Slashdot Mirror
Is the Earth Special?
Hugh Pickens writes "Planetary scientists say there are aspects to our planet and its evolution that are remarkably strange. In the first place there is Earth's strong magnetic field. No one is exactly sure how it works, but it has something to do with the turbulent motion that occurs in the Earth's liquid outer core and without it, we would be bombarded by harmful radiation from the Sun. Next there's plate tectonics. We live on a planet that is constantly recycling its crust, limiting the amount of carbon dioxide escaping into the atmosphere — a natural way of controlling the greenhouse effect. Then there's Jupiter-sized outer planets protecting the Earth from frequent large impacts. But the strangest thing of all is our big Moon. 'As the Earth rotates, it wobbles on its axis like a child's spinning top,' says Professor Monica Grady. 'What the Moon does is dampen down that wobble and that helps to prevent extreme climate fluctuations' — which would be detrimental to life. The moon's tides have also made long swaths of earth's coastline into areas of that are regularly shifted between dry and wet, providing a proving ground for early sea life to test the land for its suitability as a habitat. The 'Rare Earth Hypothesis' is one solution to the Fermi Paradox (PDF) because, if Earth is uniquely special as an abode of life, ETI will necessarily be rare or even non-existent. And in the absence of verifiable alien contact, scientific opinion will forever remain split as to whether the Universe teems with life or we are alone in the inky blackness."
Didn't the Earth get hit by another planet, causing it to shoot a ton of crust into orbit..creating the moon?
Clearly, life requires a mars-sized object to hit the planet where life wants to form.
What a load of crap. I love when they go with old data. A recent study how's that the moons effect over our planets stability is marginal and that, though there would be changes it would not be 'detrimental to life'.
While most planets are obviously not suitable for life, life itself has a strong tendency to overcome the challenges of its environment. Life endures climate fluctuations, extraterrestrial impacts, and even extreme radiation, all here on Earth. While many of these protective characteristics are conducive to the emergence of higher life, life itself has already shown its capacity to adapt and overcome.
All life really needs is a liquid solvent, energy, and enough time.
I can already hear the "intelligent design" folks jumping on this topic as proof that we aren't here through random chance but were assembled by some creator. Just as an FYI, the "rare earth hypothesis" has been circulating in the scientific community for many years.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
Why are conditions that promote life rarer than ones that prevent it?
Hey, how's it going?
If the tides are so helpful, why did we evolve from fresh water amphibians? It seems they're just making it up!
All 7.5 of them born every single minute in the U.S. alone.
Source: http://www.census.gov/population/www/popclockus.html
( Although I have to admit, that 0.5 baby is pretty darn special. )
Maybe they should define the lower bound for 'special' before even pondering whether or not the Earth falls within the definition. Then, if it doesn't, they can raise that lower bound until it does.
"In the air, there is no way for Oxygen to enter our gills. Therefore, water is extraordinary!"
No need to elaborate further, I think we all know that we are very special.
Judging by the people on it, it's special alright. I'm pretty sure it took the short bus to the Milky Way.
will someone have 'designed that' too?
This is the same thing religious leaders expouse, "what we can't explain must be special and unique". In a universe, nothing is unique. Except for snowflakes.
It's sending out brainwashing beams which make humans do things they definitely wouldn't do otherwise, such as thinking WP7 will ever get more than an Android rounding error in market share, etc.
You cannot click on the article comment links in Chrome 17 this morning.
No.
"You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won't believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!"
Just because our "route" resulted in our "life" situation, doesn't mean that other routes couldn't produce equally valid and viable "life" conditions. We're not that special.
My UID is prime!
...is a civilization of creatures living in a vast ocean of sulphuric acid (or some such), with scientific laboratories we would dismiss as "collections of rubble," that are wondering the same thing about THEIR world...
We'll never have a common language with them (they're telepaths, you see; think only rocks breaking against each other generate sound waves), and for eternity, we will live in parallel with them, and never interact with each other: Two species, forever locked in their own myopia and confident their science is telling them "We're SPECIAL."
What an incredible egos must Seven Billion creatures have.
Damn right! We call it Terran Exceptionalism. I'm sick and tired of all these "elite" types running around apologizing for Earth all the time!
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Naturally (ar, ar), self-reproducing chemistry developed on Earth adapted to its unique environment. The stars, like dust, are scattered far and wide, and thus it's also natural that we're having trouble finding life that developed in other unique environments. Back when I was a kid, and our exo-solar list of planets was limited to "we think there's something circling Barnard's Star", it was no surprise we were getting hung up on the 'Rare Earth Hypothesis'.
Now that we've got a rapidly growing list of planets to point better sensors at, I think it's unduly anthropocentric.
Luke, help me take this mask off
What's exciting about the recent exoplanet work is that we're actually filling in the first few parameters of the Drake Equation. We're getting a grip on how common planets are, and now how common it is for them to be (a) not gas giants and (b) in the right zone around the star. I think those two alone (combined with "how many stars are like ours", which we have known a long time), knock off a good four orders of magnitude - from hundreds of billions of stars in this galaxy to tens of millions that are 1) not short-lived stars ; 2) have non-gas-giants that are 3) in the "habitable zone".
We already know enough from extremophiles on earth that anything with liquid water, practically, is "habitable zone".
What we can get from just closer examination of our own solar system whether life NOT "as we know it" happens - did it arise in liquid methane, or floating about in Jupiter's atmosphere and all that. And if it does, how complex does it get?
These "special conditions" may not be necessary for *life*, but they may be necessary for it to bother (sorry, "have reproductive advantage") going past single cells, which biologists still consider a pretty Great Leap Forward.
It may well be; until we're not extrapolating from one data point, speculation is just entertainment. If it turns out complex life happens only every trillion stars and there's only one other in the "local group", ten million light-years from here, well...rats. Just ourselves to talk to.
Console yourself with this: it means our celebrities are even MORE important than we ever imagined. "Miss Universe", for instance, really IS Miss Universe!!
"The universe is a pretty big place. It's bigger than anything anyone has ever dreamed of before. So if it's just us... seems like an awful waste of space."
Since it would only take one slightly more advanced species (with a desire to make their presence known or spread some kind of message) to launch a self-replicating probe capable of visiting every star in the galaxy in a relatively short period, then I have to assume that either those probes are being intercepted, or that sentient life is indeed exceedingly rare (no more than a handful of races per galaxy).
don't worry we'll be able to completely negate the moon's effects soon :)
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
Of course the Earth is special!
We are right now, right here on Earth discussing things about Earth itself. If there were no people - nobody would be here to discuss it!
There are maybe billions of planets similar to earth but slightly different, one does not have moon, other does not have Jupiter around and so on. Because of this
reason, life did not evolve on those planet and there you have it - There is nobody on those planet to say something , only on earth there are people living who can say : Our earth is really special ! Of course, aliens from nearby Alpha Centauri would certainly disagree !
I think they just mistook the singularity of Jupiter for the plurality of planets. The mistake is common in the speech that I hear on a day-to-day basis, and then I realized you posted as Anonymous Coward...
That and honestly I would very much like the removal of different spellings of a word based on plurality. "Two cat is fighting in the alley". Of course that desire only arose after beginning to study Japanese.
If our solar system is so special that it is one in a million then there are about 200,000 systems that are as special as ours in the Milky Way. Multiply this by 100 billion to one trillion galaxies and we are really not that special.
Facts take all of the premium out of arm waving - T. Reynolds
May I be the first to post: God did it!
Would have been nice if he didn't create all those asteroids, cosmic rays, and other things from which the earth needs constant protection though.
It's special the same way every baby is a miracle
This. I would expect "appeal to low probability" to come from creationists, not in a Slashdot FP.
In a sufficiently large (possibly infinite) universe, it really just doesn't matter how uncommon any (non-zero) probability event appears - It will still happen all over the place, over and over and over and over again.
Of course, that still leaves us with that pesky question, "why don't we see ET yet?".
I do believe that it's rare to have an 'earth' or a life producing planet.
I do believe that in every galaxy there is a life form.
I do believe that we are still too young of a life form to have figured out how to communicate/discover other life forms.
I just can not fathom that there could not be other life forms in the universe, so I choose to limit it to galaxies having 1 life form each.
the nearest galaxy is Andromeda which is about 2.5 million light years, so I would think it's a lot of time before we mature enough to find out whom our neighbor is.
if you see me, smile and say hello.
I am not sure why redefining the lower bound of "special" is necessary. Out of all the planets scientists have observed, Earth is the only one that can support our form of life. Would that not make Earth a special planet, at least from our perspective?
Though after the 0.5 baby joke I am unsure if your were joking.
I think the proper term is "Ozone challenged".
"A call to arms" is a silly little fiction book which attempts to address the question of how much of the psychosis of our species is a result of our geology by creating fictional species from planets with different geologies. It still demonstrated a much better understanding of geology and biology than the author of this article. Even considering the ridiculous "bird people", "wolf people", and "frog people".
Boobs.
Now I like boobs as much as the next guy. As a matter of fact what got my mind started down the track is staring at alien boobs on all of my favorite SciFi movies and I started thinking to myself "You know, those are kind of weird as far as life is concerned".
I'll use life on our own planet as an example. Only mammals have boobs.
Other animals do indeed feed on another, there's a lot of really unappealing vomit sharing in many types of life and poop sharing in the insect world that I think would probably be more common among the stars (Slurm for example) as it's even more common here. There are nutrient transfers that happen on our planet that are different than the insect ones I just mentioned might be out there as well as some we haven't thought of, but I keep thinking of boobs, cause I think of them all the time, and I just don't see them as something that are likely to exist on alien babes. I'm not discouraging my favorite Sci-Fi writers by any means, whatever happens keep the boobs on your alien babes, but when I think of the possibility of meeting real alien babes it saddens me when I realize evolution is unlikely to have included boobs into the equation.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
That's not a design feature. It's a necessary consequence of the design. Another consequence of the design is that eclipses aren't unique to earth.
Sure, the Earth is special. To us. The probability of humans evolving on a different planet is very unlikely, just as the prospect of E.T. evolving on Earth is very unlikely.
So we grew up on a nice soft cushy earth. We all know from articles posted on Slashdot that life can live in some of the most extreme places, radiation, heavy metal polluted ex-pit mines, around scalding vents five miles below the ocean surface, etc etc etc. But humans, we're pussies by comparison. We have to live in this nice 'goldilocks' zone. Oh not too hot, not too cold, not too much radiation, juuuuuust right. If and when we do finally meet extraterrestrials who never had the soft life we have, they'll be so fucking tough we'll have to be real nice to them; because if it came to a scrap, we could probably nuke them but they would shrug it off like it was only a mildly hot day. All hail our tough as nails mean motherfuckin' alien overlords. Hrrgghuph... I think there was something funny in that hippie.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
That's no moon... it's a terrestrial wobble dampener!
Is it special compared to the rest of the planets in our own system? Sure...but so is each of them, in their own way. Compared to all the planets in existence? We have no clue, since our observations are largely limited to Jupiter-sized planets which are naturally very unlike Earth. For all we know, Earth-like planets are commonplace in the universe. Yes, many aspects of our planet and sun seem to be conveniently suitable for life *as we know it* (if they weren't, we wouldn't be here to wonder these things, after all), but until we are capable of detecting things like tectonics and magnetic fields of extra-solar Earth-size planets, it's a bit premature to presume ours is unique in the universe -- just unique in our own system.
So if having a large moon helps stabilize the earth's rotation, what about if an exo-"planet" is, in fact a moon around a much larger (probably gas giant) planet, just like Pandora in the movie "Avatar"? One would imagine that any variation in its climate due to wobbling would be completely eliminated.
While the "exo-moon" would almost certainly be tidally locked to the giant planet, as long as the orbital period wasn't too long (a week?) the difference in temperature between night and day would hopefully not be too pronounced. For example Io, has a period of 1.7 days. If the moon had a really thick atmosphere (like Titan) then this would probably not matter in the slightest as the "air" would likely distribute the heat quite effectively (but could be windy!).
Another thing we've learned by looking at these moons orbiting the gas giants is that they could have almost any amount of tectonic activity which is important for things like plate tectonics which is sometimes regarded as being essential for its effects on our climate. From super-volcanic Io to frozen Callisto, we see that tidal effects from a gas giant can pump hugely varying amounts of energy into a moon.
Of course, radiation may be a concern for most DNA based life (some DNA based life, like tardigrads are remarkably resilient though). I don't know why some gas giants like Jupiter have lethal (to us) amounts of radiation while others don't. So maybe this is a non-issue.
So maybe we should be looking for exo-moons orbiting gas giants in the habitable zone! How many are there? Obviously I don't know but there don't seem to be any dearth of gas giants orbiting other stars. As for the number of moons orbiting these gas giants, who knows but judging from our own solar system (Jupiter has 33 satellites of which 4 are "large") it seems that one or more would be at the right distance from the planet to benefit (but not too much) from tidal energy. Just for an example imagine if Jupiter was in the habitable zone. All the Galilean satellites except Io would be excellent candidates for COMPLEX life (presumably underwater).
What wavelength radio waves penetrate underwater? Maybe SETI should be listening on those frequencies! :)
The Earth is special. Humans are only here because of the great beardy guy in the sky. Now that this massively important issue is settled can we get on with colonizing Mars? Please?
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Near enough every damn planet in our solar system has a planet, if not several. THE MOON IS NOT SPECIAL IN THE SLIGHTEST.
It seems that life, intelligence, and civilization are the things that we find most interesting, in ascending order, when discussing exobiology. And, in ascending order, much, much more difficult to achieve. In other words, simple life is almost common, complex life is rare, intelligence even rarer, and civilization the rarest of all. Each step requires more time, stability, and opportunities for differentiation, than the last. A lot of the uniqueness of the Earth, according to the article, has to do with its suitability for developing land-based life. I wonder if achieving a land-based civilization is rarer than a liquid-based one. If there are aliens sending probes over here to investigate us, maybe it's to study this weird, land-based civilization. I admit that one advantage to land-based life development is that it's much easier to form divided ecosystems on land than it is in an ocean. This could create more opportunities for divergent evolution, speeding things up if you want to see a particular result, like intelligent life. However, it seems to me that there could be situations on other planets that can create a similar effect in a liquid environment. Perhaps not common, but possible. My point is, it might be chauvinistic to focus so much on conditions that allow the development of land-based life. The other, hidden chauvinism is towards carbon-based life, but it's hard to blame ourselves for that since it's so difficult to figure out how other kinds of life could work.
Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe
I found the chapter on plate tectonics very informative.
Every planet is special.
More like a failure to demonstrate restraint, just like how abstinence before marriage is all that it takes to avoid sexually transmitted diseases...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Come on slashdot....
I think the moon caused most of those conditions: stressing the Earth via tidal forces stirs up the core, breaks up the crust, evens out our wobble. The Moon caused us. The Moon seems to be awfully suspicious. so, 2 possibilities:
1) it like us, and we should worship it
2) aliens put it there and we just have to find the big rockets on the dark side that prove it and follow the manufacture's stickers on 'em to our creators.
only thing I can't figure out for 2) is if they made us, who made them? hmmm...
AB HOC POSSUM VIDERE DOMUM TUUM
And if you never have any human contact, you won't get the flu either. Genius!
Of course the Earth is special, but only in the way that one's own child is special.
Would you explain, please, how many other planets have magnetic fields? Oh, right. You have no (pardon the pun) earthly idea because we can't detect magnetism on exoplanets yet. Ok, then, how many have large moons? Oh, right, you can't detect that either. How many have water? You don't know. How many are geologically active? You don't know.
Planetary scientists should stop saying our planet is "strange" until they actually have something to compare it to.
There's recent evidence that a large moon to stabilize may not be necessary. See http://www.universetoday.com/91331/life-on-alien-planets-may-not-require-a-large-moon-after-all/ for a summary and http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0019103511004064 for the actual paper. The issue is that while the lack of a moon will result in less stability in general the level of wobbling will be small and slow. There's also been in general growing evidence that habitable planets are more common than one might think otherwise. One recent study indicates that around a third of all sun-like stars have a planet in the habitable zone. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/09/29/new-study-13-of-sun-like-stars-might-have-terrestrial-planets-in-their-habitable-zones/ http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1109/1109.4682v1.pdf (keep in mind that being in the habitable zone is not sufficient for life. Our system has three planets in that zone, Earth, Mars and Venus, and only one of them supports complex life.) There's also been recent work which shows that for red dwarf stars there habitable zones are much larger than was previously expected (essentially water ice preferentially absorbs light from just the right wavelengths that red stars emit so that the outer zone is longer).
In general, the Fermi question is a serious concern. It is a concern not just for the deep implications it has but for the practical implications for our survival. In particular, it is possible that there's a lack of intelligent life out there because life finds ways to wipe itself out. Carl Sagan for example was worried that an explanation for the Fermi paradox was that species inevitably kill themselves with nuclear war before they get off their home planets. That particular worry seems less founded right now, but other worries, like exhaustion of resources, bad nanotech and others exist. Worse, if there is such a set of very risky technologies, they have to arise quickly so that species which encounter them don't generally have time to even anticipate the risk enough. Also, if this is a common problem then that means that it needs to arise soon in our future, say the next hundred years. That's because the technology has to arise in general before one stars spreading out to space. I suspect that intelligent life is rare due to the all the difficulties, not due to civilizations destroying themselves. But the possibility that self-elimination is the problem is deeply disturbing. More resources need to be put into dealing with existential risk.
There appear to be between 10^22 and 10^24 stars in the universe many of which probably have planets, but we've only found a few hundred nearby extra-solar planets so far. With such limited information, how can we possibly say that any of these earth features may be rare?
Technically, you need abstinence after marriage to avoid STDs as well.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
The moon and the earth's oceans are coupled, so that as the earth loses rotational angular momentum through tidal drag, the moon gains orbital angular momentum: it is slowly getting farther away. When the oceans first formed, the tides were something like 60 meters high and high tide came every couple of hours.
The glass is half glass.
Unless an alien civilization finds a way to break the speed of light, we won't likely be able to communicate or visit with each other. It simply takes too much energy to travel and too long to communicate.
I quote from the Interstellar travel wikipedia article:
There is some belief that the magnitude of this energy may make interstellar travel impossible. It has been reported that at the 2008 Joint Propulsion Conference, where future space propulsion challenges were discussed and debated, a conclusion was reached that it was improbable that humans would ever explore beyond the Solar System.[1] Brice N. Cassenti, an associate professor with the Department of Engineering and Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, stated “At least 100 times the total energy output of the entire world would be required for the voyage (to Alpha Centauri)”.[1]
Perhaps if we discover something about the nature of our universe that we aren't yet aware of, we will be able to interact with alien life. For now, the possibility is quite remote.
Serious question about the summary: the comment about the outer planets shielding us from collisions caught my attention. Does the Moon have any similar ability? does it help steer asteroids away from us due to it's size compared to Earth's?
AB HOC POSSUM VIDERE DOMUM TUUM
Says who? You've made a braindead assumption that the flu can only be transmitted from one human to another, directly. DUHHH!!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
The Damned Triliogy by Alan Dean Foster (Call to Arms, The False Mirror and The Spoils of War) is a great series that revolves around the idea that Earthlings are great warriors because of our unique planetary situation - plate tectonics, etc. Definitely worth reading.
I mean, there's a guy on earth who has exactly my name, and he looks exactly like me. What are the odds???
Thanks.
The question: "Is the earth special"
And then you can either read the long winded original article and claim that well maybe yes it looks like it's special due to a lot of factors that may or may not be super common or irrelevant
Or just answer it with "no"
Being a firm beliver in nonconvoluted explanations, a supporter of Occams razors if you will, i'd say one of these choices are by far more likely.
Take this facts
- Our planet have some features not found in other planets in our solar system, or the ones we more or less know elsewhere
- We didnt got any alien message so far
Then the conclusion is that we are special and alone in the universe
Some points are forgotten
- Earth wasnt so gentle with life in its history. Wasnt intelligent life in most of it, in fact in good part wasnt any life at all.
- Our "special features" could be not needed for required or intelligent life. Alien spacenuts could perfectly declare other "features" that we don't have as essential too, that couldnt be intelligent life in spiral galaxies, planet without rings or far from galaxy core as well.
- Time matters, our civilization are here for the last 20k years, our capability to send message pretty close to elsewhere is from our last 100 years, and who knows for how much time things will last this way. In thousand of millons of years thats not even a blip on time,
- Distance matters, the universe is BIG, and if current limitations of travel (both as physical and economic limits) keeps being true, going to the next star or communicating with it, or even doing something big enough that could be noticed from there could be something that we could not ever afford. For more distant stars, the rest of the galaxy or other galaxies we could not ever be noticed.
For us, Earth is special... we are there, after all. There is no place like home. But that don't mean that couldnt be other homes with other people elsewhere.
on average at least...
The inability to explain something simply means that you are unable to explain something. It doesn't make you special. This mentality makes me think of the "god of gaps" arguments, except that the god is statistics instead of a personified deity.
Actually, the statistics part doesn't work out either. Our sample size is extraordinarily small since you can't include the extrasolar planets in it (the data we have on them is insufficient and, even more important, there is significant observational biases). When you look at that extraordinarily small sample, you will find that each of the planets will be a statistical anomaly in at least some respect.
http://theunitedpersons.org/blog/planets-with-stabilizing-moons-may-be-common
No matter what rare combination of factors have given rise to life on earth, universe is so incredibly vast with an astonishing number of planets that the same combination of factors is not only bound to arise but arise a large number of times. It only means that it might not be easy to find life within a few light years.
I always thought that earth was quite RETARDED, and I am not gonna change me choice of words for you PC idiots!
Some studies suggest that plate techtonics was caused by bacteria feed on the iron in basalt, in the process converting the basalt to the slightly lighter granite. The granite then flows on top of the basalt. If this theory is true, then plate tectonics is simply a process of convections currents operating of a fluid consisting of two different materials AND would make plate tectonics a common occurrence for planets containing life.
Many spider species give birth to live young and have internal nutrient-secreting structures in the reproductive cavity. The kangaroo has a teat in its pouch. An arrangement which has evolved several times in different body plans is likely to be one that has many benefits. Given the advantages of being upright, freeing the front legs for other purposes, the advantages of holding the baby where it is easily visible, thermal management and other factors I haven't been thinking long enough to remember, the chance is that our body plan is not too uncommon.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Technically, you need abstinence after marriage to avoid STDs as well.
Actually what you need is monogamy, and assurance that your partner doesn't have any of the STDs you're concerned about getting.
There is actually no need to refer to the Yule Tide as christmas. Christians co-opted the holiday recently and atheists should just insist on the older term.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Since it would only take one slightly more advanced species (with a desire to make their presence known or spread some kind of message) to launch a self-replicating probe capable of visiting every star in the galaxy in a relatively short period, then I have to assume that either those probes are being intercepted, or that sentient life is indeed exceedingly rare (no more than a handful of races per galaxy).
Make that "no more than a handful of races bloody stupid enough to let loose a device capable of unlimited self-replication, and lucky enough to have perfected reliable space travel before transforming their planet into grey goo".
Or as the author Greg Egan put it "it's what bacteria with spaceships would do".
Me, I'd at least put in a "terminator gene" so it stopped or slowed down to "linear" expansion after a few generations - I mean, there's only so much data you can process!
The flower children may be naive in thinking that any race sufficiently advanced to develop interstellar travel must be above war and violence, but I'd wager that a certain amount of ecological understanding is a prerequisite": If you want "manned" travel you'll need to be able to create stable, closed ecosystems for the long voyage, and even for robot probes you'll be looking to ecology as a source of inspiration for any sort of sustainable, self-regulating, system. Heck, if we survive the current financial shitstorm without regressing to the stone age it will be because people have learned that exponential growth is unsustainable. Of course, if you can build a "generation ship" that can survive for years in interstellar space then its much easier, and more productive, to fill your system and its near neighbors (where there is energy and raw material available) with space habitats.
The other solution to the "Fermi Paradox" is that the aliens have passed us by ("Look at the size of that moon, Kodos - no life could have survived those devastating tidal effects, and with that magnetic field deflecting cosmic rays the mutation rate is obviously too low for evolution") or we haven't noticed.
Bacteria/viruses would be an obvious basis for a self-replicating probe (why re-invent the wheel?) so maybe you made First Contact last week, but got better after plenty of fluids and a couple of paracetamol?
The "panspermia" theory (a long way from proven, but also hard to disprove) would also be a neat resolution to Fermi.
Finally, it could be just that, in the evolution of the galaxy, about now is the the time when spacefaring civilizations tend to emerge. We're just waiting for the first man-made object to make it out of the solar system - but even Voyager is going to take aeons to cover the distance to the nearest star (not that its headed in that direction). Maybe we're not far behind the game. We might have a few years to wait before even the aliens with technology 1000 years ahead of us actually get here.
There are all sorts of possible explanations for the Fermi Paradox, only one of which is "there are no ETs". We don't have the data to decide which is correct.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
I have been reading about the Rare Earth Hypothesis for several years now. Not only does the moon moderate the wobble. The moon slows down rate at which the earth's rotation slows towards tidal lock, the slowing of the planetary rotation until one side of the body faces the body it orbits. Without the moon the Earth could end up like Venus with a very slow rotation or like Uranus with its extreme axial tilt. In the first billion years after the moon was formed it was a lot closer and the earth had a much shorter day. With a twelve hour day you'll get twice as many tides, and with the moon a lot closer those tides could have been hundreds of feet high. A mixing zone where bacteria could evolve, where cyanobacteria could sit in tidal pools under the sun and be mixed with every high tide.
The Fermi paradox comes about because the Drake equation predicts some very large numbers. Given the high probability of life predicted by the Drake equation a space faring species would evolve and colonize vast portions of the galaxy in a few million years. Since this hasn't been observed we can conclude that the Drake Equation is incomplete. The equation should be modified to include the following:
A metric that requires a life zone planet to have a large moon.
Number of civilizations predicted by the revised Drake Equation * 1 minus the sum of the following:
Percent extinct due to natural causes (i.e. Extinction level event such as a GRB, supernova, impact etc.) We know these events happen and can wipe out life on a planet.
Percent extinct due to exchange of WMD. (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical) It's reasonable to assume that any developing civilization will experience the same kind of political and religious strife we experience here on earth.
Um, you got it backwards there, chief. Volcanoes release the carbon trapped in the ocean beds as they are subducted.
The whole point of the Fermi paradox is that if the earth isn't special, then where the hell is the evidence of alien life? All these posts explaining how we aren't special, and how "life will find a way", just lead right back to it. Why haven't we found so much as a single piece of evidence of any kind?
Ah, wait, I just flipped over to the history channel. Apparently aliens were responsible for the destruction of Pompeii. Never-mind, proof found.
The general consensus is that on most planets, the environment is too hostile for life. I think of this whenever people tell me I should go outside more. I mean really, what is the benefit of exposing myself to the elements now that my species has evolved to the point of being able to protect itself therefrom? The elements may be just right to facilitate the sort of selective environment that nurtures early evolution, but we have moved beyond early evolution and need to focus on the business of long-term survival (that is to say, planetary colonization). On the vast majority of planets we will encounter, we will have to set up well-protected bio-domes, only going outside to harvest resources (and that always with advanced protective gear).
My skin needs sunlight? Fine, I will get a few full-spectrum lamps. My muscles need exercise? Fine, I will put some equipment in my spare room. I need fresh air and pleasant temperatures? Fine, I will install heating, AC, and a few fans. I need social interaction? Fine, I will drive (in my effective-environmental-shield of a car) to various social events (which happen inside of large, similarly environmentally-shielding buildings). Or I will just hit the Internet.
Why don't mitochondria venture outside of their host cells in an effort to get "back to nature?" Because they would DIE! The cell is effective because it shields its inner environment from the harmful extremes of the outer environment. By constructing buildings that can regulate their inner atmosphere, we are just continuing that pattern, to good effect.
"Back to nature" does not evolve us further. Scientific investigation and applied engineering do, and they are the only enterprises that can ensure our survival in the long term.
Stay focused, or we go extinct.
Wow. You're insightful. Nothing better you can do with a science article than bash religion? Is that the scope of your knowledge and interest in science? Sorry that Father O'Connor pounded you in the ass in 4th grade but it's time to get over it. Either get a clue or shut your fucking ass.
or the "simpler explanations are, other things being equal, generally better than more complex ones." "Created for a reason" looks like the best explanation for the "uniqueness" of Earth.
"In a sufficiently large (possibly infinite) universe, it really just doesn't matter how uncommon any (non-zero) probability event appears - It will still happen all over the place, over and over and over and over again."
This is based on mathematical extrapolation, and while provably true for an average event. The proof cannot be verified all events without utilizing parallel universes.
But uniqueness would not in *ANY* way constitute any sort of proof of the existence of a god or verifying a creationists point of view, even though some might think that it would.
Suppose for a moment that it were actually possible to discover that we were isolated in the cosmos... that we were "it", and that intelligent life was otherwise non-existent anywhere else. While that might seem to mean something to people, in the grand scheme of things, it really doesn't mean anything at all... any more than the fact that a lot of people think that the northern lights are pretty means something particularly profound and meaningful about the meaning of life or whatnot. The cosmos can exist entirely without any purpose or meaning to it at all, and our human nature to ask "why" would only be destined to remain perpetually unanswered. This is equally true whether we are unique or not.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
My favorite theory from the 6 minutes of Wikipedia-based research that I just conducted is the idea that intelligent life tends to be very short lived.
It makes a lot of sense if you think about it, chances are that at some point in the future the world will be taken over by religious zealots who don't like technology, or made uninhabitable by nuclear war, or compressed to a singularity by accident, or turned into gray goo by tiny replicating bending robots.
Maybe the reason that we don't see any signs of alien life is because, well, we're fucked!
You need fidelity, actually. Monogamy is not required.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
In order to conclude that features of the earth are particularly unusual we need to know something about the probability distribution of those features across all planets. How much do we really know about things like the magnetic fields, size and number of moons, etc. etc. of planets in general?
The whole point of the Fermi paradox is that if the earth isn't special, then where the hell is the evidence of alien life? All these posts explaining how we aren't special, and how "life will find a way", just lead right back to it. Why haven't we found so much as a single piece of evidence of any kind?
Probably because the lifespan of technological civilizations isn't that long. Human civilization is about 3000 years old, but only about two centuries of that is technological civilization with enough power to do much. We've had the ability to send radio signals into space for less than a century. We're already starting to run out of natural resources. There are arguments over how many decades are left for some resources, but nobody sees many centuries of resources left. Trying to mine low-density resources requires greater energy inputs for the results obtained, and eventually that stalls out.
If our understanding of physics is roughly correct, fast interstellar travel is hopeless. Slow interstellar travel might be possible, but it currently looks like the closest interesting place is about 500 light years away. Sending a generation ship to a system with no habitable planets is pointless. Sending one to an active civilization means it gets there after they've run down.
If you plug reasonable values for extrasolar planets into the Drake equation and set the lifespan of a technological civilization to 500 years, you get 24 civilizations currently active in the Milky Way galaxy, which is about 100,000 years across.
How do you know this? Earth could be the first successful incubator of intelligent life. There is always a first. Why not Earth?
Another interesting possibility is that (if we develop technologically a bit further) we might be able to adapt other planets that are *almost*- but not quite- right for life to support it or even (if we develop further) that we can partially create or reorganise an existing star system from scratch such that it is able to better support life, i.e. if the solar system *is* (by coincidence) the best model for one that can support life, then we could recreate that model elsewhere, including the large Jupiter-like planets to sweep up large, dangerous objects, the "new earth's" magnetic field to protect us, etc., etc.
Possibly.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
maybe the .5 baby is only half way out?
Climate fluctuations may actually be *beneficial* to the rise of life. There is speculation that a "snowball earth" scenario played an important role here.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
With the our slay having billions of stars and there being billions over other galaxy's out there , I can't believe we're the only sentient creatures (let alone single celled or multicelled organisms). Whether we ever get s cancer to meet one another, or even detect one another. Is a who,e other issue, given that our (and any other civilizations) existences as advanced technological civilizations will most likely be extremely short lived compared to the age of the cosmos, and most likely separated by millions or billions of years.
Climate schlimate. Must be the branch of science with most false predictions by far.
Yeah, they consistently underestimate how fast climate is changing.
Why should anyone believe these climate theories when they cannot accurately predict even next week's weather?
A ten-year-old can accurately predict that next winter will be colder than next summer.
Predicting the big picture tends to be a lot easier than predicting the little details.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Weather is not climate.
2/10 for effort.
"And in the absence of verifiable alien contact, scientific opinion will forever remain split as to whether the Universe teems with life or we are alone " Ok, so it would seem most think it impossible not to have other life forms somewhere. But can't figure out why we can't find any. Could it be that they've found us but consider us too primitive and dangerous? After all, we still shoot each other and blow things up daily. I'm not sure I'd want to be around a race like that. How about you? As far as UFO's... are they real? Who really knows? But could it be they are advanced life forms dropping in now and then to see if we are still stupid? Remember, they may have a billion years of evolution on us. Where do you think we'll be in just a hundred. Or a thousand? (Provided we don't blow ourselves up first)
Wuddooeyeno? IITYWYBMAD? Like nuts? eclecticallyincorrect.com
"Then there's [the well-known case of] Jupiter-sized outer planets"
Of course Earth is special, but there might be lots of other places that are special too, maybe in some other way. The universe is not a small place.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
"I always simply blame gravitation for Womens monthly problems, not the moon."
Are you saying I'm fat?
Is the earth the only planet in the immediate galaxy to develop human beings? Probably.
Is the earth the only planet in the immediate galaxy to develop sentient life? Unlikely.
Is the earth the only planet in the immediate galaxy to develop life? Incredibly unlikely.
There are many planets, stars, and various other forms of cosmological phenomena that are capable of supporting life. A better question is, if we encounter another form of life, will we be capable of recognizing it as life? The old Star Trek stuff applies here -> what if you run into a life-form that is made up of plasma (the 4th state of matter)? What if the two (or more) of us are competing for the same resources? What if we aren't? And so on.
Even among human beings, we don't (or we choose not to) recognize certain other groups of human beings as human beings. If we have such difficulty identifying our own, what are our chances of identifying others? And if we treat each other so badly, what argument can you make for others to make contact with us?
Of course, we could have the Star Wars universe, at which point none of the above applies-> Human behaviors are merely a reflection of the universe's preference for life-forms which act as such. And contact is merely by chance.
I am John Hurt.
Since we don't have DETAILED information even about solar systems outside of ours that have been discovered, making a claim that Earth is unique is merely a theory. Theories are fine. Show me the data to back it up.
I'd bash stamp collectors as well if they actively worked to block the teaching of science in schools, denied funding for legitimate scientific research, and pushed their viewpoint through taxpayer funded faith-based initiatives.
Stamp collectors actually help subsidize the US mail since they boost profits with minimal cost to the post office. What's not to like about them?
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
eat turds, cunt!
saintium@yahoo.com
saintium@yahoo.com
saintium@yahoo.com
saintium@yahoo.com
saintium@yahoo.com
saintium@yahoo.com
saintium@yahoo.com
spam this fuck!!!!!!
Why is that these discussions (why no alien visitors?) always seem to consider (IMHO) highly improbable Star-Trek-esque future civilizations? (ie. where everything is much the same as today, except in space)
The main criticisms of the singularity hypothesis (Kurzweil et al) are that the time frames are too short - but other civilizations could have easily had a million or a billion years head start. Considering where exponential growth in processing power could take us within 50 years, what would the results be if left for orders of magnitude longer? I think its a pretty safe bet that flying around visiting strange new worlds (like medieval explorers with spaceships) seems highly unlikely.
It seems to me that the window of time where you might even consider that as a possible future is vanishingly small, maybe a couple of hundred years in the lifetime of a species.
What you're really looking for when you consider Fermi's paradox, is another nearby civilization whose 200 year window overlaps ours.... and again, the chances of that, is likely to be (even more) vanishingly small.
There could be (or have been) intelligent life everywhere, and we wouldn't even know how to recognize it.
which is essentially the 'special earth' argument.
You know, it's like someone actually designed it that way. Gen 1:1.
Hell yeah, Book of Revelation FTW.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Plain & simple :-)
There's at least 6 billion of "them" and counting...
On a more speculative side, there might be highly developed life forms elsewhere in the universe that we carbon-based blighters wouldn't even recognize as "life" if we stumbled over one of them (and perhaps vice versa).
Is it unique? Meh, probably not.
How do you define special though? Earth is certainly 100% unique in our solar system, but of course so are the other planets in our solar system.
I can say for a fact that the Earth is special because without it, we would not be having this discussion. Someone/thing else might be having the conversation, but we wouldn't. Its all relative, remember?
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Want me to blow your mind? ( With probably incorrect terminology because I'm not a scientist, just a fan of science )
Have you considered the odds of this occuring?
The Moon's size and distance from us is almost exactly the distance needed to obscure the sun.
That the density and composition of the moon allowed for just the right mass to have it settle at a LaGrange point between the Earth and Sun that also coincidentally happened to be the same ratio of volume/distance.
will someone have 'designed that' too?
Yes. It's called free will. ;)
"O Timethy, Keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so call." 1st Timothy 6:20
"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." Genesis 1:1
"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. John 3:16
The Gospel
http://www.duluthbible.org/files/Gospel%20eBooklet%20Images/Gospel_eBooklet.pdf
Aliens don't stop because they are busy searching for INTELLIGENT life.
Dear Aliens,
Don't be racist, Thank you.
The People of Earth.
P.S. Do as we say, not as we do.
Why did the human cross the road?
Because he's still stuck on his planet and can't fly.
A human walks into a bar with some Uropian gas termite his shoulder. The bartender before he throws them out asks, "Where did you get that disgusting thing?"
The gas termite says "On planet Water, these dumb fucks are everywhere."
Do you remember in High School the retarded kids and their classrooms? Did you ever go in them? Did you know the retarded kids? Don't feel bad, nobody did. You knew where they were though so God forbid you stumble anywhere near there and be mistaken for a retard. If retards spoke, you just ignored them. Well I hate to tell everyone, but Earth is the Retard Class of the Galaxy. There are plenty of Aliens out there that know damn well where we are. But do you see them coming here? They don't want any of that "retard" rubbing off on them. Oh sure, we get sightings and such, but nothing official. Do you know why? These are the Aliens that are throwing spitballs at us and calling us RETARDS and running the hell off before they end up in detention or suspended.
"Why?" do you ask????
Well imagine our Alien benefactors who waited breathlessly and patiently for us to come out to space and prove we are intelligent. Who do we send? A dog! Imagine that? So they do a mind probe to find out WTF it wants and it wants a bone. They consider the situation and just leave and chock us all up for being retarded.Word gets around you know. Yeah...that new planet..? It's retarded!
So you ask me, is Earth special? I say yeah, it's special alright, it's Special Ed.
Take the Red Pill.
the fish argument is not about water itself, its about hypothetical fish scientists thinking that a water-permeated environment is necessary for life, simply because they have not bothered to visit the air and find out that there are things called 'birds'.
just like us, we used to think there was no life at ocean-bottom. oh, but there is, we discovered worms when we went there. all based on the venting from the earths interior, not on the sunlight foodchain.
in this manner, the 'special earth theory' is exactly what fish scientists would come up with. the location of a species that creates a theory is related to the nature and assumptions of the theory. that is a fundamental theorem of intergalactic sociology. read about it in my new book, available from maxi megalon publishing next cycle.
You've made a braindead assumption that the flu can only be transmitted from one human to another, directly
Whoosh.
Technically, you need abstinence after marriage to avoid STDs as well.
Assuming you consider life to be an STD... Abstinence isn't even 100% effective since the virgin Mary was pregnant!
"To prevent this day from getting any worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD THING" 1GJU8xLuDKDxEs4KLf8fAGyptoDsqvEsBT
Of course there is life on other planets. There are a lot of systems out there and I'm convinced planets are common. How exactly common an earth planet is, is relative. An earth like planet we could survive on I expect is as rare as 1 in 1000 systems. Could be as rare as 1 in 10,000. But they do exist simply because of the numbers involved. Furthermore we can be sure there are planets out there with what we would recognize as animal life although they will probably look bizarre. Even planets with huge animals like dinosaurs. Planets with only ocean life and maybe plants will be more common because that's how we started. We can not assume all the planets that foster life we do so as long as or longer than our planet.
The bigger question is the question of another intelligent species. And even that is not really a fair question. If there were only one earth like planet for every galaxy, just the number of galaxies alone would dictate, even considering the numerous variables involved, that right now there is another species our there that we would find comparable to our own.
The question is will WE contact another intelligent species within our species lifetime. How close could another intelligent species that CURRENTLY exists be to us? Does physics hold secrets beyond the venerated "standard model" that will allow us to communicate across or travel these vast regions of space in reasonable time frames?
The question of intelligent species will be solved simply. Even if faster than light communication and travel isn't possible I believe most intelligent species that evolve with have the concept of monuments. Things that could endure time long after a species may have died off. The monuments will be found where intelligent species will naturally look, at or near unusual stars, and nebulas, black holes, and pulsars. We just need to look for the non natural signals in the natural phenomena. What signal would you send? What signals would be possible? Could we leave a signal in star light? Could we leave a signal that would trigger after a star went supernova? A galactic light signal saying "We were Here we Existed!"
What this merely means is that if/when we do encounter extra-terrestrial life, it will probably be very different from us.
Alien civilizations have probably dismissed Earth as unlikely to contain life because of its magnetism, it's solid surface, and the presence of a solvent (H2O) almost everywhere on the planet.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Why are we still stuck on this? I think the idea that extra terrestrial life is not possible is mostly driven by religious fundamentalism. It's the idea that our little earth is not the only source of life, challenging the likelihood that it's the product of one creator with one intent.
Given what we know empirically about the multiplicity of the universe, why do we even still consider that life might not exist anywhere else. I'll admit that, no matter how convincing the evidence, there is still a chance in a mathematical sense that life doesn't exist anywhere else. But please, it's akin to saying there's a chance to win the lottery. Don't count on it.
If aliens have the capability to travel from their home planet to Earth, then I am sure they also have the ability to hide themselves from us pretty well.
That or the Star Trek TOS television signal reached them, and they decided to skip this planet, since their females are of color green.
Why use the word strange? Perhaps it's rare, but then again, with about 10000000000000000000000 stars in the observable universe alone (and we don't have a clue how much bigger it really is), how would you define strange? A statement like "What are the odds of that" quickly becomes moot.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
Why should anyone believe those radioactivity theories when they cannot accurately predict even the next atomic decay?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
My personal, unverifiable, unscientific, pulled-out-of-my-rear theory is that the development of life similar to and understandable by our own is sufficiently rare, and the universe so imperceivably large that the countless life that has evolved (we'll just say billions of instances in a suitably chosen near-infinitely-tiny fraction of the universe), just haven't *found* each other for the most part. Perhaps we're just unlucky enough to be located sufficiently far from other life, and there are billions of interactions between billions of similarly evolved lifeforms in some areas of the universe. Maybe heavy interaction between such lifeforms is the norm, and we're just part of the smaller fraction who are pretty isolated. Perhaps we are the front of life spreading into a new area, or the result of life dying off in the same area. But even that is probably overstating our importance.
Going with the above, Earth is definitely special case within a certain area, if we extend that area out until just before the closest instance of the uncountable number of other cases that meet the same criteria. :} It certainly seems to be quite unique within the area that we can currently perceive and understand. Perhaps this will change one day, when we can better understand the universe around us. Or perhaps we'll have died off long before then.
Anyway, that's how I like to look at things.
Short version: Tiny fractions of an imperceivably large universe.
In a few hundred years, we will begin to make some really rubbish efforts at terraforming Mars.
The Earth is just a planet that has been expertly terraformed.
I would have loved to go to this conference!
Yes the Earth is special. It has the only position that can sustain life. If any of the factors necessary for life were off just a bit. Life could not exist. We are talking presence of water, temperature ( very critical to biological functions), light intensity of the right kind, gravity, position in the milky way, If we were to close to the core of the galaxy it would be to dangerous, to much radiation, to many stars, danger of impacts. We are between spiral arms. Making it a safe place where we can also observe the universe without lots of things in our way. Evolution cannot explain any of these factors. Plus evolution has no scientific evidence. All the "missing links" have either been fakes, frauds, or artistic impressions. There is such a thing as many biological systems not being able to function unless all the piece are there together at the same time. So much for things evolving by getting better and better. Nothing in the universe gets better with time. So if some body part doesn't work and isn't an asset to the creature, then what is it's survival value that "natural selection" would want to keep it? And where is the origin of intelligence for this evolving process. It's stupid. A relatively new theory.
Then you have the invention of a geological column that has no bases in reality. Fossils dated by the layers and layers dated by the fossils. Carbon dating has been shown not to work. It can't even work for long periods of time because C-14 has a relatively short half-life and can't be measured with any accuracy at far flung dates. Other dating methods also have big problems that make them invalid. You also have such things as polystratifed fossils, fossilized trees for instance that run through multiple layers supposed to be ridiculous ages. So obviously they aren't that old. If evolution where true the earth would have eroded flat a long time ago. All the geologic terrain can be explained by the worldwide flood. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKO-vTwYCo8 The earth never used to have such high mountain ranges. There is enough water on the planet to cover the earth over a mile deep if you flatten it out. How do you get sea fossils towards the top of Mt. Everest otherwise? All the evidence that we see matches perfectly with the Bible.
The Bible says, "For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished: But the heavens and the earth: which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men. II Peter 3:5-7
The Bible is the correct worldview. It's just that most churches don't teach what the Bible says. Lots of them do it for money and power. But the Bible itself is the way to go. If you read it for yourself you will find that it says actually different things then what you've heard. But basically you have to keep certain righteous commandments and some other things and you will be given eternal life. Otherwise you will go to hell.
www.drdino.com
We were created by a righteous God.
Amos
This sort of inward thinking is what happens when science types forget science. They want their perfect planet of 80 degrees F with a drink with an umbrella in it and nothing else. They forget that the vast majority of life forms on Earth are now -and have always been- microbial forms of life that are everywhere on the planet. They are robust little buggers. They do not need drinks with umbrellas -although they are probably IN the drink with the umbrella. They are everywhere.
Unfortunately, not a single one of them has ever invented a radio transmitter. SETI will never detect a signal from a microbe even if it stared right at a planet full of them.
The next biggest pile of life on this planet are insects. They also don't use radio. They are almost as hardy as the microbes and exist all over the planet.
Then there are the plants. There's a lot of them. No radios. They cover the land and live in the seas, too. Pretty good adaptation.
The universe could be absolutely loaded with microbes and bugs and insects and plants living on planets that would kill us. We'll never know. But since we assume there are no beaches and drinks with umbrellas out there that the earth is therefore special and so are we. QED.
LOL. Amusing little gods these humans make themselves out to be.
Sig for hire.
Assume 1 earthlike planet per galaxy, and say.... 1/1000 of those earthlike planets have life on them. And 1/1000 of those have intelligent life on par with humans. That's still a WHOLE LOT of intelligent life.
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Wow, really profound and mind-blowing.
Anyway.
Back to the porn...
There seems to be something fundamentally unimaginative and backwards about discussions like this. Let's say your world is inside a Honda car. Now you're thinking "Gee, isn't this amazing. In order for life to exist, we just had to have this protective red paint, the CRX logo, a perfectly sized stick shift, blah blah blah." Maybe Earth IS rare, but we also found unexpected things on our planet such as apes and crows using tools, life thriving around volcanic vents. Life has adapted to take full advantage of the situation here on Earth. That doesn't mean that life is any less likely to spring up in similar but different places. We wear clothes because we lack full-body hair to warm and protect us. That doesn't mean life would be fucked on a planet without clothing, right?
For one some simple tool are difficult, bare impossible to get (fire, simple metal due to corrosion, also problem with vaccuuum techs, pressure problems etc...) so you have to make "jumps" in the technological ladder with respect to land civs, at least compared to our own ladder. Amphibian civs, part water part land : the same tech ladder would then be open during the land dwelling, but then one could argue they are simply land civs using a land tech tree.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Intentionally isolating each civs so that they can't communicate and knows they are not alone : that would be a proof that if god exists, he is an asshole bastard.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
On this board there are probably more agnostic-atheist or gnostic-atheist than in other board. Go to a family board, or similar NON-tech board, and you will likely see the proportion reversed with touting of christian stuff, condemning non christian to hell, general harranging , "no/yes" to proposal against gay mariage, generic references to leviticus, etc... etc... On slashdot the proportion of atheist is higher so you will see more intolerant atheist (assuming a similar proportion of intolerant people no matter the belief/non belief), but go on other board and the proportion alone will be reversed by the CHEER numbner of christian.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Is a good read on this topic...
http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9781846143274,00.html
Look in the mirror; you will see the intelligent life in this Universe. We are the Universe asking itself what it is; and we are not schizophrenic.
E Proelio Veritas.
I really like what the previous owners did with Norway. Those fjords are awesome.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Yes, it is special. And we are, too. We are so smart and special that we realize that Earth is special and we realize all the bad things we are doing to it and to ourselves and yet we keep doing them. Yup, the Earth is specially full of morons.
Actually, rings around the second gas giant is the galactic equivalent of the maritime quarterly yellow & black flag.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I think the fermi paradox can be used to put a limit on how far away the nearest spacefaring civilization is - since we cannot detect them they have not got a chance to visit us yet - if their spacecraft travel at 10% the speed of light, an alien spacefaring civilization will expand at roughly 10% the speed of light, so a conservative estimate might be 100M light years (arose 1Billion years ago) to up to as much as 1Billion light years (if they developed shortly after the big bang) . The distance to them gets even farther away if you assume you could detect their radio emissions, or any mega engineering projects.... In any event it puts them well outside our local group of galaxies, and if they are that far away it would tend to favor the rare earth hypothesis. On the other hand if you don't believe the rare earth hypothesis then you have to assume we will go extinct shortly if you think it through (see: the great filter), so as an optimist, I prefer the rare earth hypothesis.
To Be Determined.
I believe in Darwin, that human is not special.
Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is.
All these buffoons who come with such stupid "theories" should read it once, at least; and remember that they are looking at a minuscule sample to weave fairy tales about this vast Universe.
( Although I have to admit, that 0.5 baby is pretty darn special. )
Opie: I never seen one, paw.
Andy: Never seen one what?
Opie: A half-boy.
Andy: Well it's not really a half a boy, i - it's a ratio.
Opie: Horatio who?
Andy: Not Horatio - a ratio. It's mathematics, 'rithmatic. Look, now Opie, just forget that part of it. Forget the part about the half-a-boy.
Opie: It's pretty hard to forget a thing like that, paw.
Andy: Well, try!
Opie: Poor Horatio.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Based on this maybe we don't need a big moon. Then again how rare is a large collision really? Something big hit Venus to give it its slow retrograde rotation, something big hit Mars to carve out the 'ocean' (at its North Pole), something big hit Pluto to give it Charon (yeah, I know it isn't a planet, but it is kinda big). In fact Charon is huge relative to Pluto. Perhaps large moons aren't that rare anyway. As an aside, after reading "Rare Earths" I found I just couldn't agree with some of the authors' ideas because some of them were not convincing. But it is a good book, just maintain a skeptical stance.
Bitter and proud of it.
What is rare. In an infinite universe, even a rare planet is replicated an infinite amount of times. Or if you prefer to not get all LSD about it, if you consider that X is a value that the number of total planets, and that Y is a subset of X which are "rare". Even given a ridiculous low value for Y, it is certainly countered by a ridiculous high value for X. Which when you think about it is really moot, as when you look at the possible theoretical distances involved between such entities, for all intents and purposes they might as well not exist other than a mental exercise as our ability to interact with them is so closing with the approximately NIL as to be sad and depressing.
So are there plenty of earth like planets floating out there supporting life. Defiantly! However more importantly, whats your point, and is that actually useful information at all?
We're just like them!
"Our lovely world's so lovely
And everything’s so nice
And everyone’s so happy
Beneath the ink-black skies"
If life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion. - Douglas Adams
...when reading /. that you’ve tuned into an episode of The Big Bang Theory?
Which is why I will only buy Monster brand gold plated wedding rings with an ultra-pure oxygen-free copper core to ensure the highest fidelity from my spouse.
LOL.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking