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Stephen Hawking Thinks Aliens Likely
OMNIpotusCOM writes "Noted astrophysicist Stephen Hawking thinks that alien life is likely, albeit primitive, according to a lecture delivered at George Washington University in honor of NASA's 50th anniversary. It begs the question of if we need to consider a Prime Directive before exploring or sending signals too far into the depths of space."
firstly many Scientists have came to that conclusion, Many mathematically proven that even if you call life rare, the sheer number of stars with the possibility of planets in a habitable zone means there is a crapload of civilizations out there.
Hawking has said this before earlier as well. Just because he makes the same statement again instantly makes this news??
Come on the Drake Equation has been around for a long time now guys.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
We, as a species, haven't managed to solve the problem of destroying primitive cultures *here* or a thousand other problems that suggest not corrupting alien cultures is something we shouldn't worry too much about.
I mean seriously -- if we think our technology and culture is okay for the entire planet, why should we stop here?
"Aliens being likely" does not mean that it's likely we will ever meet one (or be successful in either sending or receiving any communication).
Furthermore, for the second question, how willing would you be to share your knowledge with someone you just met off the street 5 mintues ago? Some information, you might share such as the location of your favorite [insert food-type] restauraunt. Other information, like, say, your secret plans for world domination, you wouldn't be so likely to share.
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Will they simply laugh at us earthlings; or shake their heads in frustration, wondering "when will we ever learn"?
What makes you think life forms entirely alien to earth will even have heads? Starfish have no heads, jellyfish have no heads.
I think it's a bit early to worry about TFS's "Star Trek Prime Directive". Sure, there is probably life alien to earth but face it, guys - we haven't found any. Not yet.
There are folks who think an advanced civilization from some other star has already come here to study us (Roswell), but if in fact those are aliens come to visit us, I think it more likely that it is a species descended from us come back in time to do some archaeology rather than visiting from Betelguise to work on a Wikipedia entry on us..
Travelling faster than the speed of light is, after all, just as impossible as time travel. Humans have been human for less than a million years, what will we be like in another ten million? Will we have found that time travel is as impossible as air travel was 1000 years ago?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
I would presume any such Prime Directive would ultimately be abused/ignored like it has been on Star Trek. International Law is only arbitrarily enforced. Let's first get a grip on how we treat our own people and the other species which inhabit our planet, then maybe we could think about how we would treat extra-terrestrial life forms (if in fact there are any). The only downside to idealism is reality.
Keep banging that head against the wall.
Not only does the old usage hardly exist anymore, but when you try to use it people have no idea what you are talking about.
Language changes.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I don't see why Fermi's paradox is in any way a good argument. By his argument, there are no lobsters at all. I know this because last night I left my door open and waited for one to crawl in.
Put another way - we (humanity) went from fairly small mammals to now in about 65 million years. If the dinosaurs hadn't fallen victim to $extinctionLevelEvent, they could easily have become as evolved as we are now - just a whole lot earlier. So, if intelligent/sentient life could have evolved here 60 million years ago, why wouldn't that be the case in another solar system?
For all we know, it's entirely possible that 15,000 light years away there's a planet with a civilization that is EXACTLY as evolved as we are. Why haven't we heard from them yet? Physics - would take 15,000 years for any signal to reach us. Hell, 200 light years away would suffice for that argument, and in both cases Fermi would look like an idiot.
As an aside, I see his paradox along the lines of creationism - after all, we can't prove that something doesn't exist. Only that it does.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
Then it's just a matter of settling on WHICH photons to look for. Some don't work well for communications (like the visible spectrum). Some won't travel very far. We are capable of producing photons at just about any desired wavelength, and yet we've settled on a narrow range for communications.
You could argue that we don't understand the natural world completely yet, and so there could be other means of communication. This is absolutely true, but how would we look for something that we don't know about? Electromagnetic waves are so easy to detect and discover that any technologically advanced culture is bound to use them eventually.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Absolutely not. There's a line, albeit fuzzy, between the formerly incorrect but now accepted uses of words, and the uses that are incorrect and unacceptable. This "begs the question" nonsense belongs to the second category. One day it will move to the first, no doubt about it, since after all, that's what American English is: an exercise in well-established illiteracy. But it is not there yet.
The view that language is good enough as long as it is fairly likely to get the point across is - even putting aside that it is usually harder to parse incorrect, intelligible writing than correct prose - antithetical to the "standards" culture espoused on Slashdot. It is the permissive, lackadaisical Internet Explorer approach to HTML. And it is born, I fear, of the average nerd's mediocre ability in his own language, and his desire to change the rules to suit his own lack of interest in a discipline at least as complex, and millennia older, than his own - that of effective communication. Put down the Knuth, pick up the Fowler, and learn to express yourself as elegantly to your fellow man as you might to your computer.
Anyway, I've met no reasonably educated man who does not know the correct usage of "beg the question". A few minutes ago I was reading a book published in the last decade which employed it correctly. Had the author wished to indicate that a particular question was "raised", he would have done so. While I'm here:
Here endeth the rant.
Those things are very species specific already here on earth. I don't find it very plausible that alien cooties would be very fond of us.
Parasites and diseases which are common in household animals seldom accept human as a host. Furthermore, I have never been infected by a tree fungus. I guess they don't find me favorable for symbiosis.
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Actually, without going too much into details, some things make so much and evolved independently so many times on Earth, that they make sense when you think of it.
Or even better explained: they make sense when you
A) want an alien at least evolved enough to hold a conversation with. Bacteria are exciting for biologists, but an alien you can actually make contact with, has damn good reasons to indeed look kinda like us.
B) take evolution and RL constraints into consideration. It's easy to imagine giant amoeba creatures, or sacs of gas floating on Jupiter, but those tend to either (I) have blatant disadvantages that natural selection would discriminate against, or (II) they're bloody impossible. E.g., a cell is really just a drop of sea water in a lipid membrane, and evolved from some aminoacid chains which originally started replicating in plain sea water without a membrane. And from there it's been baby steps towards any complex organisms. It was first just bacterial films, then some "worms" which were just a toroidal bacterial film and "sponges" which were just a bacterial colony with holes in it, and so on. Most fantasy extraterestrial forms proposed, like those giant gas sacks, it's not clear how they'd evolve in the first place.
But anyway, that in mind, I'll say that, for example:
- to start with the easy part, any creature of any complexity above "bacterial colony" will have specialized cells for specialized tasks. Simply because it's a huge advantage to. Cells on your skin need to largely insulate you from the uncontrolled outside world, while cells inside need to allow a freer flow of nutrients, for example. As an added bonus, specialization also means that each cell only needs a smaller set of proteins and reactions to do its job, which reduces its energy and nutrient needs and also the number of things that can go wrong.
So basically this rules out any ideas some may have about sentient amorphous blobs.
- almost any creature has either bilateral or radial symmetry, simply because it saves on DNA. Your left side is largely a mirrored copy of your right side. It also has advantages like that it's easier to swim or walk when your left and right legs/fins/tentacles are the same length. And having redundant organs is an advantage by itself too.
- any complex creature will have _some_ sensory organs, because again it's a great advantage to. Even some of the most primitive cells can detect changes in the environment, and react to them in one way or another. Some unicelular organisms already have light sensors. Over time some stuff will remain rather distributed, but high-bandwidth stuff like eyes, it makes sense to have a small number and complex/high-res, rather than photosensitivity all over your body. Other stuff tends to work _because_ it's a single structure instead of a widely distributed array, e.g., hearing. Etc. Basically given enough time and evolution, see the previous stuff about specialization: a lot of things will get concentrated and specialized.
- almost any complex creature will have a mouth at one end and an arse at the other end, simply because it all evolved out of some ultra-primitive worms which were just a thin tube that pushed water from one end to the other. And evolution works in baby steps, small changes to what already existed. Even the exceptions tend to be actually really built the same way. E.g., gasteropods have a funkier configuration, but start as the above described tube anyway: later a diagonal muscle twists them into an different configuration.
- neurons (or whatever the alien equivalent is), are inherently slow, compared to transistors. They're chemical things, just because they evolved out of other cells, and that's how cells work. They don't have to just transmit the signal, they actually have to produce chemicals to excite the next neuron's receptors, and then neutralize those so the next one doesn't keep firing for ever. Again, _because_ they evolved from other cells, which are just a complex chemistry run
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
And liberation? Whose fault is it that the people of the world suffer tyrants and murderers ruling them, really? If all the people go together we could overthrow them without too much difficulty. But then, we'd have to overthrow the new tyrants who led the last revolution, and so on.
I'll have you know that I, as an enlightened being, have been liberating lesser beings for years. I have personally liberated hundreds if not thousands of civilizations of ants. I've also liberated civilizations of bees, wasps and hornets. I'll tell you... the totalitarianism they were subjected to would make a civilized person weep.
They must have been captives, because once I slew their rulers and set them free, they all left and I never saw them again. But I'm sure they were singing my praises, whatever happened to them.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth