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Aliens Are Probably Everywhere, Just Not Anywhere Nearby
rossgneumann writes If there's intelligent life in the cosmos, it's probably nowhere we can get to anytime soon. At least that's the finding of the astrobiologist who, for the first time in decades, has rendered a major update to the key formula scientists use to seek out interstellar life. That'd be the Drake equation, which was developed over half a century ago to determine where life might lurk in the universe. Using the new Kepler data, astrobiologist Amri Wandel did some calculations to estimate the density of life-bearing worlds in our corner of the universe.
So whats new?
I thought this was the conclusion that had been reached ages ago.
Having the new data is great, but it's being presented as somehow changing our understanding of the subject.
I've always felt that the Drake Equation is not worthy of the term 'equation' since its just a simple probabilistic estimate from multiplying a ton of other probabilities and instances together. Consider for instance, the Schrödinger equation, which has a differential formulation that provides solutions to so many physical situations that arise in quantum mechanics, or Maxwell's equations, which explain all of electrodynamics, including light, and were the inspiration for Einstein's theory of special relativity.
Eh we have psychology even when we really haven't found a biological basis for consciousness.
I don't want to get into a debate about what "belief" means, but I assume
1) The Periodic Table of the Elements is the same across the entire visible universe. Otherwise, what is the value of observing distant light and concluding it's from this or that element?
2) That conditions should be about the same across the universe as well. If it's 0 degrees C at 101 KPa pressure of a 20% oxy/ 80% nitro atmosphere, two hydrogens and an oxygen make water that will be liquid
3) There is nothing special overall about our solar system.
Therefore, what's the problem? Surely there are plenty of places where conditions line up to allow atoms to mix and match over eons to build more and more complex molecular Jengas as the local star burns.
But space being what it is: huge, empty, and hostile, and our technology being limited by 1), they will also face the same limits!
We can't get there, and they can't get here.
End of story.
Best we can do is get our shit together here and create the type of rational, technocratic society that can allocate resources to sending more probes, signals, and listen for more signals.
That's it.
How can I tell?
It may not have an obvious current application, but to think that it could not ever be practical seems foolish. Even if they don't study extraterrestrial life directly, they can research the conditions required for, and possible indicators of life on any given planet.
intelligent non-human life is most likely everywhere around us, but beyond the perceptual capacities of the vast majority of humans. Goldfish don't see you walking by their bowl, they just see a flash of light (and maybe color?) and fit it into the only perceptual framework they can grasp. Every species on the planet does this on a continuum of consciousness.. perceiving the less sentient, but blind to the nature of the more advanced. to think that we humans are conveniently at the very top of this continuum is both height of hubris, as well as statistically unlikely.
Why the hell am I getting sent a 2300x667 pixels JPEG for the header when my display is only 1280 pixels wide?
It's incompetent morons who can't even do adaptive designs and make brain-dead decisions like these that are making the web unusable unless you're using the latest hardware. Here's a hint: we're not all rich Americans who don't care about throwing technology in landfills.
So you're telling me that things in other star systems are far away?
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
I, on behalf of the Alien Illuminati Confederacy, wholeheartedly agree with your xenophobic view of the universe. We... um.. THEY are not out there. There is nothing to see. Continue walking...
If we're looking for just Earth Like planets, then we are really discounting a lot of planets. And if we are just looking for carbon based life we are limiting it further.
There might be some form of life that breathes amonia and is based silcon. Or carbon based that breathes amonia. Or ..... It wasn't too long ago when it was discovered that there is life thousands of feet below the ocean's surface eating and breathing volcanic shit.
In short, it would be better just to say, "We are looking for life like us because that's all we know."
Support the supposition is right, that the nearest world with any type of life (likely single-celled) is on the order of ten to a hundred light years away. Do you know what we call that kind of world? Ours!!
If we are merely looking for intelligent life, we should be ecstatic about finding an octopus. They are quite intelligent, and you don't even have to leave the planet to find them.
I mention this because what if we went to another planet in search of intelligent life and found something like an octopus? How would we communicate with them? My guess is by cooking them, and then eating them.
Lets face it, we are effectively alone out there, the likelihood that any civilization that we do detect is still in existance by the time we can reply back to them much less actually visit them is effectively non-existant. Our best hope is that we pick up some sort of Informational Broadcast Beacon containing practical information that we did not already have ie the plans to better communication, power, or drive tech.
Lets take a look here
1. There needs to be a planet at an exact distance away from a star so things don't vaporize nor freeze
2. There needs to be water
3. Atmosphere Oxygen-rich
3.5. Atmosphere that isn't toxic
4.The Star needs to emit the right amount of energy so not to fry everything.
5. Planet can't be too close to other stars.
6. Planet needs to have a core preferably iron to deflect electromagnetic radiation.
7. Core also keeps ground warm which helps with supporting plant life.
I'm sure there is plenty more requirements to add to the list.
Best to keep this planet as stable as possible, 'cause we're stuck here and ain't no one coming to save us.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Calling it an "equation" is a gross injustice as it implies that it is "science". It isn't. We don't know the ACTUAL percentages for ANY of the probabilities used in Drake's Equation. The only variable in Drake's Equation that we have the slightest idea about is the first one R* - the average rate of star formation. FFS, it has only been 10 years since we could actually detect a single plant outside of our solar system. And mind you, unless we know EVERY SINGLE PROBABILITY in the equation, it is rendered moot because if one of the unknowns is 0% the whole fucking result will be a big, fat, zero. This guy is a fucking quack. Michael Crichton has an awesome essay/speech about how this misunderstanding of Drakes Equation has made a whole generation of people ignorant of what real science is - the creation of testable hypothesis. Essay is here (PDF warning): http://heartland.org/sites/all...
Every time I punch my reasonable, optimistic numbers into the Drake equation, I end up with with less than 1 intelligent species per galaxy.
I just think the people so say that intelligence is so important for evolution and survival are deluding themselves. The dinosaurs survived for hundreds of millions of years without ever developing tools, much less radio.
The situation is very simple: The probability of all life being extinguished on Earth in the next 2 ish billion years is 100%. If we want to survive beyond that we need to get off planet. Earh is 4.5 billion year old. Talk of cost is ridiculous: I can fly from UK to US for less than one day's wages (on a good day) and I'm just a regular guy. 500 years ago it took the lifetime's savings of a wealthy man to make the same journey. It is ALL about energy. Once we have a reliable means of providing it on a sun-scale then we can do anything we want. We evolved to an understanding of relativity and quantum mechanics in a few million years, why the hell shouldn't we make a few more steps, given the same time again?
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "we have a protractor"
for the first time in decades, has rendered a major update to the key formula scientists use to seek out interstellar life
The formula hasn't changed, the variables are still unknown. Someone simply used recent data to make an educated guess as to the value of one variable. The Drake equation is basically a thought experiment, it was never meant to give a real answer. People who attempt to plug in "more accurate values" are missing the point.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Our planet has what I would assume to be a fairly unique advantage, a relatively huge moon that creates tides. Combine that with the axial tilt that occurred when the moon hit the earth and you have what would seem to be a very special set of circumstances supportive of life and evolution.
"I'm not saying it was aliens...BUT IT WAS ALIENS!" http://www.bing.com/images/sea... I want a Giorgio t-shirt. They are hilarious.
Really? It was my understanding the Drake equation was just some back of the envelope shit, figuring in factors a human being could think of when it came to the possibility of extra-terrestrial life. Surely this has been modeled more accurately since?
Plus, we have really bad manners, and they really don't want to hang out with us.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
As much as I like the idea of anything confirming that life in the universe is abundant, this is again little more than an educated guess.
RTFA, he seems to be trying to update the drake equation based on the presence of planets in the goldielocks zones of local stellar populations. Fine as far as that goes, but I strongly suspect that such populations will derive more consistently from where they are on the main sequence, as well as their stellar neighborhoods.
This means that simply extrapolating our local population of such planets is no more reliable than extrapolating the globe's population of insects based on where you're sitting now: whether you are in the arctic or the jungles of Belize is going to give you radically different results, neither of which are representative.
-Styopa
It's not that we haven't found the biological basis, it's that we haven't pinned the biological interaction. It's understood that consciousness is generated from the neural activity of the thalamocortical system, but the big issues are: what exactly is the relation between perception and conscious memory, and where do certain conscious functions originate. It's well understood that primary consciousness occurs in most animals and is easily identified in humans, tied easily in both cases to understood neurobiological processes, and doesn't need any of the weird metaphysical or psuedo-scientific theories of consciousness thrown out that use bad physics, math, or magical thinking. Consciousness is a mystery as much as the ocean's a mystery - we know it's there, we might not know WHY it's there or WHAT it contains entirely, but we can guess WHERE it comes from, and HOW it works.
Eh we have psychology even when we really haven't found a biological basis for consciousness.
Well, to be frank, consciousness is phasic, so this bizarre fixation on a single steady state of consciousness might be what's in question, not the mind map projection itself.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
And it was a waste of time for Higgs et. al. to make equations and addition to Standard Model with the Higgs field and boson in them decades ago when we hadn't actually found any such bosons?
That the Drake equation was far too general to tell us anything useful and lacked specifics on where to start looking.
I think it was Nate Silver who said that useful equations lead to actionable intelligence.
I had an argument with one of my math professors in college, who didn't believe there was life anywhere in the universe other than Earth, and his argument was largely religious in nature. He believed that for life to occur you would have to have an Earth sized planet and a yellow sun 92 million miles away and had to have a moon to keep the seasons stable etc.. and this means that the chances of what we have here happening somewhere else was so close to 0 that we are the only intelligent life in the universe. I don't believe in god or religion, as I believe both are crutches for our lack of understanding what is going on around us.
The class I had this professor for was calculus so just as an exercise I took the drake equation and modified it to reflect a purely random distribution of civilizations in the galaxy, and the first step was to use the frequency of nearly earth sized planets in the habitable zone of stars that we could see up to that point (Based on Kepler data at the time) and then used calculus to estimate, based on the number of known habitable zone Earth sized planets in the cone of the galaxy Kepler was looking at. This number was used to determine what portion of the volume of the galaxy Kepler was looking at and could see. (in a best case scenario) I then took this ratio and applied it to the zone of the galaxy where life is most likely to actually exist (too close to the core of the galaxy there is too much radiation, too far out, it is unlikely that heavy elements have formed to make planets. I used the "Washer Method" to determine what the volume of the cylinder in the galaxy where planets exist and where long lived planets were likely to exist. I then plugged this number into the drake equation and then assuming an even distribution of planets with life, planets with intelligent life and planets with intelligent life where catastrophes (self created or otherwise) have not happened. (and there is no way to actually know this last bit, like the drake equation it is educated speculation)
After many hours of checking the math I determined that based on the data we have, the nearest technological intelligent civilization is somewhere around 1000 light years from us. I know this still does not give us much useful information , but it does explain why SETI has not had any responses to our outgoing messages, nor have we found anything interesting in terms of extraterrestrial radio chatter. We simply have not been listening or transmitting long enough, all things being equal and assuming a best case scenario. Based on the estimates I did in calculus class, If we received an intelligent signal tomorrow morning and responded to it, we would not hear the reply back until sometime just after the year 3014. If Gene Roddenberry was right about the progress of technology on Earth, We would be actually traveling to the stars before we would hear back on that first phone call where we knew someone was on the other end.
There was another statistics book I read called "Super Crunchers" by Ian Ayers, that pointed out that you can have the most well thought out statistical equation that works and gives you useful data about the likelihood of how likely someone is on a particular night to go to the movies, but the equation has no way to predict if a particular person would not go to the movies due to having broken their leg earlier that day. There are always circumstances, however I don't believe my Calculus professor (though I respect his beliefs and his convictions about God and morality, and he is definitely smart) was right in assuming that you would have to basically have an exact replica the Solar System to have life or even to have life as we know it.
Hopefully Gene Roddenberry was right, and we have a race like the Vulcans just 10 light years away around Epsilon Erida
Considering the recent discoveries right here on Earth of life forms that live in incredibly harsh environments like geothermal vents and the ongoing discoveries of planets in other solar systems, I bet something that counts as alive lives all over the universe. Finding a technological civilization OTOH, that one looks tough. Pretty sure no one has yet got a >C starship going or they would be here and everywhere else too. We will likely be the first if it can be done at all and then the aliens we find will be selling us New_Manhattan for $24 worth of old DVDs and regretting it soon after....
Only until we meet one off world neighbour. We can consider ourselves alone in the universe. The "I exist - therefore so do you." is wish full thinking. The drake equation is flawed or seeded with Zero equals zero.
Simply - the drake equation should only start to propagate with probabilities AFTER we meet our FIRST neighbor.
Until then the probability is higher than not that we are indeed alone in the universe.
On the other hand, we've been sending life into space for 50+ years.
Given that we have only managed to get 12 men to our own freakin moon for brief visits in our entire history, and can't seem to find the wherewithal to send any more any time soon, this doesn't seem like a profound conclusion to me.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Look we all know of those joke daily mail equation about "best" day of the week to do x,y,z , all having no causal relationship whatsoever. It is an equation, alright. The problem is that the drake equation is about as useless as it can be , and still it let people drop a lot of ink. The main problem is that many of the term cannot be estimated.... Until we visit far flung corner of the galaxy or the unvierse and find no life/life there. Ultimately int he absnece of facts too many term are simply down to whether you are "optimist" for certain term or "pessimist" on them.
If somethign depends on your opinion it might still be an equation by the virtue of having a right erm and a left term and an equal, but it is not anymore science. It is religionm fantasy, politic, fiction, but not science.
The drake equation is not science. It is a garden variety water cooler conversation about what you believe.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
yeah, there's a field with *cough* real application. A biologist that studies life in space when we haven't actually found any.
Space is a remarkably hostile environment - doubt anything lives there. Presumably astrobiologists study life as it might exist on another planet, presumably with a focus on "what to look for". Detecting life, even bacterial, on another planet would be a landmark moment in human history.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Astrophysicists have been saying this for years. The distances are too vast and velocities are just too limited.
They is plural, woman is singular! The plural of woman is women!
You expect me to take a paper, especially a physics written in MS Word seriously. Sorry, lost all credibility when a physicist can't even figure out LaTeX.
If there is life out there, surely some of it has progressed to levels of technological innovation far beyond our wildest imaginings. Even if we cannot reach them in any meaningful timespan, perhaps they can reach us. I remember a story once about a ship on a five year mission to seek out new life and civilizations.. Would not any advanced society with the technological capability do the same? Great story. They really should have made a tv show or a movie about it.
Considering our existence is mathematically impossible to happen by chance, I'm going to go with probably not.
I think we should estimate the diameter of the sphere within which we could detect life on another planet and then estimate the probability that there is life within that sphere. For example, give our best technology what is the furthest distance would be able to detect life on earth? How many stars like our sun are in that sphere? How long would it take for seti to rule out each of those stars?
According to various news organizations that shall remain nameless, aliens are here right now, taking away our jerbs!!!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
The fact that we are in a small galactic cluster, per typical cluster, suggests its small size has protected us from being visited or invaded. If we had evolved in a medium or large cluster, the most likely case otherwise due to density, then perhaps we'd have encountered ET's by now. ET's are less likely to visit & colonize sparse clusters because it's too far to travel for too few resources.
Copernican Principle and Anthropic Principle would suggest that some factor is involved to "keep us out" of denser clusters, where probability would otherwise place us. The boondocks are protecting us. Nobody is bothering us because we are stellar rednecks hidden in the difficult-to-reach woods.
Table-ized A.I.
Some of the hypothetical explanations to the Fermi paradox seem more plausible to me than the idea that we are not yet within reach of communicating with extraterrestrial life.
For example:
It is the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself
We're not listening properly
Intelligent life tends to experience a technological singularity
They choose not to interact with us
Earth is deliberately not contacted (the zoo hypothesis)
They are here unobserved
Is that there is likely life on some of the planets around the stars we see in the night sky, but we will likely never know for sure.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Humans have been extending their perceptual capabilities for centuries. What do you think a telescope, electron microscope, or mass spectrometer are? We've detected dark matter in other galaxies and as far as we can tell it barely interacts with normal matter. We've detected neutrinos. We've detected Kuiper Belt objects by the thousands. Goldfish may not be able to understand these extra-philial intelligences, but they can sure as hell see them.
Every species on the planet does this on a continuum of consciousness.. perceiving the less sentient, but blind to the nature of the more advanced.
Mystical bullshit. For one thing, in purely biological terms there is no such thing as "more advanced".
...beyond the perceptual capacities of the vast majority of humans.
Except for you obviously, you special snowflake you, and presumably all those other people claiming to channel alien intelligences.
Please take your "Ancient Aliens" garbage somewhere else. The Drake Equation is arguably bad science; you don't even meet that bar.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Slow down there, buckwheat.
The speed of light is a universal constant, and it doesn't actually make much sense to talk about exceeding it. You break causality and travel backwards in time. If you are sure that these problems can be overcome you have no idea what the problem is. Relativity is a description of the geometry of the universe, and explicitly covers what happens if you try to go really fast. It has been verified to a ridiculous number of decimal places. What you're talking about is equivalent to talking about exceeding the Planck constant or the fine structure constant.
Science fiction is easier and more fun to read than science, but you should probably spend some time reading about this universe, because you're gonna be here for a while.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
I do not think it means what you think it means.
It's an offense against math to call something "calculation" or an "equation" when the number and character of the paramaters are guesses extracted from the posterior of a wishful-thinker and the numeric values pluggged-in to said "equation" are mostly pure guesses designed to achieve a result that aligns with the reasearch paper somebody is writing.
"The Drake Equation" is, and always was, a sad joke played upon people who are desperate to find alien life. For some people (myself included), alien life if found would be extremely interesting and probably exciting (in either a good way or a very bad way) but for some people the SETI project and related work is a religion and "space aliens" are their substitutes for angels (usually such people substitute "the universe" for "God"). For these people the aliens they imagine and hope for nearly exactly replace traditional angels: They are messengers imparting higher knowledge and wisdom, and highlighting man's shortcomings, often aided by super-technology (a substitute for magical or divine powers). It has always interested me that the people desperately seeking alien life never are afraid to find it and never presume that such life, if more advanced than us, would be hostile to us and seek to destroy us. People who substitute aliens for angels seem quite inclined to play with numbers to support their beliefs just as a tiny minority of religious people slip into numerology.
So this man just proved that his career as an astrobiologist is going to be very boring.
A lot of people seem so incredulous at the very notion that as far as intelligent life goes (that is, an organism capable of questioning its surroundings and its very existence), human beings are "it". Many suggest that it should be mathematically improbable for such a thing, and yet in reality, we only have a sample size of 1,and have absolutely no way to know how likely such life may actually be anywhere else. Neither, of course, do we have any particular reason to conclude that we *are* actually alone in the universe, but the reality is that if such life didn't actually exist anywhere else, absolutely nothing in our world would be changed by such a revelation, if it were possible to ever know that for certain.
If uniqueness can exist in a domain like mathematics, where actual infinities can be encountered and explained, it seems vastly more likely that in a universe that is quite clearly of finite age, uniqueness would be that much more common.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The Tissint meteorite fell in Tata Province, in the Guelmim-Es Semara region of Morocoo, on 18 July 2011. It broke apart in the atmosphere and rained material on to Earth, with several pieces being recovered and some being sold. It is also only the fifth Martian meteorite to be seen falling to Earth by eyewitnesses - the last being in 1962. Tissint had been ejected from the surface of Mars 700,000 years ago when an asteroid struct the surface. Of most interest is the sign of certain elements being carried into cracks in the rocks by water fluid, which has never been seen in a Martian meteorite before. Dr Philippe Gillet, director of EPFL's Earth and Planetary Sciences Laboratory, and colleagues from China, Japan and Germany performed a detailed analysis of organic carbon found in the meteorite. They concluded that it very likely had a biological origin. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sci...
The goal of space exploration is to flee from super-novae. Humans become nomads again. Mostly living on space-ship, moving far below c, using fusion energy, communication using radio waves, developing A.I.. It will not allow us to reach outer pulsars, but in the long time will spread us across the galaxy until all stars die. Did not RTFA.
I'm rather confident that the laws of nature make it so that abiogenesis happens given enough time and favorable conditions. However, the transformation from single cellular to real multi-cellular (not the prokaryotic kind) is probably extremely rare, e.g. on Earth it took like 3 billion years. And then there's the likelihood of life evolving towards high intelligence.. I don't think the chances of that happening are very great either.
I am allowed to tell you this! The human Amri Wandel knows too much! Our saucer battalions are inbound to teach this puny earthing and his big mouth a lesson that he will never forget! We will give him a strange slightly hallucinogenic UFO experience that he can't explain, undermining his credibility as a scientist! You have been warned! I can say no more ...
The purpose of existence is to make money.
I mention this because what if we went to another planet in search of intelligent life and found something like an octopus? How would we communicate with them? My guess is by cooking them, and then eating them.
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1733
"Stop failing the Turing test!" -- Dilbert
Seems far too pessimistic and why would we believe that a life bearing planet wouldn't have intelligent life? This planet does.
I'd say 6ly for nearest habitable planet (around a red dwarf) and 50ly for the nearest civilization. I base this on the fact that most stars have rocky planets.
A space anchor. I have thought of it before.
The universe is expanding. Everything in it is moving around. Were one to somehow achieve stationary stature relative to the rest of the universe, presumably things would just fly by you and you would not need to exert effort at all.
How you might maneuver to someplace you want to go might be a bit of a problem. Possibly using space grapples or something like that to time points of stationary stature VS resuming spatial influences.
Specifically how one does that might be a bit troublesome, but an interesting thought problem. However without something analogous to wind, you would be forever just going with the tide, or in generally one direction as to where things are moving for you. How you get back might be a bit of an issue.
Space is not, by it's very nature and name. Couple that by being very big (vast understatement).
So yes, their very well might be life all over the place (relatively speaking), however baring some magic technology and revolutionary understanding of the basic principles of the universe, we'll never meet, see, or communicate with them in any way.
We still don't have proof that there isn't other life in our own solar system on some of they many moons. And yet we are writing an "equation" that implies such?
People really need to learn to use the phrase: "We don't know yet."
This is your reminder all these formulas are useless because they rely on assumptions in the math. You can just as easily "proof" the opposite.
It would help if we knew what consciousness actually is, psychologically.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
"That's a great ID10T story. Right up there with INSERT INTO MyHugeTable (ID, Value) Values (SELECT MAX(ID)+1 From MyHugeTable, "Value") which I found on a table with one million rows when client asked why his website was so slow. "
I see almost exactly this in a newly mis-behaving app that I have to deal with. The table in question has grown very large. It bothered me when I saw it the logic. I don't have great SQL chops, but this kind of logic only works well with a serial column, right, as the DBMS will track the highest assigned value? If not, then the thing has to do index or table scans to find the value in each invocation.
CMIIW
thx, sr
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain