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Exoplanet Count Tops 700
astroengine writes "On Friday, the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia registered more than 700 confirmed exoplanets. Although this is an amazing milestone, it won't be long until the 'first thousand' are confirmed. Only two months ago, the encyclopedia — administered by astrobiologist Jean Schneider of the Paris-Meudon Observatory — registered 600 confirmed alien worlds. Since then, there has been a slew of announcements including the addition of a batch of 50 exoplanets by the European Southern Observatory's High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (or HARPS) in September."
I wonder if there will be some announcing strategy to try and be the one to announce planet #1000.
We must buy 3D printers to print out warp drives and colonize those planets, as our Holy Leader Hawking has commanded! All hail the Holy Musk and Blessed Pettis, who will lead us off this Mud Ball, for ever and ever, amen.
could've sworn it was there a few months ago... anyone know what happened to it?
I just spend the weekend at a family gathering. Many of my relatives are doctors, scientists, and professors. The topic of alien life came up, and almost all of them laughed it off! Now I'm merely a computer programmer so I didn't say much, but when I hear about there being hundreds of exoplants out there in space I can't help but think that there may be life on at least some of them. After all, these are only the planets that we know about so far! There are probably millions upon millions of other similar planets out there that we just haven't discovered yet.
Why do well-educated scientists consider alien life, even if it's very simple or nothing like life here on earth, to be such an absurd idea? Why do they have so much trouble considering it with any seriousness?
Because if what we've found so far is at least a somewhat representative sample, the overwhelming majority of planets tend to be either gas giants, frozen balls of rock and ice, or roasted balls of rock and lava. You have to be terribly imaginative to see life coming up on worlds like that.
Of course, even if we go by 1 in 700, or 1 in a million for that matter, the Milky way ought to be positively teeming with life. We simply don't have enough data to make a meaningful conclusion either way yet.
Why do well-educated scientists consider alien life, even if it's very simple or nothing like life here on earth, to be such an absurd idea? Why do they have so much trouble considering it with any seriousness?
The scientists in your family may not be representative of scientists in general.
I've always assumed that most people who know the numbers involved think that alien life must exist (with a hundred billion stars per galaxy and hundred billion galaxies, it seem like there are pretty good odds).
Whether we'll communicate with, travel to, or be visited by aliens is an entirely different question with a lot more scope for doubt.
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
I've always assumed that most people who know the numbers involved think that alien life must exist (with a hundred billion stars per galaxy and hundred billion galaxies, it seem like there are pretty good odds).
Part of the problem is that some people use 'alien life' to mean anything from microbe-sized upwards while others use it to mean 'little grey men in flying saucers'. The former is almost certain to exist, but there's no evidence for the latter and good reason to believe that they don't exist; technology merely a few thousand years ahead of ours should be visible across much of the galaxy.
If you consider how many times the scientists have been wrong in history, you'll have a pretty good guess.
Now non-scientists have been wrong too, so it's closer to say "humans have been wrong".
Bottom line: we actually don't know. There may, or may not be alien life. Heck, we don't understand the universe either.
We often pretend to be the best specie there is, because we kill all the other ones we've found so far (which makes it fun as we are afraid another specie from space would do that to us lol). And that therefore, we'd know a lot already. The thing is, we don't have really a scale of things, or if any, we're meaningless compared to the universe.
But we know that what we've found so far is NOT a representative sample, because the methods are biasied towards finding jupiter-sized planets?
There are scientists and there are scientists. If the scientists in your family scoff at the idea of alien life then their opinions may not have been well considered. There are plenty of very credible thinkers who feel quite certain that we will one day find life off the earth - Stephen Hawking among them. People who scoff at ideas which seem far fetched just because they seem far fetched have a history of looking quite red faced when later they turn out to be wrong. The earth is flat and the centre of the universe, and the Newtonian world being just two famous examples. It goes all the way back to the earliest discussions on the nature of matter. Greek philospher Democritus was criticised for his ridiculous idea that matter consisted of 'atoms'. We may or may not find other life in the universe, but to dismiss it as impossible is just silly.
...'cuz I hate to think somebody having to rush a long-lost prequel to the Bible into print.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
That's not really good reason to believe they don't exist. A galactic spanning civilization, for one, would only be visible, as you say, across the galaxy. Not across the entire universe. And secondly, as of right now it is only a pipe dream that a couple thousand more years of history will spread us across the stars. We might just as easily blow ourselves up, retreat into a cyber-singularity, or just run out of gas, so to speak.
But anyway, I agree that it's likely that microbial life of various sorts is abundant. And on the other end, I've always felt that it is only a kind of cellular chauvinism that prevents us from thinking of stellar objects as life forms. They grow, they mantain homeostasis, they sometimes reproduce in a fashion, they consume, they die.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Disclosure: I am not an astronomer
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
"Because if what we've found so far is at least a somewhat representative sample, the overwhelming majority of planets tend to be either gas giants, frozen balls of rock and ice, or roasted balls of rock and lava. You have to be terribly imaginative to see life coming up on worlds like that."
There are plenty of life forms that live in unusual environments right here on this planet. Geothermal vent ecosystems for example:
Deep-sea bacteria form the base of a varied food chain that includes shrimp, tubeworms, clams, fish, crabs, and octopi. All of these animals must be adapted to endure the extreme environment of the vents -- complete darkness; water temperatures ranging from 2C (in ambient seawater) to about 400C (at the vent openings); pressures hundreds of times that at sea level; and high concentrations of sulfides and other noxious chemicals.
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2001/ast13apr_1/
There are also bacteria that live in sulphuric acid in caves.
http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/planet-earth/guide/caves.html
It isn't unreasonable to think that life may have evolved in unusual environments elsewhere.
That's not really good reason to believe they don't exist. A galactic spanning civilization, for one, would only be visible, as you say, across the galaxy.
That's not obviously the case. Largescale stellar engineering is something we might notice. Dyson Spheres and Ringworlds for example are both things that we'd be able to see in nearby galaxies. Similar remarks apply to other big engineering projects.
But anyway, I agree that it's likely that microbial life of various sorts is abundant. And on the other end, I've always felt that it is only a kind of cellular chauvinism that prevents us from thinking of stellar objects as life forms. They grow, they mantain homeostasis, they sometimes reproduce in a fashion, they consume, they die.
By this logic fire would be alive also. Stars don't seem to do much of the things that life does, in particular, stars don't reproduce in a way that makes stars more similar to themselves than not so (except in so far as high metal content supernova lead to even higher metalicity).
Not really. Basically, as soon as our methods allow to detect lower-mass planets we immediately detect them.
It's just that now our tools are not yet good enough to detect Earth-sized planets in habitable zone.
Where do you get the idea that scientists don't believe in extraterrestrial life?
The more planets and potentially earth-like planets we discover, the more paradoxical the Fermi paradox becomes: "where are they?"
I'm glad someone is maintaining the vanguard of traditional scientific thought regarding life, especially e.t. life.
When Kepler's planets are confirmed (I guess when it sees 3 or more transits), I think this total will more than double.
Also, I don't know where the AC above is coming from but the scientists I know (tenured theoretical chemist who worked under a Nobel laureate, computational linguist who's father won a fields medal, A.I. expert funded by DARPA and prominent computer graphics researcher with 9 patents) all think it is very VERY likely there is life out there. (Are the AC's acquaintances in the "hard" sciences?).
After all, "it would be a tremendous waste of space!"*
*don't know if I paraphrased that right but if you saw the movie you'll know
How would we see a Dyson Sphere if it's capturing all the output from their star? It would be just another patch of blackness against the inky black of space. Our small slice of space we can view at any given time is very tiny, frequently changing, and we can't actually see most of these exoplanets, just their effect causing their stars to wobble. We'd have no hope of seeing satellites around a planet, or space shuttles, or even a space ship the size of one of the Alliance citadel style things in Firefly, with current technology, unless they were within the inner solar system, or buzzed a probe in the outer system. We might see something very large if it deliberately silhouetted itself against Jupiter, for us.
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
Small-minded people. Unable to connect facts in their mind. Astronomy is based on studying light from "out there". Based on the fact that we assume all matter to be the same elements that we see on Earth, otherwise, what are we looking at? So, if everything in the universe is made of the same chemical elements we have here, it's not a big leap to believe that life can pop up anywhere.
The only problem is that if you think the universe contains the same elements as on earth, the same limits on energy sources and technology apply. Steel is steel no matter where in the universe. Those lifeforms aren't able to come here any more than we are able to go there.
The scale of the universe simply doesn't mesh with the short life-span of humans. The universe is billions of years old, billions of light-years in size. People live what, 10, 20 years of useful life span were their brains and bodies work well? And what do we do with that time? We spend most of it going to school so we can go to work just to survive, then our kids put us in retirement homes and wait for us to die so they can collect the inheritance.
There's just not much to be gained by the average person to spend the time to understand these things.
Were they laughing off the idea of extraterrestrial life itself, or the stuff you commonly see in popular culture...you know, the people who treat Roswell like a Mecca, go on about grays and abductions and crop circles, anyone who agrees with Ancient Aliens Guy, ect.? It is one thing to speculate that, out of countless stars, it is possible that there exists more than one planet with some sort of life (while admitting that there is no evidence whatsoever to indicate that that is the case and acknowledging our general lack data), and it is hard to say that such an idea deserves to be dismissed outright, however the idea has certainty attracted more than its fair share of things to be rightly laughed off. I never really noticed that scientists completely dismiss the notion of non-terrestrial life, if anything, I'd have assumed just the opposite is true. I'd guess that either your relatives are not representative of scientists as a whole for one reason or another, just chose to go with what evidence is actually verifiable rather than get into the whole 'billions of stars times non-zero possibility of life equals...' thing, were thinking not of the concept itself but of of the nonsense various spacey nutters go on about, or just didn't want to look like said nutters in front of everyone else by acknowledging the possibility.
Human conceit primarily. There is still the belief, even among the supposedly well educated, that alien life doesn't really exist even if they think it's a mathematical certainty because of the number of solar systems in the galaxy.
Furthermore, these people certainly don't follow this mathematical certainty to its logical conclusion. Namely that given the vast number of star in the galaxy (400 billion+) and the high probability of there being complex life in the galaxy, the probability of intelligent species with spacefaring capabilities should not be dismissed out of hand.
And given that in our own stellar neighborhood (e.g, within 50 light years of our own solar system) there are a number of stars at least a billion years older than our own star we should take the possibility of other intelligent life possibly exploring our own solar system seriously and also not dismiss the possibility of our own solar system being explored by other intelligences.
that assumes
1) aliens would have similar technology / uses of that technology which probably isn't true (specifically the usage part)
2) a few thousands years is across the board; while it's true you may have a time frame of a few thousand years to detect the technology, add dealing with the speed of light *and* the fact that a few thousand years is minuscule in comparison to the distances involved. That simply means our ability to detect progressively beyonds the past as we reach further out and not our current time frame. Saying that they don't exists because we can't see them within this time frame is not a good argument since they may have existed in the past (before this timeframe) or after the time frame (which could be up to right now).
But it's true, microbial life is much much easier to be developed rather then intelligent life, especially one that has self awareness and can use tools.
"You have to be terribly imaginative to see life coming up on worlds like that."
Um... no you don't. There are even theories out there for life that could exist inside a stars corona.
Just speculating that the context of the discussion matters a lot. Maybe they felt a lot of peer pressure to discredit the idea, since they were all together. Or it could be that they are sick of real kooks talking about aliens. "Aliens" is different than "life". Aliens is Sigourney Weaver.
A relative of mine worked at an public observatory/science center for many years in a big city. He had to deal with a lot of loonies who know what flavor of ice cream the aliens like. Many feel a very religious connection with "aliens". Perhaps they pick this up from movies. From a scientific POV this has more to do with human psychology than exobiology. It's a part of our culture, and it's a difficult place to start from if you want to get at the truth.
Earth biology is a science we know comparatively little about. Exobiology is so speculative, you could run a lot of very expensive experiments, come up empty, and not have scratched the surface or have proved anything either way. Experiments that don't prove anything unless you hit a very unlikely home run are easy to laugh off. There could be a billion planets out there, full of life, or we could be alone. It doesn't change the odds when we don't even know what we are talking about.
It kind of makes SETI look like a waste of time. I guess it's worth doing, but it's like pissing in the ocean.
We can restate the original premise. Our methods are biased towards finding large planets close to stars.
Given the limits of our current techniques, it should be possible to quantify the limits of their resolution. Put this together with some models of solar system formation and we can extrapolate our observations using a model that says X% of all planetary discs tend to evolve into systems with large planets that migrate in toward their sun. So 1-X remain in some other state. perhaps one we can't detect (yet).
Have gnu, will travel.
You can't say that seems like pretty good odds because your information regarding the problem is incomplete. In order to determine whether you actually have good odds you need to know the number of planets in the universe, n, and the probability of life existing on a randomly chosen planet, p. The only information available for n is ballpark figures, and there is absolutely no information about p, except that it's non-zero. From a mathematical point of view, it's impossible to say that alien life must exist.
We would see it somewhat like when we see a exoplanet today. When it transits in front of a - in this case second - star.
"Dyson Spheres and Ringworlds for example are both things that we'd be able to see"
I think you meant "are both things that are make-believe."
I just spend the weekend at a family gathering. Many of my relatives are doctors, scientists, and professors. The topic of alien life came up, and almost all of them laughed it off! Now I'm merely a computer programmer so I didn't say much, but when I hear about there being hundreds of exoplants out there in space I can't help but think that there may be life on at least some of them. After all, these are only the planets that we know about so far! There are probably millions upon millions of other similar planets out there that we just haven't discovered yet.
Why do well-educated scientists consider alien life, even if it's very simple or nothing like life here on earth, to be such an absurd idea? Why do they have so much trouble considering it with any seriousness?
Do you think there's any other intelligent life out there?" "If not, it sure seems like an awful waste of space."
Carl Sagan, Contact
It's also possible that numerous civilisations with a similar level of technology to ours exist, but it's simply impossible in practice to "colonise the galazy". Inter-stellar travel may simply require too much energy/resources, or it may turn out to be infeasible to survive in space for long enough for anybody to reach another star.
The existence of extraterrestrial life is completely philosophical and hypothetical. Saying that such-a-such scientist does or does not think there is otherworldly life is not proof one way or another, even if that scientist is decorated or the great Hawking, whom I admire. We can discuss the size of the universe, the number of stars and discuss it from a statistical point of view. The math involved does lead to the probable conclusion that extraterrestrial life must exist, but this is again not proof. As for the idea that "galactic spanning civilizations" must be seen from our small rock is human arrogance. There is a strong possibility that such a civilization exists and our current technology simply cannot detect it. As for question of celestial bodies and stellar objects being life forms, we don't know that they are non-sentient. that is a philosophical question of another kind. What definition of life do we use?
The meaning is clear.
Isn't Ringworld unstable, though?
Actually, krugerrands are the best specie.
"when I hear about there being hundreds of exoplants out there in space I can't help but think that there may be life on at least some of them"
Hate to state the obvious but the planets so far have been mostly gas giants. The odds of finding life as we know it on one are zero. There are proposed lifeforms that could live by drifting in the upper atmosphere of gas giants but the odds are slim that such types of life exist. They've yet to confirm an earth sized planet and it may be many years before they do. Directly imaging one is probably decades off. Having a nice close of photo of one is probably never. Without interstellar travel we probably will never confirm life on other planets just that it's possible.
When do we go there?
administered by astrobiologist Jean Schneider of the Paris-Meudon Observatory
Seriously what does Jean Schneider really do?
...as of right now it is only a pipe dream that a couple thousand more years of history will spread us across the stars. We might just as easily blow ourselves up, retreat into a cyber-singularity, or just run out of gas, so to speak.
yep. Who says colonizing other worlds or having some kind of interstellar fleet it worth doing? If a civilization has advanced a few thousand (or even a few hundred) years beyond ours, I'd imagine they would have an amazing understanding of how their environment works, how to manage and recycle resources, how to generate power, and environmental reclamation, all with maximum sustainability. Methods of education and information dissemination would also have advanced to the point where even the general populace has a sufficient understanding of these areas, which I assume would include cultural values that consider voluntary birth control, or whatever the equivalent would be called in reference to their method of reproduction, to be as important as environmental protection. Perhaps the only reasons for many advanced civilizations to travel beyond their own solar system would be for resources they couldn't otherwise access, scientific exploration, or a catastrophe or threat of one. The first two probably could be mostly automated, leaving catastrophe as the remaining driver of massive colonization. Although, given they are of such an advanced state, some of the things we would consider a catastrophe might conceivably be dealt with technologically (ie. asteroids/comets, climate change). All this assumes they don't blow themselves up, or become Terminators or something.
There are more practical issues - our technological age of reason isn't actually very old yet.
Take SETI and radio transmissions - we've only been emitting radio for 200 years, and we're rapidly confining the emissions or ditching them entirely (fiber optics). Who's to say that within the next, 50 years or so we won't discover some alternate broadcast technology which dispenses with radio entirely? (entangled particles come to mind, if communications by that route were ever to be possible).
The course of future technological development is always unclear - especially when you get to considering speculative technology like interstellar travel. Maybe it's only possible between star gravity wells or maybe future civilization trends towards virtual reality (i.e. cities and artificial illumination stop being used because constructs are just giant computing substrates).
Not to mention objects with really short orbits, which means much more rapid observations. Any planet will only pass between the star and us once per cycle (assuming it's in the plane) which makes it much easier to find orbits measures in weeks or months instead of years and decades. Like for example our Jupiter has an orbit of almost 12 years. They need two measurements to get a period and want three for confirmation, that's 36 years. How long have we been searching for exoplanets again? Oh right, we wouldn't have found our own solar system yet.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Younger Slashdot readers cannot imagine what the discovery of exoplanets means to those of us who have been reading science fiction since the 1950s. We dreamed of traveling to the moon, and we managed that thanks to a martyred President. With that milestone accomplished, we looked forward to the planets and the stars.
Somehow, we lost the will to explore space. The Space Shuttle, which should have preceded the exploration of the Moon, was funded only after many compromises, and the program is now ended. The Russians still have their 1960s-era space capability, and the Chinese are moving forward, but the exploration of the Solar System is being done by robots.
We thought we would have to travel to the stars to see if they had planets, but the astronomers have managed to see them from a distance. It now appears certain that most stars have planets, and it is only a matter of time before we start detecting the habitable ones. There is no longer any chance that we can ignore the challenge of interstellar travel. It may be a century or two before the probes are launched, but launched they will be. The dreams of the science fiction fans of the 1950s are being realized.
technology merely a few thousand years ahead of ours should be visible across much of the galaxy.
Why do you assume that? Maybe other forms of life don't use technology the way we do. Maybe they choose to use non-broadcast forms of technology. Maybe their communications tech has moved well beyond anything we've yet discovered, i.e., people using radios are going to be invisible to people looking for smoke signals. Maybe the galaxy is populated by planet-eating space goats that are attracted to coherent electromagnetic transmissions, and wise civilizations have learned not to broadcast. There can be lots of reasons why we don't see other's technology.
The existance of alien life is not so far fetched. But the idea that we can do anything about it is about as speculative as you can get. It tends to lead to coversation with all the coherence of a bunch of stoners.
the sun's gotta die eventually.
actually, i can imagine the "cold death" scenario making for some interesting interstellar turf wars - fighting for mass to keep a home star burning while all the stars slowly go out.
Homeopathy doctors, creation scientists, humanities professors... ah yes, I'm starting to see what the problem is.
just realised I responded to a response to the question. Such are the dangers of posting from the feed reader view...
Not enough information. We have no idea what the odds are for abiogenesis to occur, even if the conditions are right. Even assuming we knew how often those conditions are present.
They aren't computer scientists, or perhaps they'd have a different attitude. It takes shockingly little in the way of logic to create the equivalent of a Turing Machine. Just NAND gates are enough. Are we a superior kind of computer? Do we possess to ability to solve some problems faster, algorithmically faster that is, than a computer could? Is a Turing Machine incapable of duplicating a living creature? I think the answer to all those questions is no. I expect that there are many environments that could support such simple logic functions. Life as we know it is based on carbon. And so, we may find life all over the place when we get better at recognizing it. However, it will probably be relatively simple stuff similar to Earthly bacteria. After all, it took approximately 3 billion years here for multicellular life to evolve from those humble beginnings.
We humans have this tendency and desire to think we're special. Today, the Middle Ages idea that the Earth is the center of the universe seems so naive and revealing. In the future, the idea that we are alone might seem similarly foolish.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Gas giants can't form close to stars, they have to migrate towards them.
That too is in question. To understand why we see so many Jupiter-sized planets you really need to understand the techniques we use to detect them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methods_of_detecting_extrasolar_planets#Established_detection_methods
For some methods fully confirming a planet requires more than one orbit. Their orbit may be measured in years, decades or centuries. For other methods it's a one off event and we can't confirm the existence of the planet. The first confirmed planets were detected around a pulsar (a kind of dead star) only in 1992. And the method used only worked for pulsars. It took until 1995 to detect a planet around a main sequence star.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extrasolar_planet
Then it took years to get dedicated space instruments up. Effectively we've been at this only for 17 years. Given the difficulty that's nothing. Give it time! Perhaps your grandkids will grow up with earth sized planets confirmed.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I guess we are at the point in time where an expert on exoplanet searches knows that finding life in outer space is hard, but achievable, while an expert in another area thinks it is still too difficult.
I just spent my last mod point 30 seconds ago... ...
This guy got modded up telling an anecdote implying that scientists laugh off the idea of alien life?
Parents answer is most concise: this is just not the case.
Sigh...
Yes. Niven addressed this in the sequel by adding massive engines to the ring that stabilizes it.
Some scientists take too much to the heart: "if it can't be experimented, it doesn't exist" but most of them consider that it would be gross arrogance to even consider we are the only sentient specie in the universe.
Why we haven't encounter any other yet, is of no importance, although is a no-brainer: the sheer numbers of available planets is both a blessing and a curse.
IANAA but as I understand it a Dyson Sphere should have a pretty big infrared signature and (probably) not much in the way of other emissions. This is because if all of the contained star's energy output is being captured and used then the waste product (i.e. heat) has to be dumped somewhere (namely outside the sphere). Not sure how one would detect a ringworld though...
Accept Eris as your Fnord and personally sate her
ok so my question is this.. Whats the point? We can't communicate with them and certainatly can't travel there. perhaps they could travel to us but see point A. so whats the point?
Best probable solution to the "Fermi Paradox": we don't see signs of advanced civilizations because there are no advanced civilizations currently interacting with our level of reality. This could be for a number of reasons:
1. civilizations tend to destroy themselves
2. technology accelerates and reaches such a degree of sophistication that it allows transcendence, escape from the bounds of spacetime that we are familiar with
3. there is no practical faster-than-light travel so civilizations give up on star travel
4. something is destroying all advanced civilizations
5. we're the first
Why do well-educated scientists consider alien life, even if it's very simple or nothing like life here on earth, to be such an absurd idea? Why do they have so much trouble considering it with any seriousness?
They are aware that of the lack of evidence for alien life? It seems to me that your relatives understand the difference between science and science fiction while you do not.
There is a difference between putting forward a hypothesis that life "might" exist on other planets given the right conditions and believing that alien life "must" exist.
Scientists ultimately have to deal with facts and even test theories against real observations. Their rational approach is what separates scientists from science "enthusiasts".
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
administered by astrobiologist Jean Schneider of the Paris-Meudon Observatory
Seriously what does Jean Schneider really do?
compare charts of found planets to chart of the habitable zone.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
How would we see a Dyson Sphere if it's capturing all the output from their star?
Captures and then does what with it? None can fool Second Law of Thermodynamics. In order to use some, you have to let some go, or else there is no flow of energy. A Dyson Sphere would most certainly shine with brightness comparable to its star.
Anyone publish any decent statistics of how densely stars have exoplanets? I presume most have been found from nearby. I'd like to know what percentage of stars have or don't have exoplanets.
Suppose this could be calculated from the data of nearest stars and planets thusfar.
But the reaction you describe reeks of closed mindedness.
Anyway, we really have no idea what's out there. The Drake equation has been criticized for being of little use; what it does very well though is point out how much we don't know. The great thing though is that we're progressing very rapidly; if life (not necessarily intelligent) is rather common, we will find out in less than 3 decades, possibly earlier. The upcoming 30m and up telescopes are getting close to the point where we could do spectral analysis on some extrasolar planets.
Unless you assume that any civilization "advanced" enough creates computers, and that once the computers become complex enough they're indistiguishable from life and sentient beings -- Personally I believe the answer is clear...
Floating just beyond our Oort cloud is a large becon beaming out a warning the message to the Pan-Universal Mechanoid Civilizations:
"Quarantine Zone - Organic Human Infestation"
or in English: "Primitive Wild Life Habitat"
I mean COME ON! Would YOU trust US with a WARP DRIVE?!!?! I wouldn't!
The Fermi paradox though is that it would only take one bug eyed monster with the stubbornness (and longevity) to hop on the slow boat to Proxima Centauri, then it's just a matter of time before the Milky Way gets colonised. Even at sublight speeds, the BEM could do it in under a billion years.
Scott Adams explains it away in The Dilbert Principle though - the holodeck will be our last invention ever. If you can simulate it, why go to the expense and risk of actually doing it?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
This. I think the conclusion that any sufficiently advanced civilization is fully "computerized" is inevitable; once you have the technology, there's simply no (rational) reason not to abandon your meatbag and migrate to a more robust and easily maintained container.
weinersmith
This one is pretty close:
http://184.72.55.19/kepler/detail/157.05
And this one
http://184.72.55.19/kepler/detail/268.01
No, read between the lines! 700 and 1000 are milestones. gcd(700,1000)=100, so we're talking about up to 100 planets per mile. Those are *very* small planets.
Advanced life doesn't necessarily develop large brains, and even with large brains you don't necessarily develop advanced technology. Only one species on earth did it, and *all* species that haven't died out are decendants of a long lineage of survivors. There is no particular reason to think our level of intelligence and our ability to build technology are logical outcomes of life, most species thrive without it. Even if the universe is teeming with life anything comparable to us may be exceedingly rare.
Were you talking about extraterrestrial life in general or extraterrestrials visiting earth? Some people assume when you are talking about aliens you are talking about the big-headed Grays flying in UFOs. That's alot different than talking about single cell organisms on a planet 20 light years away. Also, many educated people who aren't in astronomy have no clue about just how big the Universe is. I think if they are shown just how many stars exist and how many probably have planets, they can be shown that there is a near certainty that there is other life out there, although not necessarily intelligent. (unless they have a religious bias that precludes such a thought).
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
"alien life" can come up in at least a couple of significantly different contexts.
Were you talking solely about the possibility of life other than Earth? I'd say that according to our most middle-of-the-road estimates, it seems like it would be a near-certainty.
Or was the discussion about UFO's and aliens landing and probing peoples' rectums? That would pretty much deserve derisive laughter.
For what it's worth, considering that we're at the every early stages of spaceflight ourselves, any entities we meet in space (or coming to visit here) are going to be our tech or higher. Considering the age of the universe, and that fact that it only took about 7-8 billion years to go from dust-to-sentient life, there are strong odds that anyone we meet will in fact be 000's, if not millions or even BILLIONS of years more advanced than us....could we even conceptually recognize if they were here? They certainly won't show up with anal probes.
Obligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/638/
-Styopa
there's simply no (rational) reason not to abandon your meatbag and migrate to a more robust and easily maintained container.
Boobies.
-- Counting backwards since 1984!
Quite possibly the funniest /. comment I've ever read...
weinersmith
I just spend the weekend at a family gathering. Many of my relatives are doctors, scientists, and professors. The topic of alien life came up, and almost all of them laughed it off! Now I'm merely a computer programmer so I didn't say much, but when I hear about there being hundreds of exoplants out there in space I can't help but think that there may be life on at least some of them. After all, these are only the planets that we know about so far! There are probably millions upon millions of other similar planets out there that we just haven't discovered yet.
Why do well-educated scientists consider alien life, even if it's very simple or nothing like life here on earth, to be such an absurd idea? Why do they have so much trouble considering it with any seriousness?
i will recommend to you that in somehow, see and let your "family" see the one of the history channel series "ancient aliens", and of course, take the good thinks be smart and watch it with them, in some points, they have, at least, get into a conclusion, that maybe is there no evidence of other life in other planets, but at the same time it's impossible to denied
You can see the reason for moving off Earth quite easily. Lots of people believe that the idea of a growing economy is a false promise because the Earth is a closed system and will run out of ... well, everything ... eventually. So the "answer" to these people is to contract everything down into a "sustainable" way of life for as many humans as possible. Sure, they will be living in mud huts, but hey, it will be sustainable and as long as there is no growth it will be able to continue forever.
Or at least until the Sun burns out.
The other view of life is that there is growth or there is stagnation and death. To cut off humans from any possible future of exploration and any sort of challange so we all get to just exist within our sustainable bubble is indeed stagnation and death. After a hundred years or so of that I doubt you would recognize what was living there as human.
The answer, obviously, is that long before resources on Earth are used up we need to be gathering energy and raw materials from elsewhere. We need to be moving people off planet for a number of reasons but just for starters the two biggest reasons are "just in case" and because humans are motivated to explore and overcome challanges. "Just in case" should be pretty clear - today a big rock could wipe out all life on Earth easily, possibly with warning time measured in months.
The idea that humans are motivated by exploration should be clear to anyone that has ever read anything about life before 1970. Why did people cross the ice bridge from Siberia to Alaska? Why did people on Polynesian islands get into absurdly small boats and travel to other islands? You can't say they did it for the money as you can for Columbus or other Spanish explorers.
People are motivated to explore and trying to keep humanity bottled up on Earth is a huge mistake. However, if we allow the short-sighted and fearful to control the future of humankind we will be locked up on Earth in a life that can only be described as stagnation and death.
Oh, and in case you were interested, how you make the Earth "sustainable" starts with a big population reduction. You can't have sustainable with 7 billion people - it is going to have to be a lot less than a billion. Maybe 250 million or so. If you aren't going to get this reduction through war, you might get it from propaganda. Convince people that because of global warming, pollution and running out of resources that we need to cut back, reduce, reuse and not have children. What does it take to convince people that the "responsible" thing to do is not have children? Well, we are already a good way along that road.
It would output the same energy as the star but would have a vastly greater surface area than the star, so the energy density would be much less. It would only radiate in the infrared and very hard to detect.
compare charts of found planets to chart of the habitable zone.
They're handing out Ph.D. for clerical work now too?
Unless you assume that any civilization "advanced" enough creates computers, and that once the computers become complex enough they're indistiguishable from life and sentient beings -- Personally I believe the answer is clear...
Floating just beyond our Oort cloud is a large becon beaming out a warning the message to the Pan-Universal Mechanoid Civilizations:
"Quarantine Zone - Organic Human Infestation"
or in English: "Primitive Wild Life Habitat"
I mean COME ON! Would YOU trust US with a WARP DRIVE?!!?! I wouldn't!
But you can't deny, Captain, that you're still a dangerous, savage child-race." -- Q to Captain Jean-Luc Picard
6. They never developed bacon