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Our Solar System: Rare Species In Cosmic Zoo
astroengine writes "Pulling from 20 years of research since the first discoveries of planets beyond our solar system, scientists have concluded that Earth and its sibling worlds comprise what appears to be a relatively rare breed in a diverse cosmic zoo that includes a huge variety of planet sizes, orbits and parent stars. The most common systems contain one or more planets one to three times bigger than Earth, all orbiting much closer to their parent stars than Earth circles the sun, says astronomer Andrew Howard, with the University of Hawaii."
That's because the current methods used to detect exoplanets are biased towards large close in planets. As technology progresses we will get more diversity.
We're still really bad at detecting planets that are NOT bigger than Earth and orbiting much closer to their parent stars? Seriously, whether we use light occlusion or observing the star's wobble, this is the only type of planet we know how to detect.
Turns out if you're color blind, red and green are very rare and special colours.
The Universe is so large that it cannot possibly be that we are the only life thriving on a planet orbiting a star. There would be countless other lifeforms out in space on countless planets. I wonder if it is possible that a rogue planet could harbour life. Say if it was thrown out of a solar system but volcanism was keeping it warm enough for life to survive. How long would that last? As that was a plot point in Star Trek Enterprise.
liberare massarum ex ignorantia, clausa descendit molestie.
Who knows what they meant, but taken literally "one to three times bigger" means
x+x ... x+3x
"one to three times as big" would be
1*x ... 3*x
Being somewhat of the anal retentive disposition, it annoys the hell out of me when someone says "200% increase" when they mean "doubled", which is merely a 100% increase.
(And since this is *very* common, I stay annoyed the hell out of most of the time.)
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I don't... I can't...
Fry's NOT SURE if troll
See? We are the only place in the universe that can sustain life.
Great. Now that we've got that established, we can argue over which god made it.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
we arent the only place in the universe that can sustain life.... there are several other planets that have running water and are about the same distance from their stars. besides.. just because humans cant inhabit planets with larger gravity and hotter temperatures doesnt mean nothing can.
I think that the main issue is that people see the TV shows and movies and think that "life" has to look like that.
But those are just theatrics so that human actors can play the parts. Look at the variations of life on Earth. From whales to worms.
It's not just whether there are other civilizations out there. It's also whether either of us would develop technology that the other would be able to understand or recognize as signals AND broadcast them during the time when they could be received AND with sufficient power to be received.
I was under the impression that this was agreed to be due to observation bias. That is, it's a hell of a lot easier to find planets bigger than Earth orbiting at frequent, highly periodic intervals than to find anything else.
I think that the main issue is that people see the TV shows and movies and think that "life" has to look like that.
But those are just theatrics so that human actors can play the parts. Look at the variations of life on Earth. From whales to worms.
Are you telling me that the galaxy isn't full of people who grow lumps of rubber on their heads?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Likely not long. Mercury seems to have the fastest orbitting speed at almost 50km/s.
If it were shot at proxima centauri at 4 light years away, it would take about 23 000 years to reach it. I didn't take into account how fast proxima centauri would be moving, if mercury was shot at it while it was moving trowards mercury, it would be a lot faster, if the other way around, it may even never reach it.
23000 years without solar energy would likely be a very, very long time for any "advanced" life. There would be no possibility for photosynthesis, for example.
Also, a planet that has enough vulcanism for 23 000 years probably isn't all that inhabital for most larger species. Bacterial colonies and single cell life may still thrive as it did during earths vulcanic period.
Now, I know I am leaving out some very major factors here, but it just seems to me that its utterly unlikely you will find complex lifeforms on such planet. 23000 years of darkness would also be a very very lucky shot. It has a way bigger chance to keep going in the space between stars without ever reaching close to one.
Who happen to breath the same combination of gases and who are comfortable in the same temperature range and gravity range.
Not to mention the inter-breeding. So much inter-breeding.
But that's what happens when you have writers who know more about getting a job writing for a show than they know about science.
Good! Rare is many according to the law of big N
Rare?! If only one in a million fits, that would be an enormous amount of habitable planets!
They had examined 900 in detail and and already concluded that a few might fit. Well, it sounds more like one in a hundred, which then would be even more GREAT!
Anthony Hopkins, of course!
Two fun facts:
1. In TOS, it was somewhat legitimate science fiction to suppose that alien worlds could be identical to Earth. It was theorized that we might be the "optimal" path for evolution to take, and hence things might develop along extremely similar lines. This is why there is literally an episode where they find a planet that has gone through World War III, which ends with Shatner moralizing about the virtues of the US Constitution. This was much-loved because it meant they could re-use props from other productions. Other exciting examples of this kind of imaginary thriftiness include the modern Roman empire, although many were softened: the 20s gangster planet was created by accidentally leaving a history book behind, and the Nazi episode (TM) was deliberate meddling by "a Federation historian" (whom I guess we'd call a neo-Nazi today.)
2. By TNG, the technobabble problem was so bad that the actors sometimes rehearsed with scripts where the technobabble hadn't even been filled in yet. The writers wanted to write a human drama, and science was just a prop thrown in, to support that. To their credit, it at least created a popular show, something which other science fiction programmes had a lot more trouble doing.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
So instead of billions of solar systems like ours, there are just millions. And in at least thousands of those millions, there is probably some poor shmuck like myself posting from their parents basement!
Tired of my customary (Score:1)
If we stay on this rare planet, we are certainly doomed. It's the nicest place we know of but if we don't get off this rock, we'll probably get killed off by collision with a smaller rock. Or a super volcano... Or Mannian hot air... Or the next ice age... Or our own greed and stupidity.
My money is on the Bransons and Rutans of this world figuring out how to get us into space and someday stay for good. Once someone figures out how to survive in space, there will be thousands hot on their heels. We don't need another Earth. If we can survive long enough to get there, the only reason we'll stay is for variety, not neccessity.
There are more raw resources between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter than exist on Earth. We just need to get there.
To be fair, TNG did explain why (most) aliens were humanoid in the episode The Chase.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
Most people get % increases wrong; this is why I usually ask people to give it in "x's". Another that's irritating is "twice as cold."
If you can't convince them, convict them.
The problem isn't that there are no planets in more distant orbits; it's that the Kepler Space Telescope is designed to detect occultations, when a planet passes between the star and us. I am frankly ASTONISHED that Kepler has discovered SO MANY planets in so close to the parent star, but a civilization in the Tau Ceti or even Alpha Centauri system would never be able to detect the Earth - because none of our planets ever occult the Sun from their viewpoint.
Look up in the night sky, and imagine those distant (and very hypothetical!) civilizations orbiting those many, many stars and trying to find US.. Using a Kepler-type telescope, ONLY civilizations that are pretty darn close to the ecliptic would be able to detect OUR solar system.
For Kepler to have discovered so many planets, there must be planetary systems around virtually every star out there. There may be a trillion stars in the Milky Way. If only one in a million planets host anything even remotely resembling "life", there must be a million planets with some form of life.
Not to mention the inter-breeding. So much inter-breeding.
Who'd want to be the captain of a starship, if not for all the opportunites for inter-breeding?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
It's not just whether there are other civilizations out there. It's also whether either of us would develop technology that the other would be able to understand or recognize as signals AND broadcast them during the time when they could be received AND with sufficient power to be received.
Actually I don't see it as being about that at all. The debate here is about other species existing, us knowing about them specifically is merely a question of our own knowledge about reality and has no bearing on reality outside of our heads. It is very anthropocentric to base theoretical assumptions about extraterrestrial life on our own ability to perceive that life.
I would posit that we'd have more diversity if scientists stopped being so conservative about what qualifies as a planet.
Take, for example, the plight of Ceres. Residing somewhere between Mars and Jupiter, it's been called a dwarf planet for quite some time, just because of its immutable physical characteristics. Size discrimination is very real in the physics community, a practice which continues to this day.
Imagine how many more planets we'd be able to discover if we'd just liberalize the definition of a planet. I know it's served us well, but it is time to redefine the term planet to be more inclusive of our increasingly diverse universe. And how, exactly, would this hurt the status of existing planets? I know it wouldn't affect my planet.
And why, exactly isn't Ceres a planet? Because the IAU decided to redefine the term "planet" to exclude it! Such blatant bigotry has no place in a pluralistic universe. We should be ashamed.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
I wonder if any other planet has Microsoft Bob also
Table-ized A.I.
The (Nobel price winning) psychologist Kahnemann calls this phenomenon "What You See Is All There Is" - and he detected in the "experts", not in space.
and most importantly, who speak standard US English.
Perhaps it was just that they had all these unused costumes and sets around so it was cheap to do.... just saying...
Anyone wearing night googles to study exoplanets could tell you that.
We can't see much with our telescopes.Twenty years ago we couldn't detect the planets that we can today.
In twenty years or so from now we will be able to detect even smaller planets that we can today. I bet.
So how exactly big is "one time bigger"?
I think that the main issue is that people see the TV shows and movies and think that "life" has to look like that.
But those are just theatrics so that human actors can play the parts.
Yep. All intelligent life just happens to be bipeds with the brain in a head at the top with a face that has eyes above the nose and the mouth just underneath it.
I'm still wondering how Spock can be the offspring of a human and a Vulcan - complete with two hearts and green blood!
No sig today...
Most exoplanets are much bigger and closer to the sun than Earth is... incidentally, these are the kind of planets that are most easily detected.
'nuff said.
As far as i know, the closer a planet is to its sun, the greater the signal footprint we get. So it cant be a big suprise that we havnt found so many minor planets like earth, when we also know that bigger and closer-orbiting planets exists.
...who speak standard US English better than many Earth-natives.
No sig today...
The Universe is so large that it cannot possibly be that we are the only life thriving on a planet orbiting a star.
Unfortunately it quite possibly can. Since we have only one instance of life on record, in the absence of further evidence all we have is conjecture. We might very well be alone in here.
Gullible idiot
Turn in your geek card.
Universal Translator
The USA don't exist in Star Trek. No US English.
And you forget the universal translator.
And you forget that several species have been presented to have a language not translatable by the UT.
The Sheliak for example.
In Enterprise, before the UT was invented they had to employ a human translator extremely talented in translation unknown languages.
So. No. They don't all speak English.
The book Rare Earth dwells into the possibility we're in fact quite exceptional. I've seen plenty of debate regarding some of the statements and conclusions drawn by the authors but nonetheless, "intelligent" life seems a lot less common than expected. That being said, we're improving our "life detection" skills and it might be possible, in a few years, to actually "scan" a planet from earth and detect elements, through spectrum analysis, which point to evidence of life.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
Obviously it's not "most planets are bigger than Earth", it's very exactly "our present detection method being a measure of star movements due to the planet presence, we only see enormous jupiter-like things for now".
How to say it politely?
"I hope the OP summary is, er, too concise, otherwise this just means Hawaii climate turns the scientists silly..."
Herve S.
The Universe is so large that it cannot possibly be that we are the only life thriving on a planet orbiting a star.
There is a huge fallacy here.
The reason that we are on this planet is of course the fact that life IS possible here. However, the chances of life occurring somewhere might be 1 in a gazillion.
It might even be that life exists only in a small part of the multiverse (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse) Let us assume that at the sub-atomic scale, decisions are not taken at random, but that at every (let's say binary) decision the universe splits in two halves (one half taking one outcome of the decision and the other half the other). Then if --in this big tree of universes-- life exists somewhere, then it may appear in one universe as if either there was a God that created this life, or, to the more scientifically oriented life-forms, it may seem that life may occur elsewhere in the same universe. But the reality is that the formation of life may be much less likely than we think, and other life may exist only in parallel universes.
Yes, we have created small DNA-like structures in reaction chambers. However, life on Earth will not function with only some random string of DNA. Complicated machinery (ribosomes etc) is needed to actually make life work. And we know absolutely nothing about the probability of this machinery to come into existence from scratch.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
By the 1701-D's time, that job was relegated to the First Officer's beard.
And even if the UT did work, it didn't always make sense. Darmok was one of the best episodes imo.
The Universe is so large that it cannot possibly be that we are the only life thriving on a planet orbiting a star
Amazing logic there. Most people who have given it serious consideration think it is perfectly possible that Earth has the only life in the universe.
Heresy! It was Morgan Freeman, obviously.
...scientists take a measurement that's known to be valid in only a microscopic fraction of observables (ie, systems that happen to have their ecliptic in line with ours, and have an orbital period so far of 1 year) and base broad, sweeping conclusions about the entire universe on them.
These guys are almost as bad as anthropologists, who'll build an entire career 'interpreting' facets of a who civilization extrapolated from a half-dozen potsherds.
-Styopa
Sokath, his eyes uncovered.
Titty Sprinkles. (No really, google it)
Which was why Roddenberry did it that way, I saw an interview with him once where he was asked why all his aliens were forehead aliens instead of anything exotic and he pointed out 1.-The exotic aliens on Dr Who looked like crap, and 2.-90% of an actor's craft is done with his face and when you can no longer see the actor's face he can no longer convey emotion. Joss Whedon said the same thing when asked why he got rid of the cool "American Werewolf" in the first season for a classic wolfman, he said all the animated wolf could do was snarl, it couldn't be scared or show pain or any emotions whereas Seth Green could make you feel for the monster by putting bits of the man into the performance.
As for TFA, to quote Ian Malcolm "Life finds a way". Just look at how there is life on this planet in some of the most hellish places, like thermal vents on the bottom of the ocean. I remember reading an article talking to the guys that went down so deep in the Marianas trench and one of the things they were talking about was how you had flat fish even down that deep. To say that our planet is so far unique for supporting our monkey asses is fine and dandy but anybody who thinks that means there couldn't be life on those because we wouldn't survive is just being arrogant. This is why i support exploring the oceans of Europa with a probe, from what we saw the oceans under the ice are warm and flowing, if there is any place in our own solar system that would have life my money would be on Europa.
The problem isn't that there may or may not be life out there, the problem is even in our own galaxy the space is just so damned vast that just saying hello could take 10 million years. Until we can find a way around that pesky little relativity thing we are just pulling ideas out of our asses because with our best telescopes its the equivalent of stepping out a single inch, our reach is just too small when compared to just what is in our own galaxy, much less the thousands of other galaxies, that for all we know earth like planets are a dime a dozen, there just aren't any in the few feeble inches we can reach out with our current tech.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Yep. Some posit the probability of intelligible life as essentially zero -- meaning that Earth is a fluke. Still, such guesses are just that -- guesses -- and though educated, that term is relative, as there is at present no way to know all the factors. Even Drake admits he was only spitballing.
Twice as big -- x + 1x = 2x. Obviously, it's an awkward way of expressing it.
Ok, then where is everybody? AKA Fermi Paradox The rare Earth has always been my favored explanation.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Were...not are. We are a warlike species...I would be suprised to find another species, lifeform, even bacteria yet alive in/on another world. Just because of the energy required too reproduce. Implies a second species, to feed upon, implying predation,implying feast/famine, so can you call it intellegence, fast breeding cycles, doesn't imply "god" put it there. But good chemistry, proper mixing of the appropiate star stuff, and the death of many stars already past. So could god be the astronut left behind in the latest suicide attempt from cities in flight?
Damn, I wish I had mod points. That may be the best explanation I ever heard.
21st Century Renaissance Man
The actual article is much better than the one linked in the story. A version very close to the one published in Science can be found here, at the public preprint archive (arXiv). The article should be relatively easy to read even for non-scientists. Note that our knowledge of the distribution of planets is marred by the biased sample we have access to: It is much easier to observe planets if they are close to their parent star, and heavy. Most of the statistics provided in the article attempts to correct for this bias, so we can say pretty confidently that small planets are much more common than large ones*. But the other claim in the summary, that most planetary systems are much more compact than the solar system, doesn't seem to be supported in the article itself. But perhaps I missed something.
Anyway, the Science article is readable, and if nothing else the figures are quite interesting.
The main issue that people see with shows like that is not that humans play the aliens. The issue people see is that those aliens don't believe in God. Alien life does have to look like that. God made everything, including us...........Therefore all aliens will look like us. Sound logic. /sarcasm
There said it. Total troll post.
Nothing to see here. Ignore us, Earth isn't one big reality show that we use for our amusement.
The Universe is so large that it cannot possibly be that we are the only life thriving on a planet orbiting a star.
That is emotionally compelling but logically invalid.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I think that the main issue is that people see the TV shows and movies and think that "life" has to look like that.
But those are just theatrics so that human actors can play the parts. Look at the variations of life on Earth. From whales to worms.
Are you telling me that the galaxy isn't full of people who grow lumps of rubber on their heads?
And speak English with an American accent?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Isn't there something to be said for sample size here? We've had the ability to "easily" see large planets. We've discovered that there is a strange(to us) phenomena known as "Hot Jupiter". But other than that, we have found only relatively large planets up to this point. Each of those systems with large planets may also contain smaller planets as well.
You can't prove a negative, but that appears to be what they are doing. Since we don't have the tech to discover systems like our own, we MUST be rare.
Prof. Farnsworth - "Oh a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-My-Own-Grandpa!"
The galaxy is full of people who live on moons of gas giants because they had a lot of incentive to develop space technology to hop from moon to moon.
The galaxy is full of people who grew up in low-gravity environments, because they are more comfortable living in space and thus travel is easier for them both energetically to get there and biologically to live there.
The galaxy is also full of people who grow lumps of rubber on their heads, but that's just because it is the latest rage in all the Alpha Centauri fashion holos.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
In TOS, Kirk asked Sargon why he kept calling them "his children". Sargon told Kirk that they seeded the galaxy with their likeness eons ago. Kirk responded that there was evidence for independent development of humans on Earth but Spock said this seeding would explain Vulcan mythology. One of the appealing features of the TOS as originally pitched to DesiLu was that they would visit "Class M" planets, so humanoid.
Everybody is on their own planet with the same chemicals and rules as here. They're just as far away from us as we are from them, and they won't have anything better than us technology-wise. They can't get here, and we can't get there. Simple as that.
Yep. Some posit the probability of intelligible life as essentially zero -- meaning that Earth is a fluke. Still, such guesses are just that -- guesses -- and though educated, that term is relative, as there is at present no way to know all the factors. Even Drake admits he was only spitballing.
The probability of intelligible (sic) life is NOT "essentially zero". However infinitesimally small the probability, it's not zero, since we know there's life on at least one planet.
However, as someone says above, the problem is that because the probability is so very, very low that any other intelligent life is simply too far away for us to ever contact. If we have to look to another galaxy to find our neighbours, well...short of a stargate-type piece of magic we may never meet them. We might trade millions of years old light speed signals, but that's not really going to help and we're not going to have much of a dialogue.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I like how science fiction is coloring your (and everyone else's) viewpoint here. The only reason we think there must be life out there is that our fiction has conditioned us to think that. You forget that we have no actual evidence. But only actual evidence counts.
Coldness is the inverse of hotness, just as slowness is the inverse of being fast. If something is 100 K hot, then being twice as hot would make it 200 K. Its coldness is 1/(100K), and being twice as cold would make is 2/(100K), which corresponds to a temperature of 50 K. Which is exactly what people mean when they use expressions like "twice as cold". Similarly, ten times as slow as 100 m/s would be 10 m/s. This is unambiguous, mathematically well defined, and intuitively understood by most people even without thinking in terms of inverses. What is your problem with it?
This is a comment from a scientist that I can only hope was taken out of context...
The most common systems contain one or more planets one to three times bigger than Earth, all orbiting much closer to their parent stars than Earth circles the sun, says astronomer Andrew Howard, with the University of Hawaii."
Of the planets we have found, from observation with Kepler mission are the ones with the shortest revolutions. Basically Kepler counts how many times the star dims and looks for a pattern ... every 90 days -- every 180 days... If Kepler was in Alpha Centauri it would not have been in operation long enough to find Earth yet if it was look directly at the Sun. It need up to 4 occurrences to be sure it has found a planet... it started in May 19 2009 -- If we passed in front of the Sun on the 19th --- it would not 'find' Earth until two week from now. Kepler has not been in operation long enough to find Earth yet ... so the claim that most planets are orbiting closer to the Sun than Earth is because it will be in the next two years that the planets that orbit with a similiar period to Earth start to show up... It the MAIN reason the program was extended to 2016 ... That way we will see the Earth like orbits and a few Mars like orbits.
I stay annoyed the hell out of most of the time.
About those colorful metaphors--I don't think you should use them. You don't quite have the knack for it.
Just because the universe is much older than Earth doesn't mean that life must have developed elsewhere first.
Unfortunately, this means we may never meet any intelligent alien life, escept in some unimaginably distant future (hundreds of millions of years from now) if we even still exist then.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
You could do that from the comfort of you own home. At least in a few states.
Depends on the "tone" of the species. If they are meant to be a wise race, they get an English accent. Specifically, a London accent.
.
You mean there might be a world without spelling mistakes? No Dan Quayle, I realize, but still that would be kind of awesome.
You would automatically be banished from such a world at the first typoo
I come here for the love
Yes, the "humans are special" train of thought has never led us astray before.
Now if you will excuse me, I have some epicycles to calculate.
It's funny that the answer to the question, "Is there a God?" and "Is there life on other planets?" is interchangeable: "We can't know because there is no proof."
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I prefer the Rare Earth hypothesis
I come here for the love
I recently read a work of fiction that made a good case (accidentally--they were talking about humans alone) for the Fermi Paradox. Basically, every civilization that becomes spacefaring first becomes so extraordinarily efficient that they don't put out radio waves, and that they have "ascended" into a computer simulated universe where they live as immortals, where the processing speed of the computer is fast enough that a thousand years might pass on the inside in a second of real time. Resources and expansion are handled by a self-improving AI. Said AI consumes entire star systems while providing for its passengers.
Its interesting, because it would explain why no individual aliens pop up here or there, despite the fact that they have the tech to get here easily, and there are resources here that individuals would want to exploit. The AI is so advanced that it doesn't require any preprocessing of materials, perhaps even driving increased fusion rates in dying stars to produce the minerals it needs, something that would greatly reduce the need for expansion in any event.
In essence, there are no spacefaring alien civilizations on this plane of existence. Just alien AIs, which present as one god-like being for each civilization. They might even merge or otherwise cooperate in order to avoid destructive confrontation, which would waste resources. Perhaps such AIs agree to leave developing civilizations alone, and only contact them once they have developed that type of AI.
Here's hoping that is the case, as otherwise, they are rare, and may not give a shit about us, and will roll over our civilization like a steamroller over a garden slug. If we are lucky, the expansion front of such an entity would at least let us "in" prior to consuming our star system.
Please, provide a proof of that assertion. Or were you using the word "logic" in the hackneyed manner it is used in Star Trek?
The likelihood of producing a universe that gives birth to life exactly ONE time, is, in fact, infinitesimal. By definition, actually. Either there is lots of life all over the place, or there is none. Saying exactly one is like saying there are exactly five. Or exactly 563.
The method for locating planets works better on planets closer to a star than on planets farther from the star.
It also works better for larger planets than smaller planets.
Put these two items together, and BAM! most of of your detections are bigger planets closer to stars.
Being somewhat of the anal retentive disposition, it annoys the hell out of me when someone says "200% increase" when they mean "doubled", which is merely a 100% increase.
That's nothing, in the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_display_resolution#WUXGA table, there used to have 150% decrease in pixels. And it wasn't even an imaginary square screen.
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
My personal favorite is x times less (fill in any positive integer for x).
It's not possible. What they usually mean is 1/x-th.
And now that I've pointed it out to you, TV commercials will hurt your brain even more than usual. You're welcome.
I cant believe Seager and Howard dont know this. I think the journalist must mistinerpreted their paper.
“We don’t know exactly what to look for but our instruments are general and we can look for gases that don’t belong,” - Quote from the same article and same astrophysicist.
Spock doesn't have two hearts. You may be thinking of Doctor Who.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I once read an estimate of a million years for Earths oceans to freeze basically solid (exceptions of thermal vents) if cast out of the solar system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
They are only interchangeable so long as the answers to either are inconclusive, or if you assume the answer to both is no.
If the answer is yes to either of those questions, then the ramifications might be rather large, and potentially very different from eachother, unless you assume that "God" is necessarily equivalent to "alien".
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Infinite diversity does not rule out the existence of singularities. The properties of 0, for instance, are unique in the Real Numbers (an uncountably large infinite set), and yet the properties of something unique as zero still exist exactly once in that domain. In fact, one can even show that in order for the system to be coherent, that 0 *MUST* exist (and must be unique).
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
When I watched Prometheus, this episode came to mind. =)
/* No Comment */
Also would have accepted "Babel Fish."
/* No Comment */
It's not just whether there are other civilizations out there. It's also whether either of us would develop technology that the other would be able to understand or recognize as signals AND broadcast them during the time when they could be received AND with sufficient power to be received.
Contrary to popular belief, we ( collectively ) have come to the point where we'll be pretty good at spotting intelligence. Or perhaps we should call it "purposeful manipulation of energy", as that's really what we're talking about. It's actually fairly easy. Remember, we're not talking about understanding it, nor are we talking about gauging how advanced it is ( not immediately ). Rather, just recognizing order against the chaotic background of the universe.
Once we identify purposeful manipulation of energy ( ie: TV signals, radio waves, gamma rays or WHATEVER are being used to to propagate information ), then it's just a matter of deciphering it. Which is the harder part, granted, but hardly beyond what our species is capable of.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
do you happen to remember what book this was? I love such stories. it sounds kinda like. Charles stross - accelerando?
"The space elevator will be built about 50 years after everyone stops laughing." - Arthur C. Clarke ~1980
Who'd want to be the captain of a starship, if not for all the opportunites for inter-breeding?
Just ask Zap Brannigan:
Captain Zapp Brannigan: As my protégé you should know that the only way to deal with a female adversary is to seduce her. [Kif groans]
Captain Zapp Brannigan: This time we are sure she's a woman, right?
Kif Kroker: *Yes*.
or:
Captain Zapp Brannigan: We have failed to uphold Brannigan's Law. However I did make it with a hot alien babe. And in the end, is that not what man has dreamt of since first he looked up at the stars?
[pause]
Captain Zapp Brannigan: Kif, I'm asking you a question.
[Kif groans]
"For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert"
I said that too. :) Roddenberry suggested it right in the show bible.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
I assume by 'the first place in the whole universe to develop life' you mean 'first place to develop intelligent life that is capable of building technology and motivated to advance and explore'. I don't think it is obvious that "humans are the first" is significantly more obvious than the other explanations like they all retreat into virtual worlds, or they all destroy themselves through ecological collapse or nuclear war or nano disassembler gray goo accidents. Or some combination thereof. After all, until we populate the universe with our probes or whatever all we've done is survive some of the pitfalls and the paradox remains unresolved.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
I think you are confusing interbreeding with inbreeding.
Hey give us regular humans some slack. I think you could accept that "200% increase" and "200% of the original amount" could get conflated thanks to the eternal process of linguistic short-cutting. Now "COULD care less" is totally unacceptable regardless.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Shaka, when the walls fell. :-(
Are you insane? Didn't you receive that message transmitted from space back in 2010? It plainly said of Europa: "Attempt no landing there!"
*golf clap*
I drank what? -- Socrates
And rejecting a logical hypothesis because it doesn't fit with our preconceived views of the cosmos has never led us astray either.
Earlier (modern) thinking on the existence of intelligent life in the universe tended towards fairly high estimates of the potential number of advanced civilizations in the universe. The Drake equation has been used to estimate the probability of civilizations in our galaxy that could be detected using a radio telescope. The Drake equation starts with the number of new stars forming in the galaxy every year over the life of the galaxy and then applies a series of probabilities that these stars have planets capable of sustaining life, that the planets develop life, that life evolves to complex, intelligent life, that intelligent life develops detectable (by radio telescope) evidence and that detectable signals are produced for long enough and in the right time window to be detected by us. Original estimates optimistic and arrived at a range of detectable planets in our galaxy between 1000 and 100,000,000.
However the Drake group initially assumed that 100% of habitable planets developed life and 100% of these developed intelligent life. This was based on a fairly linear view of evolution and the bias that evolution has a particular goal - to develop advanced, communicating, detectable, intelligent life. Religious folks are criticized for intelligent design, which in its most progressive form, is an evolution that is intelligently guided or directed towards a specific goal. It seems the astronomers have/had the same fallacy. When you consider that the earth is roughly 4.5B years old and that 1) to the best of our knowledge, abiogenesis (life evolving from simple organic compounds) only happened ONCE in all this time; 2) complex life (multi-cellular) has only existed for the last 1B years; 3) there have been numerous mass extinctions, any of which could have (and yet still may) wiped out all complex life on the planet; 4) intelligent life has only existed in the last 200,000 - 500,000 years; and 5) only ONE intelligent species has evolved and survived to develop a detectable civilization, it becomes clear that the evolution of life is NOT linear or directed towards a specific goal.
Different assumptions applied to the same equation yield vastly different results. If we assume that the evolution of intelligent life requires a rocky planet with a solid iron core, a molten mantel and thin tectonic crust, with just enough vulcanism to create a CO2 rich (but not too rich) atmosphere, with liquid water, orbiting a fairly young star within a habitable zone, with a magnetosphere to protect life from radiation, with several large gas giants in the outer solar system to protect the planet from bombardment by meteorites and comets, but allow just enough, early bombardment to seed the planet with water and organic compounds, with a large, near planet sized moon to allow tidal action (it is thought that life originally formed in inter-tidal zones), etc, etc, it seems very, very, very unlikely that a large proportion of habitable planets developed life at all.
I think it is quite possible, even probable, that there is life "out there", but intelligent life seems less and less probable.
If you aren't part of the solution, then there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
Suppose that the odds of a technical civilization developing in the Universe is 1%. We could be extremely lucky, and there's a very small chance some other species did. There are multiple-Universe theories and hypotheses, and if there's a few hundred Universes or more some of them are likely to have people like us. In any case, nobody would ever really see the Universes without intelligent life, and so we can disregard them.
To put it another way, back in the 70s a statistician became concerned at the odds of a bomb on a plane, and disliked flying. Then he calculated the probability of two bombs on a plane, found it acceptable, and carried his own bomb. Given that we necessarily have one event (us/a statistician's bomb), that doesn't tell us anything about the probability.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Indeed. I've often found it fascinating when we discover a new piece of the puzzle here on Earth - that of a condition peculiar to our situation - that is absolutely essential to sustain life (or at least intelligent human-type life as we know it). One of the more recent examples that comes to mind is the existence of our moon and its mass ratio to the Earth... stabilizing the progression of Earth's axis. Life could not exist for very long without it. And there are hundreds of conditions like this that are absolutely essential - likely lots more yet to be discovered: Right kind of star, right distance from star, right orbit, proper chemical composition of planet, magnetic field, proximity of solar system to non-life-friendly cosmic events (supernovas, etc),
And when it comes down to calculating the probabilities of all these conditions happening in one place... the numbers become stupid insane big - like 1 chance in greater than the number of sub-atomic particles in the entire universe big. The reason is because of "irreducible complexity"... You see, it doesn't do you any good to have the right type of star if you don't have a planet with the right orbit... and if you DO have the right kind of star with the right kind of orbit, it doesn't do you any good if you don't have a planet with the right kind of magnetic field to protect the atmosphere and life that may be on it... Any life that may exist wouldn't last very long.
Want to see how fast the probabilities decrease? Let's assign some arbitrary (certainly underestimated) numbers:
Chance of having the right kind of star: 1 in 100
Chance of having proper orbit: 1 in 500
Chance of having appropriate chemical compisition of planet: 1 in 1000
Chance of being in the right place in the galaxy: 1 in 5000
100 x 500 = 50,000 x 1000 = 50,000,000 x 5000 = 1 chance in 2.5x10^11
So, you see... with ONLY 4 parameters the chances of having the right conditions to sustain life are very remote. And there are LOTS of parameters to figure into the entire calculation. It is INDEED very much possible - even probable - that our little blue dot is the only place like it in the entire universe.
George Burns!
I drank what? -- Socrates
Well until we actually observe other alien life the scientific assumption should be that most life is like ours, that ours is the path of least resistance, the optimal path that all life takes. I think we should be open to it being radically different, however until we observe anything to the contrary, it is all just so much speculation. It could be that some life is so radically different that we may have a hard time recognizing to even observe it. It could be that we are the life oddballs, and most take another path. Who knows. However at this time the most rational response would be to surmise that at least at this time, life is likely similar to ourselves.
Childhood's End by AC Clarke has a similar view... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood's_End
but that at every (let's say binary) decision the universe splits in two halves (one half taking one outcome of the decision and the other half the other).
Whoah, buddy. Stop. Right. There. Are you implying that a near infinite amount of "intelligent" life exists in the past and future of this time line? Because, I have vast amounts of observational evidence to prove you wrong about the former, and one hell of an extrapolation to disprove the latter.
But 2010 was 3 years ago. Surely we can land there now.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
It's funny that the answer to the question, "Is there a God?" and "Is there life on other planets?" is interchangeable: "We can't know because there is no proof."
Which is why I always found it hard to trust any teacher who would demerit me for using the excuse, "My dog ate my homework." They're basing actions on unprovable hypotheses!
As for TFA, to quote Ian Malcolm "Life finds a way". Just look at how there is life on this planet in some of the most hellish places, like thermal vents on the bottom of the ocean. I remember reading an article talking to the guys that went down so deep in the Marianas trench and one of the things they were talking about was how you had flat fish even down that deep. To say that our planet is so far unique for supporting our monkey asses is fine and dandy but anybody who thinks that means there couldn't be life on those because we wouldn't survive is just being arrogant. This is why i support exploring the oceans of Europa with a probe, from what we saw the oceans under the ice are warm and flowing, if there is any place in our own solar system that would have life my money would be on Europa.
A saying by an actor/fictional character has little value.
The prerequisites for life, or anything equivalent, are high - we don't look for life inside (active) volcanoes or the sun, because there are certain environmental extremes that simply make life impossible. Why didn't life find a way in those places? It couldn't.
Just because you have a million lottery tickets doesn't mean you are guaranteed a win - it all depends on the odds - and we have not determined the odds for life.
I'm not saying that there isn't life elsewhere I'm just pointing out your ridiculous statement that it cannot even be possible that there isn't life out there.
The universe is big but as far as we know it isn't infinite. Multiplying the probablilities of lots of unlikely events quickly gets makes things very very unlikely.
Francis Crick once wrote 'The origin of life appears to be almost a miracle so many are the conditions require to get it going'.
Paul Davies who I believe heads up SETI has written a whole book about this question and having read it I can tell you that he is far from convinced that there is any life elsewhere.
Hey, I was trying to think contemporary so the young'uns didn't feel left out....
Does that mean that somewhere in the universe there is an exact copy of, say, the Mona Lisa? Down to each last brush stroke? After all, there is one, so the possibility is non-zero.
In my case, though, I COULD care less, but it's not worth the effort. I think I already care little enough already, so I'm not going to bother myself about it.
Ah.
Alanis Morissette!
I drank what? -- Socrates
You make a good point about how many conditions we find that the Earth has gotten that we "think" are needed for the life to have evolved here. I put think in quotes, because we don't actually know if they are all absolutely necessary. But even if they are all needed, it is only for the conditions of Earth life to exist. We may find other planets with a very different type of life form. And those planets probably have just as many amazingly improbable conditions and attributes that are completely needed for their life to have formed and be sustained. As we have only one planet that we know of with life on it, we don't yet know anything about the conditions needed for life to form or exist.
I'll just give one example as to my thinking. A long time ago on earth, the atmosphere was very different. It didn't have oxygen and was filled with poisonous gasses. At least these were poisonous to us and most of the life that currently exists. With your logic we would have to conclude that life did not form on earth until the atmosphere changed to support it. But I believe it is pretty well established that the life forms that existed back then thrived and eventually were the cause of the atmospheric changes that took place. Maybe our life could not survive very long without the moon we have, but another one might prefer it with no moon.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
Again look at the thermal vents, if you would have asked any scientists before we found those worms if anything could live in such a hellish place they would have told you "only in sci/fi" because of the insane pressures and the water being so extremely hot....yet life found a way. Hell we recently found creatures at the bottom living on methane which again until we found them was something straight out of sci/fi, yet life found a way.
Sure it may not be the kind of life you can sit down and discuss the laws of physics with but it IS life and to say we know for sure what planets can and can't support life when we haven't even explored the planets in our own solar system well enough to say for sure there is no life on them? That isn't science, that is arrogance.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Good thoughts... Of course one always has to allow for possibilities beyond our current realm of understanding - or even comprehension. That's one reason I, personally, don't accept the idea that 'life' evolved - spontaneously - on this rock. Chance - is not a scientifically workable solution (in my opinion). But its not my intention to start a 'creationist' debate here. :-)
I think you have misinterpreted what my logic assumes.... We have many odd-ball 'types' of life that exist on Earth NOW - not dependent on oxygen, etc, etc. Many species of which have only been discovered recently. IF the theory of evolution is true - in the sense that we humans evolved from primitive life-forms... it follows that such a process takes millions upon millions of years - even billions of years! This requires some level of stability in the system in which it develops over a VERY long time-scale. Presuming the laws of physics are the same throughout the universe (and have been here through the history of the Earth) - life - of ANY type - is dependent on complex forms of chemistry. Afterall, DNA is just a strand of chemicals bound together in a very specific way... There are boundaries (such as temperature) outside of which these complex forms of chemistry break-down and will not work. At all. (That's why boiling water destroys ALL of the run-of-the-mill-type bacteria in it.) Even if one did have a hypothetical planet where life did spontaneously generate itself at some point in time... its chances of evolving into something like a human that consumes all kinds of energy just to stay alive and feed our massively intelligent brains - even if it IS based on something other than a DNA molecule - aren't very good if its host star blows itself up after only a few million years, incinerating the planet in the process... or if it gets swallowed by a black hole... or the magnetic field disappears and the 'life molecules' begin to be blasted apart by solar radiation, etc. etc.
I might add that the "humans are common and disposable" hasn't served us well either.
It is definitely hard to imagine life that can survive the super extremes like molten lava or the star going super nova. I would also tend to agree that it takes a long time for life to evolve for the environment it exists in. But the time evolution takes could be the product of the stability of our planet and not dependant on it. Again we are using our one example to extrapolate to others which is about the worst case for any type of statistical estimation. What if there was a life form that swam in a soup of it's building blocks (food and energy etc.). And if this life form had huge growth rates and offspring amounts but with a much larger rate of mutation than we have here on earth. This could be due to higher levels of radiation or their equivalence of DNA is less accurate at reproduction than our DNA is. Even if 80% of the offspring failed to survive due to defects, if each creature made millions of offspring you would get much plenty of evolution for a changing environment. So things like the stability of our orbit or the moon holding the axis straight won't matter if the life there is evolving quickly enough to compensate for it. In fact even here on earth lots of our evolutionary change happens after a massive die off. Once the ecological niches are free, then new things evolve to fill them. When there is fierce competition, the currently existing forms hold on to the niche. Once they are free, then new things evolve and fill them in. If the dinosaurs hadn't been killed off the mammals would probably not become as successful as they are and we wouldn't even be here to question this. So perhaps less stability would drive quicker evolution and create more life forms quicker than we have here. It hasn't taken that many decades for Staphylococcus aureus to evolve resistance to our antibiotics or for weeds to start becoming resistant to Roundup. Without these pressures the bacteria and weeds didn't need to evolve these abilities. And this is still Earth based life. With alien life we have no idea how quickly change may take place. That is all fine and dandy until the planet is destroyed, which I would agree would be the end of the game for them. It makes for interesting thoughts, but until we find some other examples of life and can compare it is all just mental masturbation in a way.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
Forgot about that one; thanks.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
in which case, why would you need a planet? more likely to see "life" appear as an extension of the process by which organic compounds get cooked up on chunks of dirty ice in the oort cloud, or equivalent. advantages: nice reliable uninterrupted energy flux, none of this nasty business where the energy source vanishes every night that planets stick you with.
no wonder Bones was always in a foul mood. having to cure a galaxy's worth of STDs on the Captain's Log.
-90% of an actor's craft is done with his face and when you can no longer see the actor's face he can no longer convey emotion..;
So what do they do? Hid Levar Burton's big expressive eyes behind a visor. Didn't make sense to me then and doesn't now.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
as was pointed out to me recently (to my great disappointment), this multiple infinite universes model would also require universes where everything is made of green cheese, for example; even universes where 2+2=5, at least where that was the belief of every human being, and possibly where that was true, depending on how well you can argue. that took a lot of the wind out of my infinite universe sails, which is too bad as I get a lot of mileage out of that theory in the consolation department.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
statement: there is no intelligent life except us
retort: the universe is so unimaginably vast, there is more likely to be other intelligent life than not
statement: there is no god except God/Christ/Allah
retort: the universe is so unimaginably vast, there is more likely to be other gods than not
and yet, people react differently to the above.
Though that's an awkward way of saying it, "half again as big" is a similar phrase that does get used.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
"Common" and "disposable" are not synonyms.
You're right. We are totally special. Feels good, man.
Also, the law of large numbers does not exist.
I mean, Crhist, it's like you guys don't understand that there are a shitload of planets out there (like, more planets than grains of sand on our planet), and probably a tenth of those are in the habitable zone, and have been for BILLIONS of years. Yes, rare things will happen, lots and lots of times.
Again, telling me there is exactly one planet with life is like telling me there are exactly three planets with life. It's asinine.
OK you've convinced me now. I didn't realise there where 'shitloads' of planets out there. I'm an idiot and so are all of the scientists who have given serious thought to this matter.
Have you heard of Paul Davies or SETI or Francis Crick?
I, like most people who have thought about it think that life elsewhere is pretty damn likely, truly intelligent life much less so but still likely, but no one who has thought about the arguments ('there are shitloads of planets' isn't the only argument) would ever claim that 'it cannot possibly be that we are the only life' as you state.
The creation of life appears to have only happened on Earth once (there seems to be only one tree of life), and it seems to have taken several hundred million years. That suggests that even when conditions are right, as they obviously are here, it is pretty hard to get going.
The 'there are shitloads of planets' argunment could just as easily be applied to the question of intelligent life elsewhere and yet Drake's equation and Fermi's paradox both point to the flaws in such simplistic reasoning.
You made an overblown statement and were called out on it, not just by me, and now you won't admit you were wrong.
Is life elsewhere likely? I think so. Is it possible Earth houses the only life? Absolutely. Read Davies' book, it's very good.
Sure it may not be the kind of life you can sit down and discuss the laws of physics with but it IS life and to say we know for sure what planets can and can't support life when we haven't even explored the planets in our own solar system well enough to say for sure there is no life on them? That isn't science, that is arrogance.
Pay attention to what the actual data is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthermophile
However, it is thought unlikely that microbes could survive at temperatures above 150ÂC, as the cohesion of DNA and other vital molecules begins to break down at this point.
Temperature of Lava: 700-1200 deg C. Surface of Sun: Estimated 5505 deg C
Are you claiming that life has found or will find a way in those environments?
If yes, you are making a claim with no data - ignorant claims are not superior to "arrogant" claims. If no, then you have conceded that are limits on "life finds a way".
But who is to say that life HAS to function by DNA? That is how we developed, sure, but just because one planet in one spot with one kind of conditions developed that way does NOT mean that all life HAS to evolve that way.
This is one of the reasons Neil DeGrasse is pushing for better exploration of Mars and Europa, as he says until we find actual alien life, even if its just the size of a single flea, we just won't know if life follows a single 'roadmap" or if there are many ways to get to the same place just depending on conditions.
Hell we can't even say for certain that life on this planet originated here, since we know that Mars had a primal soup earlier than we did and that multiple large impacts did occur between the Earth and Mars so its very possible our DNA didn't start out here,but started out as bacteria on Mars and was carried here on an asteroid. Until we do a more complete exploration of Mars we simply can't know and that is on our own planet and we are gonna assume that we can guess whether a planet can or can't based on the teeny tiny bit of information we can get from out telescopes? With the current way of detecting planets in other systems I don't know if that would even work for anything less than a couple of sizes larger than Earth, I doubt anything smaller would cause enough shift for us to even detect it.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
But who is to say that life HAS to function by DNA? That is how we developed, sure, but just because one planet in one spot with one kind of conditions developed that way does NOT mean that all life HAS to evolve that way.
There's only so many chemical elements to work with, and those elements have certain observed properties. Maybe there's an undiscovered exotic configuration of common elements that could be used for life inside molten lava or the sun - but the more likely reality is that there isn't. A chemist or physicist might come up with good explanation why life is impossible given that level of energy (involving chemical reactions and atomic bonds), but I'm content to approximate it as "very unlikely"
If life finds a way, we should find life anywhere we look - yet we can find and create sterile environments. Why is that? Life is a complex system built upon certain prerequisites. Violate those prerequisites, and life quickly becomes dead.
When you treat life as an information system (which it is), then you recognize that for every working configuration, there are vastly more non-working ones. There's no particular reason why there must exist a working configuration, because failure is a common and easy option. (ex: non-compiling buggy code)
This is one of the reasons Neil DeGrasse is pushing for better exploration of Mars and Europa, as he says until we find actual alien life, even if its just the size of a single flea, we just won't know if life follows a single 'roadmap" or if there are many ways to get to the same place just depending on conditions.
Or maybe this whole notion that life is merely an accidental self-assembling self-improving system of systems is fundamentally flawed.
He didn't tell you that. He explicitly told you something that is nearly the opposite of that. You read what he said, despaired of your inability to refute it, and intentionally chose to pretend he said something else so that you could knock over a strawman and claim a victory that you could never really earn.
You are a liar.