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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.
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 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.
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.
Plus, we have really bad manners, and they really don't want to hang out with us.
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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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> 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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On the other hand, we've been sending life into space for 50+ years.
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.
The prime directive does definitely apply to us. Until we become a type 1 civilization its pretty unlikely this will change, assuming there is any kind of benevolent interspecies "Federation". A lot of that (depending on the technological level of the members of that Federation) depends on where we are too, In a Star Trek sense, our experience would be much different if we lived in Federation space and the prime directive was in force on our planet (though that might not stop them from dressing up as us or using cloaking devices and studying us) than if we lived somewhere in something like the TOS version of the Klingon Empire. There are also wild card races that just don't care about everyone else's rules, like the Borg. I imagine if a type 0 planet were under attack by the Borg in federation space, the prime directive would be more out the window than it usually is when Kirk takes moral issue with it or it's implications and breaks the rules.
I take it you never heard of that pesky "speed of light" thing? It puts an upper limit to how fast you can go and thanks to us being in the asshole of the Milky way even if we develop craft that run at SOL the distances are so vast that it would take decades to get anywhere good which thanks to time dilation would mean when you got back tens of thousands of years would have passed.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
And then there's the whole problem of, as your speed increases, impacts from dust and micrometeorites become a serious problem. It'll do a lot more than just scraping the paint off the hull.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
...or it wouldn't, and it's not.
Who knows.
The idea that we've got it all figured out and we've reached the limits of what the physical world will allow is pretty narrow thinking.
If humanity survives for another thousand years (let alone a million), think where we'll be. In the last hundred years we did more than the thousand before it. [*With thanks to the thousand before it.] What happens next?
So let me see if I got this straight. Less than 300 years ago the fastest method of transportation was horse and buggey and sail ships on the Ocean.
In 300 years we now can put ships in space that can travel at 87,000 mph (143kph), and your best reasoning borrowed from Astrophysicists no less, is that aliens can't be here or make it here because the distances are just too vast ?!?!?
This lacks basic reasoning at minimum and surely imagination.
Imagine if you can how fast we'll be able to travel in space another 300 years from now. Now imagine how fast an alien race could travel if they were 5,000 years more advanced than we are. What about 100,000 years? 1 Million? 10 Million? Pretty sure after even a few thousand years the problem of going across these vast distances will be solved.
Hey, kids, if you extrapolate Moore's "Law" out 25 years, we'll soon be able to make transistors out of 1/40th of an atom! And if you extrapolate the population growth at the start of the 20th century to the current date, all of us are dead of starvation right now (and we didn't even know it)!
It's amazing how the people who have the most faith in science know the least about the actual science.
(Don't bring up wormholes or Alcubierre; both are basically "if we had some materials that violate a whole bunch of laws of physics, we could violate the speed of light limit too. They're bullshit.)
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.
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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Given the massive scientific progress made in the last 300 years and the huge number of scientific theories that have been discarded and rules/laws reworked, it's reasonable to assume that the speed of light barrier will be overcome. The bigger question is given that alien civs are statistically certain to exist, how come we've not been contacted? Well maybe we have. The egyptians could have met aliens and got neat new tech from them, then the aliens went away to wait for us to evolve into something interesting. They could have done the same with the sumarians, the atlantians, the greeks- we have no way to know. They could be coming back every few thousand years to check up on us and we'd still not know, our ability to hold onto important information just wasn't there for most of our racial existance.
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.
The speed limit is c. It's the law.
Absolutely. I too feel this is a pretty well-established fixed upper limit on a body's physical speed through spacetime.
Of course, I live in hope that Humanity will eventually develop methods to 'skip around' the pesky limitations of physics in the universe as we currently know it. That said, no evidence is available to assist me. Even if such a thing is possible we might be talking about a technology tens of thousands of years ahead of our current tech level.
Perhaps in time we'll learn to employ gravity with similar ease to our methods for utilising the electromagnetic force. Likely, this will be only one of many, many prerequisite technologies needed to achieve interstellar travel.
Without the tech itself we can only speculate. However limited we are, the beautifully elegant Alcubierre drive concept (which we're all no doubt familiar with) was still the product of an imagination of our time, even as desperately limited as it is. Some Humans are really very clever. We may well yet crack this nut, only time will tell.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
Perhaps we could also work on a spaceship that instead of propelling itself through the universe, remained stationary and moved the universe around it.
the aliens went away to wait for us to evolve into something interesting.
All of them?
Every faction from every alien civilisation in the entire galaxy all unanimously decided to go away for thousands of years, even though their own rules (according to your scenario) allow them to interfere.
There are 200 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. If intelligent life can appear on just 1 in a million, that's still 200,000 civilisations right now. And that doesn't include the civilisations that rose and fell over the last 8-10 billion years since metallicity became high enough in the galaxy to support planets.
If even a single alien civilisation enjoys/wants/requires colonisation, and interstellar travel is as easy as you believe, then our whole solar system would have been colonised billions of years ago; and more likely colonised again and again and again, hundreds of times, every few million years as new civilisations rise and fall.
[People just don't comprehend how big these numbers are. Star Trek has a lot to answer for.]
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
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
"it's reasonable to assume that the speed of light barrier will be overcome."
How is it in any way "reasonable"? We don't travel anywhere even near below the speed of light, and as a matter of fact we used to travel faster than sound but now we don't even have Concorde anymore.
Our entire civilization is running on fumes and we're scrambling to get the last dregs of fossil fuels out of the Earth. Where does your naive, almost child-like naive optimism come from?
" we have no way to know"
But we do know NOW. And everything points to : game over.
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
Let me guess: you're a programmer.
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 distances are so vast that it would take decades to get anywhere good
That is all assuming a human-like lifespan.
What if an alien creature could live 1000 years, possibly using some kind of suspended animation? 10,000 years? 100,000 years?
100,000 years at 0.5c is 50,000 lightyears which will take you anywhere in the Milky Way galaxy.
Actually, real scientific progress has been fairly slow and limited in the last decades, and the science that has been done is mostly small refinements, not anything major. What has exploded in the last decades is the number of observations we've done, both in space and on Earth, like in particle accelerators. Nearly everything we see falls neatly in the ranges predicted by scientific theories. Given the fact that the speed of light limit is pretty fundamental to all our theories, I wouldn't say it is "reasonable" that it will be overcome.
To a geologist, it's negligible.
We've probably had control of fire for about a megayear. OK, we've gone through several species names in the time, but so what? In the first megayear after getting STL transport that averages 0.1c, we could fill the galaxy.
We've got gigayears in front of us. Tens of them, before starting to need more exotic technologies.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"