbs me to hear people talk about how finding life elsewhere in the universe would be the "end of religion." Religion survives scientific discovery, because ultimately it's not based on what is possible to know, but what is possible to feel - something science cannot touch.

      In short, there's a lot more of us out there than you think! Also, there's plenty of christians that are rather apathetic about doctrinal details like this, never underestimate the power of apathy.

      Cheers,
      Justin

      P.S. I hope we do find some life out there in my lifetime!

    13. Re:We/they may be better off alone for now by Hatta · · Score: 4, Insightful

      My personal belief is that believing the Bible does not preclude belief in other life forms.

      Of course not. Basic logic tells us that if you assume a contradiction, you can derive anything. Since the bible is full of contradictions, if you assume that it is true, you can prove any statement you want (as well as its inverse.)

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    14. Re:We/they may be better off alone for now by Rich0 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Actually, most scientists would consider a willingness to change ones profession of beliefs upon gaining more knowledge as a good thing...

      Personally - I'm a scientist, and a Christian.

      Being a scientist means that I know that all statements have a concept of certainty associated with them. For examples I believe that the world is round, and I'm extremely certain of that. I tend to thik that there are no spacial dimensions outside of the obvious 3, but I'm not at all certain about that (to the degree that extra dimensions are very small).

      In the same way, I can look at the Bible and make interpretations with varying certainties. Does the Bible teach that there is a God - I think I can give that a high level of certainty. Does it teach that there is no chance that aliens could exist - well, I'd have to say that I'm not sure, but I can think of good arguments one way or the other. So, I think that in cases where the Bible is vague, we should certainly look to the knowledge we can gain with our eyes and ears to help clarify things.

      Remember, the Bible was written with a purpose. Its purpose was not to describe the orbits of the planets, the size of the earth, the nature of matter and energy, the nature of time, whether there are aliens, or how in detail the world came to be. The primary purpose of the Bible was to teach about the existance of a God, the relationship of man to God, the nature of man as being inherently flawed, and how God set out to fix that. It also has a lot to say on what the right thing and the wrong thing to do are in a variety of situations, and principles behind these distinctions.

      If I want to understand human psychology, I'll pick up a psychology text. I won't expect it to be 100% accurate - just a snapshot of what experts in the field currently think. The same applies to physics/chemistry/whatever.

      When somebody goes off about how one line in the Bible about the radius and diameter of a large bowl suggests that pi is equal to 3, I stop and ask myself whether the point of the passage was the exact (to the nearest micron) measurements of the bowl, or if it was just a footnote in an overview of a massive construction project. Usually, when the authors of the Bible wanted to get a point across, they generally repeated themselves and used a variety of examples - just like most normal people would do. If something in the Bible is fairly obscure, chances are that it is fairly unimportant in the big scheme of theology...

      Christians - just like scientists - would be wise to be honest about the limits of their knowledge. People confuse being honest about uncertainty with being wishy-washy, and as a result we have churches full of preachers who like to bang on the pulpit and pick any contentious issue in theology and say that if you don't agree 100% with them on it you're destined for eternal flames... If you want to know what the Bible teaches - read the Bible. Take anything else that anybody says with a grain of salt...

    15. Re:We/they may be better off alone for now by b00le · · Score: 5, Insightful
      What if our situation is unique or we are the first? You can't build any assumptions from a sample size of one.

      While it's true that we can't do statistics with a sample of one, it's not as if there is no data. The universe (very large) is certainly a datum, and one of the things astronomy has taught us is that it seems everywhere very similar: made of the same stuff and subject to the same laws. And in this one sample we have many subsamples showing how life appears as soon as, and everywhere, it can.
      It doesn't matter how probable or improbable life is - even if it occurred less than once in every galaxy that would be far more probable than our being unique. Unique is a big word. That idea that we are unique cannot be counted as rational in the face of even the little we know - in fact, it is precisely because it is not rational that it is often so passionately defended. What it would mean - and this is the superstition hardly anyone wants to abandon - would be that we were not natural. But we are.
      --
      Science fiction for grown-ups...
    16. Re:We/they may be better off alone for now by Stephen+Samuel · · Score: 4, Insightful
      To (mis)quote Isaac Asimov: "One is a very strange number and ought not to exist".

      If the universe is inimical to life then we should not exist. If it is life-capable, then chances are that there are other life-filled worlds out there (possibly even life-filled stars). If there were 'only' a few millions such worlds, that would still only leave at most a couple such planets in our own galaxy. There would have to be billions of life-bearing planets for us to have a good probability of having (much less finding) a second one in our galaxy.

      We are (for obvious reasons) the first life that we've found in this universe. The probability of being the only is low.

      As for the fact that most of the planets we've found so far being gas giants close to their stars ... well duh! We're mostly finding them as a result of things like star transits, and wobble effects. Earth has a near-zero effect on the wobble of the sun (too small). Jupiter is too far out -- if you consider the probability of Jupiter being observerved transiting the sun from some random orientation, that's near zero.

      --
      Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
  2. Absence of Evidence is not Evidence of Absence by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why is this even being posted here?

    1. Re:Absence of Evidence is not Evidence of Absence by MarkusQ · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It's suggesting that the theoretical model for how planets are formed may not be accurate.

      Right, but their basis for suggesting that is a pattern in the data that is totaly explained by known selection bias in the data. Occam's razor, if nothing else, should have made them stop and think. If you knowingly mount a security camera in an ammusement park angled so that it can only see people over six feet tall, do you then conclude that an alternative theory of amusement parks is needed, because by the standard model you would have expected to see more children than you did? Or do you say "sample bias" and try to develop a better camera setup?

      We can't detect earth-like planets at earth-like distances from their starts (yet) but we can detect large planets that orbit close to their stars. So of course the extra-solar planetary systems we find will be the ones with a gas giant close in. That just proves that our detection methods are detecting the sort of things that can be detected with those detection methods. It says nothing about what we aren't detecting (yet) one way or another.

      -- MarkusQ

  3. Ok Seriously... by still_sick · · Score: 4, Insightful

    How frigging arrogant would we have to be to honestly believe that in the ENTIRE universe, we are COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY UNIQUE?

    Come on, people... Seriously.

    --
    ...Also, I didn't know Buggalo could fly.
    1. Re:Ok Seriously... by Decameron81 · · Score: 4, Insightful
      How frigging arrogant would we have to be to honestly believe that in the ENTIRE universe, we are COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY UNIQUE?


      That's not arrogance, it's just a belief. You can call it a "statistically improbable belief" but not arrogance.

      On the other hand I would like to understand how is it even possible to calculate the chances of life appearing in another spot of the galaxy, and the chances that such life becomes intelligent. Personally, I don't think they are as high as you seem to believe.
      --
      diegoT
  4. Only 120 solar systems? by Amberlock · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I bought 120 lottery tickets and didn't find a winner. Must not be possible to win the lottery then, right?

    1. Re:Only 120 solar systems? by techno-vampire · · Score: 4, Insightful

      But we also have proof it's possible for a Solar System to have planets that can support life. We live in one.

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  5. Key wording is "100+ systems currently known..." by MarkEst1973 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    for every one system we know of, there are one billion that we don't. It's a little premature to say we're unique when we have such little data to work with.

  6. This is not "news for nerds" by ghost_world · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's "news" for dummies.

    With current technologies (and the amount of time we've been looking) we can only detect very large planets that are quite close their parent star...

    SURPRISE!!!! We've only found systems with large planets close to the parent star.

    Big news.

  7. Nothing days we are alone by Progman3K · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Our situation with regard to the physical parameters of our corner of the universe seems to be average:
    Average sun
    Average location in the galaxy (OK, maybe a little out in the backwater, but we have traversed more dense regions of the spirals of our galaxy in the last x billion years).
    Average matter content (gases, etc...)

    What might be the case could very simply be that space is awfully big, and we have only scanned a tiny portion of it in a tiny portion of the ways possible to scan it.

    I mean come on, if the observable universe is TINY, and we've only examined a TINY portion of that, isn't it a bit too early to say "That's it, we're all alone" ?

    After all, why have such a huge place all for the likes of us? What a waste...

    --
    I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
  8. Hard to find by www.sorehands.com · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Hey, it is even hard to find intelligent life on this planet.

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  9. Most people have an intuitive sense that the... by exp(pi*sqrt(163)) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...Earth isn't hurtling through space at high speed relative to nearby objects, and certainly don't have a sense that it's orbiting the sun. Thankfully science is informed by more than intuition.

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  10. Re:Gun-Jumping by PhuCknuT · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You missed the point of the article. We can detect jupiter sized planets, the problem is, every one we've seen has been way closer to the star than jupiter is to our sun, we haven't found a single solar system like our own. Aliens looking towards our gas giants would see something different than all the rest of the nearby systems.

  11. Patterns by ndavidg · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There are 200 billion suns in this Galaxy and 125 billion galaxies. The process in which solar systems are formed is caused by forces of physics and the laws of chemistry which are the same through the universe. Just because a terrestial planet has not been seen by human eyes or touched by human feet does not mean it does not exist. In the same way that Europeans in the middle ages could deduce that the earth is round from seeing ships sink in the horizon, we can deduce that planets like Earth or Mars are plentiful throughout the Galaxy. Our geocentricity misleads us to use phrases like "Known Universe" in the same way that Eurpoean history misleads us to call America the "New World" and to say that Columbus "Discovered" America.

  12. method only sensitive to large, fast planets by peter303 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This article is bogus. About 95% of the planets have been detected so far by causing subtle doppler-motion shifts in their parent stars. The lower threshhold of measuring this doppler shift from earth observatories can only measure the really massive and/or fast (close-in) planets. Several planned space-based observatories will improve on this. They will either have more sensitive doppler or use alternative methods such eclipsing transits (Kepler probe) , or direct observation of planets.

  13. Re:Would You Visit Earth? by geoffspear · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Of course not. They've already examined our solar system, and found that the only planet here, Jupiter, would be inhospitable to any sort of life, so they didn't bother.

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