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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.
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.
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.
The birthday paradox would mean that even if planets with intelligent life are an average of thousands of light years from the nearest alien planet with intelligent life, the likelihood of one pair of planets with intelligent life existing much closer together than that is high. Those two planets would be like the two people who share a birthday in the paradox. That's a completely different idea than this article is about.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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.
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.
The birthday paradox is more than that. It also includes that the probability that you are close to some other planet is far more smaller than the probability that there is some 2 close planets. So the ideas are related.
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...
I second that. Not all of us work for companies that are sophisticated enough to have wide screen monitors!
(Viewed on a Dell 19" 4:3 monitors at 1280x1024)
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.
Well, that's a different way of stating the birthday paradox, but it's still not what the article is about.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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.
5:4
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.
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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.
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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?
> 1. There needs to be a planet at an exact distance away from a star so things don't vaporize nor freeze
Which presumes life is based on this temperature range, and not silica or some other process.
> 2. There needs to be water
Again, not mandatory for life. Water-based life, sure. But we have no way of knowing if most life is based on water.
> 3. Atmosphere Oxygen-rich
Again, not mandatory for life. For all we know, oxygen is regarded as a poison by most life.
> 3.5. Atmosphere that isn't toxic
What's toxic for you may not be toxic for most life. Life on gas giants may be quite different, or life in the moons of a gas giant. Oxygen is a fairly toxic gas.
> 4.The Star needs to emit the right amount of energy so not to fry everything.
True. But different life may have different energy ranges. Water has a limited range.
> 5. Planet can't be too close to other stars.
This is most likely the biggest one. Being too close to more than one star means higher range of fluctuation.
> 6. Planet needs to have a core preferably iron to deflect electromagnetic radiation.
Or life exists in gas giants which have thick atmospheres, or beneath the crust.
> 7. Core also keeps ground warm which helps with supporting plant life.
For all we know, perhaps most intelligent life are avian in nature. Birdlike aliens who regard us as crippled freaks.
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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....
On the other hand, we've been sending life into space for 50+ years.
What kind of reprobate uses bing?
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!
ALIENS! Sheesh...
The birthday paradox depends on days being measured modulo 365. There is a finite bound on the birthdays available. That doesn't extend to planetary distances in three dimensional space over the span of the universe.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Best laugh I've had on slashdot in a while. Good job
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.
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.
Your last sentence is no more based on reality than someone insisting we can't be. Neither of you have anything to base it on.
Life is anything that dies when you stomp on it. [Dave Barry?]
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.
Here is a big one. The assumption that living things can spontaneously spring from Magic Soup. Before Louis Pasteur, scientists believed that this was a commonplace event. Reality is that humankind has never observed such a thing.
If you assume the lifespan of a technological civilization is not infintie, you could probably work the Birthday paradox in. It's not exactly a "modulo", but its related.
(That said, I don't see it. Just because I think you could probably work it in doesn't mean I find it at all obvious.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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
> 3. Atmosphere Oxygen-rich
Again, not mandatory for life. For all we know, oxygen is regarded as a poison by most life.
> 3.5. Atmosphere that isn't toxic
What's toxic for you may not be toxic for most life. Life on gas giants may be quite different, or life in the moons of a gas giant. Oxygen is a fairly toxic gas.
We know for a fact an oxygen rich atmosphere is both not required and quite toxic.
It would actually be much easier to argue a oxygen free atmosphere is a requirement for life to form (as was all one out of one cases we have proof of show)
Cyanobacteria is thought to be the first organisms to do photosynthesis, of which a side product created is oxygen.
All of the oxygen in the atmosphere and in the water was produced this way over billions of years before the first organisms evolved to use oxygen as an energy source instead of expel it away as a toxin.
After billions of years of life pumping oxygen out, the eukaryote diversity exploded exponentially to form the beginnings of oxygen breathing organisms, and all this still billions of years before the earliest humans were around.
Earth changing from oxygen free to oxygen rich and the resulting explosion in life was a pretty major event in Earth history we call the Cambrian Explosion, which was 'only' about 500 million years ago.
The first eukaryotes showed up in the fossil record just under 2 billion years ago.
That is around 1.5 billion years of life forms (far predating humanities meger tens of thousands of years on this planet) that the GPs two requirements imply never existed nor ever could.
Um, not actually. Some of the volcanic vents in the pacific have life that doesn't operate the way you describe.
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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
Planets can't be too close to other stars
This is most likely the biggest one. Being too close to more than one star means higher range of fluctuation.
As a point of reference, a significant number of solar systems are binary systems, making them subsequently less likely to support life.
6. Planet needs to have a core preferably iron to deflect electromagnetic radiation.
Or life exists in gas giants which have thick atmospheres, or beneath the crust.
Although it's tough to consider the possibility of structured life existing at 10,000 atmospheres and 2,000 degrees F, I would imagine it being possible. But, such a life form is *far* less likely to be reaching out into space than we would, as the problem of keeping a "livable environment" in a space ship is at least 10,000 times more difficult. Are there even solid elements at 2,000 degrees F and 10,000 atmospheres?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
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.
You're right, but all those lifeforms you describe, if they are intelligent; I don't want to meet them.
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.
The catch with measuring lifespan of intelligent life or more accurately technological life (the measure of intelligence is rapidly changing at this time but the measure of use of technology remains pretty clear) is bound to two things, firstly what really drives the evolutionary advantage of technology bound life and the other, the lifespan of the technology bound life.
It would seem the biggest driver for technology bound life is repeated frequent and fairly rapid climate change driven by what ever mechanism that provides the advantage for the adaptability of social intelligence over more physical individual biological evolution, so for us repeated ice ages only over tens of thousands of years for a couple of millions years. So the mind can more readily adapt to climate change ie fire, clothing, dwellings than the body. Catch with that is while it will drive biological evolution of the mind it can cripple the development of civilisation by basically repeatedly crushing them with climatic change, floods, droughts, glaciers, storms.
Increasing life span will drive increasing social stability, no longer just say tens of years but thousands of years, just think of the political stability where not just your parents are socio politically active but your great, great ,great etc. grand parents are socio politically active. Think of how those people who lived through the great depression would govern today. Also consider how that kind of lifespan intersects with the vagaries of planets, storms, earthquakes even simple wear and tear of dwellings. Face it for very longed lived sentient technological life, the stability of space borne life is very compelling, so no need to attempt to populate the entire galaxy and the home world becomes more of an theme park for early social evolution.
So what would we see of them, absolutely nothing they did not specifically want us to. Now if they treat their own world like a theme park for early social evolution, how would they treat our world and our primitive society, keeping in mind how many people find something like Meerkat Manor http://www.meerkatmanor.co.uk/ appealing now think of it with cranky short haired crested rock throwing apes and how much more fun and interesting that would be, especially in the shift from throwing rocks at each other to throwing nuclear weapons at each other. That at the positively charming delusion that the whole galaxy is theirs and theirs alone and they will be able to own and control it all. All of it, will be theirs and only theirs and they will bend it too their will, well, at least the psychopathic ones but they currently tend to drag the rest along with them, most often by force.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
The birthday paradox depends on days being measured modulo 365. There is a finite bound on the birthdays available. That doesn't extend to planetary distances in three dimensional space over the span of the universe.
The whole birthday "paradox" is a human failing of not taking into account the number of possible pairings, it doesn't have to be modulo anything. If you have a thousand planets with life with a one in a million chance to be close, what's the total probabiliy of two planets being close? 1000/1000000? Bzzzzzzt wrong answer, because there's 1000*999/2 = ~500000 possible pairs. So the actual chance is more like 50%, instead of 0,1%. Not that it has any practical application, because it's the odds of two alien planets being close. Earth's chances would still be one in a million per planet, just like the odds of any person having my birthday is roughly 1/365.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
For all we know, perhaps most intelligent life are avian in nature. Birdlike aliens who regard us as crippled freaks.
Oh, now you actually made me feel like a crippled freak.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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...
There's been non-carbon non-water based life discovered?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Actually the first recorded modern scientific experiment disproved the spontaneous springing into being of life, or at least of maggots. 2 pieces of meat, one sealed in a jar and one open to the air, only the piece of meat open to the air became maggot invested.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
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.
It's far too early to do the maths on the three dimensional case, but uniformly distributed points on the real line have nearest neighbour distances that are exponentially distributed. It should be pretty obvious that with a big enough number of points some will be close.
[FUCK BETA]
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
Mod parent up, wish I had mod points.
This is exactly right. It's the number of permutations of pairs that gives rise to the birthday "paradox". Nothing to do with being modulo some number.
Wrong, nothing to do with being modulo some number. It's the permutations of pairs that gives rise to it.
1. The temperature range is important because it affects the speed at which process can go. Whether life is carbon or silica or something else, its still ultimately chemical in nature and neccessarily must involve numerous chemical reactions, and temperature has a dramatic effect on reaction in general, and basically acts as a filter determins which reactions occur at an adequate pace in a given temperature range. And slower chemical baseline processes will be highly likely to lead to slower rates of evolution.
2, 3, 3.5. We make certain assumptions based on the prevalence of certain elements in the universe. Generally the lower on the period table you go, the more common the elements. Theres no reason to think our combination is that unique. If the odds of life happening are low, it's a fair assumption that what does work will be fairly common.
4. Star eneergy: again, temperature/energy affects the rate of processes.
6. Gas giants wont block the radiation. I dont think thats a sufficient solution.
7. Temperature stablility is likely to be important, just as minor variations are likely important to create the small amount of chaotic mixing that is also likely essential (ie, perfect stability in a system is unlikely to give rise to life as everything reaches equilibrium and stops)
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
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.
Paradox doesn't need quotation marks. Paradox doesn't mean false, it means seemingly contradictory on the face of it, whether or not it's contradictory upon further examination.
I put it in quotes because it is not a genuine paradox.
The problem is that as technological capabilities increase, so do the capabilites for destructive action, until you reach to point where a small group possesses the capability to destroy the entire civilization. Since there are a LOT more small groups than large groups, that means you need an ever increasing amount of stability if you are going to survive. We've already had some extremely close calls, and for us a small group (was) still the size of the US or Russia. These days we're approaching the point where a small group is the size of Turkey. In a decade or so it might be down to the size of North Korea. At some point, some small group headed by someone too unhappy with the current social system will decide to do a Samson act and pull down the temple. So by one projection our maximum expected life as a technological civilization is less than an additional century. And I left out the effect of accidents, or "AprÃs moi, le déluge" (though Lois didn't intend that as a result, some people would).
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
NASA announcement: Arsenic-based life form discovered on Earth circa 2010
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
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.
I think it safe to say that intelligent life is going to be really, really complicated. Carbon makes up complicated molecules better than any other element, so it's reasonable to expect life to be carbon-based. Water also has some nice properties, but I find it more plausible that life will not be water-based. Oxygen isn't necessary, but I'd think that the development of intelligence would be easier with some sort of highly reactive gas in the atmosphere, and oxygen is a lot more common than chlorine or fluorine in the galaxy.
While I can easily imagine carbon-based life-forms in gas giants using compounds other than water, it seems to me it would be awfully difficult to build a technical civilization there, without a real surface, and with heavy atoms likely so scattered.
Therefore, I expect intelligent life with a technical civilization to be carbon-based and probably water-based and oxygen-breathing, on a world where water can be liquid. The planet will be able to keep water, which implies some sort of protection against high-energy radiation. Beyond that, I think I'd just be speculating.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
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
The arsenic replaces phosphate. Those lifeforms are still carbon and water based.
Even if true, it is still basically life as we know it, but since on-one else has been able to replicate the findings...
Besides Mono lake is not a volcanic vent under the ocean. I think the poster was just thinking about how some life has different means of acquiring energy.
http://www.nature.com/news/ars...
http://news.nationalgeographic...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Exponentially? I'm not so sure. I think it'll be a Poisson distribution. They're somewhat similar, but very definitely not the same.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
The inter-arrival times of a Poisson process are exponential.
[FUCK BETA]
"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