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Maybe There's No Life in Space Because We're Too Early
Long-time Slashdot reader sehlat shares "a highly accessible summary" of a new theory about why we haven't yet find life on other planets -- that "we're not latecomers, but very, very early." From Lab News:
The universe is 13.8 billion years old, with Earth forming less than five billion years ago. One school of thought among scientists is that there is life billions of years older than us in space. But this recent study in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics argues otherwise... "We find that the chance of life grows much higher in the distant future..."
Stars larger than approximately three times the Sun's mass will perish before life has a chance to evolve... The smallest stars weigh less than a tenth as much as the sun and will glow for 10 trillion years, meaning life has lot of time to begin on those planets orbiting them in the 'habitable zone'. The probability of life increases over time so the chance of life is many times higher in the distant future than now.
The paper ultimately concludes that life "is most likely to exist near 0.1 solar-mass stars ten trillion years from now."
Stars larger than approximately three times the Sun's mass will perish before life has a chance to evolve... The smallest stars weigh less than a tenth as much as the sun and will glow for 10 trillion years, meaning life has lot of time to begin on those planets orbiting them in the 'habitable zone'. The probability of life increases over time so the chance of life is many times higher in the distant future than now.
The paper ultimately concludes that life "is most likely to exist near 0.1 solar-mass stars ten trillion years from now."
So, we're those guys after all?
What I sometimes find most stunning is, how far out these planets are.
Thousands of lightyears, sometimes even more, so we see thousands of years in the past, while our own civilisation made its biggest steps within the last 500 ~ 1000 years.
So similar to Star Trek, we just might to get to know the club when we qualify for it (FTL Communication or Travel).....
The Fermi Paradox was described over a half century ago.
The "somebody has to be first" option is one of many options for why we don't see a Universe swarming with life.
There are quite a few other options. Unfortunately with my faith in humanity, I'm guessing the intelligent species tend to destroy themselves options is more realistic.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
We the humans are stupid to think we have any ideas on how life is in the universe. We know barely anything about the planet we are on, let alone other planets in our solar system. Everything is else we do is basically guess work with no way to prove anything. We are stuck in our small, small, small, small, small, small, very fucking small part of the universe. WE KNOW NOTHING. So quit pretending we do.
Be seeing you...
So are we Vorlons, or Shadows?
I think there's non-terrestrial life all over the place but we're too unimaginative to see it. Asteroids that collide in specific ways to make other asteroids that do the same. Star dwelling hydrogen eating beasts whose bodies are formed of energy fields. Lightyear-wide self-forming nebulae that communicate by making protostars. Three-atom-wide nanobugs. Systems of sand dunes that graze on sandstone and excrete dust. It's arrogant to define life as "things like us"
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
There is no life in space because it is big. Really big. And time is even bigger. Species don't live forever. The chances of two species of intelligent life coexisting is vanishingly small. Even if it occurred we could never contact it, because space is too big and we are limited by the speed of light. Space nutters need to give it up: we are the only ones. Star Trek isn't going to happen, ever.
All that stuff we use that's so important to life comes from exploding stars. I think the main sequence will have to explode before we get better conditions for life universe-wide.
A long, long time ago ... sheez! doesn't anyone know history anymore!
The chance of life increases over time? Really? Go figure.
Life happening somewhere has a very low probability. Hence visiting a few planets is not enough. There are billions and billions of other planets in the Universe. The probability that life exists at least somewhere else in the Universe is very very high. We're early in that we don't have the technology to visit / analyze distant planets . But life exists elsewhere.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Whenever I see articles likes these, I get a feeling that people forget that we are looking into the far, far past when we observe other stars.
Hypothetically: If we travel a few thousands light years away from Earth and point a telescope at the planet, it will look like there is no life here.
As time goes on the possibility of life in the universe increases? Color me unsurprised...
The Copernican principle says we are more likely to be roughly average in space and time. This would imply that something in the future limits life. For example, it could be horrible terrorist weapons like self-reproducing nanobots that eat multi-cellular life.
Table-ized A.I.
Bacterial life appeared on this planet basically the instant asteroids stopped bombarding the planet. For all we know, life was created and destroyed several times before the Late Heavy Bombardment ceased. So it appears that simple bacterial/viral life may be commonplace throughout the cosmos. Indeed, there are tantalizing signs that Mars and Titan may harbor some form of life.
On the other hand, complex multicellular life only appeared in the last billion years, which suggests that the leap from single-cell -> multicellular life is somewhat difficult. Our sun won't be conducive to life in another billion years, so complex life "barely" made it here.
I would love to be wrong, but given the fact that planets appear to be commonplace throughout the cosmos, and we have yet to hear from anyone, it starts to shift the odds towards one or more of:
1) Complex life is relatively rare and widely separated in space and time.
2) Complex life doesn't survive long-term (nuclear war, grey goo)
3) Complex life does survive, but for some reason doesn't communicate or colonize other worlds (a "Prime Directive", or perhaps they "sublime" in the Ian Banks/Culture sense)
I actually lean a bit towards 3 myself, but humanity will eventually find out, one way or the other.
I say this all the time. Life clearly exists, but in our Galaxy (the only reachable life that realistically matters to us), it is likely to have existed in the past or the future. Or it simply exists too close to more massive objects, and its timeline exists far accelerated from us. In other words, time passes faster for them than it is passing for Earth. The Milky Way is by far not so big when compared to how much time has passed and time that will pass, at varying speeds.
There are those who believe...that life here began out there, far across the Universe...with tribes of humans...who may have been the forefathers of the Egyptians...or the Toltecs...or the Mayans...that they may have been the architects of the Great Pyramids...or the lost civilizations of Lemuria...or Atlantis.
Some believe that there may yet be brothers of man...who even now fight to survive--somewhere beyond the heavens!
Fleeing from the Cylon tyranny, the last battlestar, Galactica, leads a rag-tag fugitive fleet on a lonely quest...a shining planet known as Earth.
I've heard this as one of the explanations for the Fermi paradox for years.
Irrelevant news and morons using moderation to mod down what they disagree on. 2018 resolution: so long.
The current standing theory is the accelerating expansion of the universe will make matter unstable around very roughly 30 billion years from now.
Table-ized A.I.
Don'tcha just love that subject heading. It promises a rich and controversial argument along with Attitude that won't quit. Sorry, but it's all downhill from there.
However our example of 'intelligent life' may be first or last, but how long *will* it last? If other life forms are as self-destructive as we are, their existence will be but a blink of the eye in the overall duration of our particular universe. Catching that fleeting glimpse will be like finding a needle in No Man's Sky.
...omphaloskepsis often...
It will happen again. Chaos theory is wrong. There is no god, guys balthar is only making things up to get his dick sucked.
It would seem that the very notions of time and space don't make sense overall. They only make sense at certain scales.
*brass section kicks in*
I don't know where you got that idea, but it's completely wrong at a very fundamental level. The science of physics allows us to define with precision the limits of physical behavior that can be described by the laws of physics, but those are laws of humans, not laws of nature.
If you restricted yourself to talking about the possibilities available within the laws of physics, you might lay claim to a defensible position, but instead you wrote: "we get more and more confirmation that FTL communication/travel is fundamentally impossible". Good physicists never make such claims of impossibility outside of their domain, but take good care to stay within the mathematical limits of their discipline.
The above is a very important distinction in the context of this thread, because no other civilization in the universe is likely to have the same laws of physics that we have, except by extraordinary coincidence. Even if founded on the same underlying principles of enumeration, their mathematics will be utterly different to ours in its formalisms and in its concepts. We cannot possibly state that their laws of physics do not provide a straightforward mathematical pathway towards FTL solutions, even if ours do not.
You're also excessively certain about the solidity of the walls of our own particular prison. From Bell's Theorem to the Alcubierre drive, the possibilities are expanding rapidly. Using the word "impossible" after only a few hundred years of strong science which is still plagued by many fundamental inconsistencies is extremely unwise. :-)
The issue that I have with this hypothesis of the article. Is making a guess that places us many standard deviation out from the median just because there is no data. With the lack of data we should assume that we are average in every way at least within 1sd.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Not much is known about these brown dwarf systems. They tend to have quite a bit more solar flares and solar wind in the habitual zone, wich is far closer to the star than in our own system. These may strip atmospheres away before life has a chance to exist. Further the planet forming mechanisms are not well known as current theories do not have the data to back them up with emperical evidence and in fact our theories changed significantly once these modern techniques were employed. It's an interesting paper but it's basically pulled from a very dark region of space at the moment. It will be quite interesting if it turns out to be plausible, which we may possibly know in our lifetimes.
There's nothing new here. It's one of the basic solutions to the Fermi Paradox.
"We're the first ones" is right up there with "we're the last ones, and all the rest are gone already" to explain away why, with billions of planets, there's no sign of anybody out there.
The smallest stars weigh less than a tenth as much as the sun
Cool, I didn't know you could "weigh" a sun! - I thought that the best you could do is calculate its approximate mass.
Kindda makes you wonder how big the scale must be. And what it's made of that can withstand so much heat. And what you set the scale on. (At home, I always place mine on a floor that's connected to the Earth, but I'm not sure how that could be feasible on...well...a larger "scale."
(sorry, couldn't resist)
Let's imagine for a moment that somewhere a solar system just like ours formed at exactly the same moment. And I don't mean exactly at a cosmic scale (i.e. give or take a million years or three), but exactly. The solar system formed, and the planets formed and then that third planet from the sun had an impact that formed its moon (and yes, let's pretend it survived that impact just like ours did), then life started to get going, evolved...
This takes millions, no, billions of years. And every now and then there's some big, game changing event like some meteor crashing into the planet that wipes out 95% of all life and such things. These things happen at random. Somewhere along those billions of years.
Now take a look at what we call our civilization. From the earliest moments that we can trace where we could at least pretend that there was some sort of "sentience" in our ancestry. How long ago was that? A few dozen to a few hundred thousand years, if i'm not mistaken. Recorded history, i.e. something where we actually have written records of humans, runs for less than 15,000 years.
15,000 years of "actual" civilization and technological progress. With long pauses due to various reasons and just about 250 years of directed and focused research (let's face it, before that it was pissing in the wind). 250 years of scientific progress vs. 15,000 years of civilization vs more than a billion years of the evolution of life.
Even if two planets formed at the same time under the same conditions, it could easily be the case that on one a civilization developed that is colonizing planets at the time when on the other one the most advanced sentient being just discovered that rocks can be turned into weapons.
So being the first planet to harbor life means little considering the vast amount of random events that can easily shift the birth of civilization and technology by a few thousand or even millions of years, while the development of technologies from primitive to space age may well be in the hundreds of years.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If we want to meet aliens, *somebody* has to get up off their ass (or whatever somebody has) and build the starships.
If we are 'those people', it's going to be lonely for a long time. If not, we'll be more ready to meet whoever 'those people' are--and to participate in whatever their thing may be.
Either way, there's no reason to sit around and wait for the Federation to show up.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
It's just a matter of keeping up with technology, and we can't. We evolve in a blind and slow process, while machines evolve fast, faster, fastest. Linear growth versus logarithmic. We lose.
Short conclusion: The stable intelligences must be machines. They would also be long-lived to the degree that interstellar travel is no problem for them. Extremely unlikely they haven't surveyed the neighborhood and spotted all the life-bearing planets. Gets more speculative, but if they are curious, then they would quite likely be interested in watching how life evolves, but that's partly on the theory that life diverges while computers converge. If they are lonely, they might be interested in company created by the transient naturally evolved intelligences.
Probably not my latest version, but I couldn't find one later than this: http://eco-epistemology.blogsp... The quatloos part is a Star Trek joke.
Regarding your comment about climate change, here is my recent palliative solution: https://ello.co/shanen0/post/w...
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Obviously they would just get on TV and announce the existence of other intelligent life, particularly if it was more advanced than us. Clearly they would not consider it a national security issue, and would have no reasons to want to withhold such information. They would be all set and ready to go to completely obliterate the entire world population's world views, religious beliefs, and utterly shatter the status quo, risking unrest, rioting, the smooth continuation of society with people showing up to work and going shopping and all the normal things that keeps the gears of society turning...
It is of course ridiculous to talk about such things as the Fermi paradox when you live in a world that would withhold any such information from the public. There are only ever two possibilities:
1. We have not found other intelligent life, and they would not announce it anyway.
2. We have found other intelligent life, and they would not announce it anyway.
then we can claim land rights and ip property rights on everything and rent seek of the newer races =- It's the American way baby.
The numbers support the theory that the observers recycle the universe by observing the higgs particle, so the only real chance for existence is to get in first, or at least early.
So, we're those guys [wikipedia.org] after all?
That is not really what this paper is saying. All they have done is calculated when intelligent life is most likely to evolve given a constant probability per unit time for intelligent life to evolve on a planet in the habitable zone of a star. This is obviously going to be weighted towards the longest time periods available because they have assumed a constant probability per unit time and, unless I missed it, do not include any possibility for intelligent life to go extinct or otherwise disappear (e.g. "go beyond the rim" in B5-speak).
The real question which they fail to answer is what is the value of the probability per unit time for intelligent life to evolve on a planet in the habitable zone of a star? If we assume that Earth is a somewhat typical indication of this then the probability for intelligent life to have evolved somewhere else in the galaxy is overwhelmingly large already which is what leads to the Fermi Paradox. The fact that it is going to be higher in the future is no help to explaining why we do not see evidence of life elsewhere now.
To put this is simpler statistical terms it is as if we have already tossed a coin a thousand times and, as far as we can tell, have only manage to get one coin coming up heads. The fact that if we toss the coin another million times that at some point in the future we are far more likely to get some more heads than we have so far (which is what this paper points out) does nothing to solve the problem of why we appear to have only got one head in the first thousand tosses.
On a more serious note, anyone who has sat and given some thought to what the TFS talks about has probably realized that we could be one of the earliest sentient races. The universe didn't start with the ingredients of life. It was brewed in stars and then spread by the exploding of stars and the re-coalescence of that material. That shortens the possible time frame for sentient life
Actually if you actually read the paper (yes I know it's Slashdot so you are excused! ;-) they mention this there. All the ingredients for life, including the heavy elements, are there in the second generation stars which formed a few million years after the first generation of stars which were around ~30MYr after the Big Bang. The large stars which go supernova have very short lifetimes so heavy elements were created and dispersed into the coalescing gas clouds really quite rapidly. So instead of ~13.6 billion years for life to evolve you have ~30+a few million years less i.e. negligibly less time.
I had breakfast at A&W the other day, and I sure made a brown dwarf system the next day...
The impact winter might last much longer than just one season or those 'several years'. Stockpiling enough food is not enough, when it's impossible to grow it again. The sun was blotted out for several years, and all prehistoric animals eventually died, because climate change was too severe for those species to survive.
I recently read a very interesting science fiction story, wherein our slightly more advanced civilization caused a multiple-thermonuclear event that created a very long-term nuclear winter that forced humans to create a ringworld around Earth — simply because conditions on the ground were too adverse for any long-term survivability of the species.
The author of the story hinted at several reasons for setting up shop in Low Earth Orbit and the resulting aspects:
* that although humans as a species might survive the event, the civilization on the ground broke down and the few extant countries were unable to take care of the billions that still lived, but were unable to sustain themselves;
* that radiation and other maladies (formed as a side-effect of civilization breakdown) were suggested to have had long-term adverse effects on humans specifically, and on humanity as a whole. That also included flora and fauna. The idea was, that the human species on the ground were at severe risk of degrading.
* as the nuclear war in the story was the catalyst to creating a ringworld, then with the passage of time, a significant divide of both distance and culture between the remaining Eath humans and ringworlders developed, which meant a two-track humanity and possible speciation.
The ringworld was apparently created to keep original humans intact out of concern that there would be degeneration. Since a ringworld was created, then there's a possiblity, that some degeneration in the human species was observed.
The ringworld was also created as a backup to keep the civilization going—transmogrified as it was anyway by the nuclear war and the ringworld, which was one way to evade possible destruction of humanity by any future cataclysms on the ground.
* The story ended with some humans setting out to explore space to find new habitable worlds, because the situation so far appeared to be untenable in the long term. The humans in that sci-fi story didn't discuss it a lot, but there was a vague suggestion, that the leaders both on Earth and in the ringworld were aware, that keeping the (two-track development) status quo with then-their haphazard setup was infeasible given what the snapshot of their technological advancement was.
Essentially, nuclear war—or detonation of even one nuclear weapon—is what we as a species really must avoid.
We haven't found signs or evidence because what we are looking for, or expecting to find, is just all wrong.
To understand the problem, first think about what we know of life. It is all around us. The Earth is covered in life, in the air, in the soil, in the sea, on the land. It is everywhere. From small microbes to giant whales and even bigger creatures that have long since died out. Life comes in so many forms, it might as well be an infinite variety. It remains well beyond human ability to catalog and classify and identify.
So we have a lesson staring us in the face: life comes in all shapes and sizes and kinds, and that's just this ONE planet. If this is typical, we can expect other planets might have similar diversity. When we look out into space, logically, we could look for this sort of world. It is, afterall, the only one we know. The only pattern.
But that's not what happens when we look for life out there. Oh hell no. All we look for is radio signals. Look at the Earth: teeming with life, crawling with it, covered in it. Only one has ever invented radio. And then only for a bit over 100 years. None of the other billions of fine creatures has ever bothered with radio. That we know of. Just one.
So when we look out into space, we aren't looking for life at all. We ARE looking for a copy of us, in this brief window when we had radio and made enough noise with it that it might be heard across short interstellar distances. But nobody really knows how far our signals get. And if you were on alien world doing what we do, listening for signals, but you did it 200 years ago, the Earth would be a silent and dead world. So that settles it: there is no life in space. Right?
This is basically what is being said now: we, in our infinite wisdom, have decided to look only for exactly what we are this very moment, and having not found that so far, we have unilaterally decided the universe is empty and nobody is home.
This is absolutely asinine. The stupidest mistake in human history: to expect to find ourselves out there, to LOOK only for that, using only primitive methods only really useful because it's all we've managed to invent, and we we do not find signs of life after just a few years looking, we declare the universe is dead.
Netcraft now confirms: the universe is dead and you will be too, soon.
That's pretty fucking arrogant.
"Pathetic Earthlings. Throwing your bodies out into the void, without the slightest inkling WHO or WHAT is out here. If you had known anything about the true nature of the universe, anything at all, you would have hidden from it in terror." -Dessler of Gamilas
Sig for hire.
Makes sense. I know I'm early at least, my wife tells me so every time.
More in-depth story line, weren't actually so stupid as to die off in spite of vastly superior tech, etc.
So your telling me that our planets and solor system is lol 13.8 billion years old!?ðYðYðYðY boy your stupid! Heck even Einstien if he was alive today, would've told you that as well! Because if our earth system and planets were this old we would've had no life as we speak! A nuclear fallout vast planet system! Not only that Einstien said the one who created our solar system etc was God! The Almighty one The Alpha & Thee Omega one! So your Big Bang Theory Is A Lie!ðY
Others believe in this thing called evolution, and genetics. Evolution does have a problem at the first cell but that problem isn't unique to Earth and is identical wherever it happens. If life did start out there - which I would put at 1 in 100 - then there is about a 98% probability that it only came from Mars.
Our genetics by the way show pretty much beyond doubt that we are closely related to all the other life on Earth - we all share the same basic DNA coding.
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
Decades ago in a piece in _Analog_ someone (Ben Bova?) made a case for the lack of contact being a lack of metals.
Metals are necessary for technology (as we know it). And technology (as we know it) is necessary to become space-faring. Planets around older stars are less apt to have metals. There won't be any ancient species with interstellar travel until species around the newer stars develop it.
When an ancient species travels to contact a newer one, we might be the ancient ones. Or we'll contact an even more ancient species that lacks the metals for travel.
Been a few years since then, and it's likely discoveries have invalidated that argument. (Those pesky astronomers keep learning new things. "Science marches on.")
Anyone here been keeping up, and care to post about this notion?
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
Perhaps there is nothing but early civilizations. Maybe they don't survive themselves for one reason or another. And even in the future, civilizations will always be "early" ones.
(||) Nehmo (||)
Slashdot is FBI.
(Has S.M. started to compete with XKCD?) http://www.schlockmercenary.co... and http://www.schlockmercenary.co...
I have long thought it possible that we are the first intelligent beings in our galaxy. Not too likely, but a distinct possibility. It is an even more remote possibility that we are the first intelligent life in the Universe. It is a no-brainer that life could not have evolved anytime before the very first stars to form became super-novae, blowing the heavier elements necessary for life into the inter-stellar medium. The question becomes then, how soon after those very first stars blew did life become possible?
The optimist proclaims we live in the best of all possible worlds and the pessimist fears this may be true.
So we've got a multi trillion year head start to populate the Universe?
Mod this to +5 and lock the discussion; this is pretty much all that needed to be said.
That some basement dweller on /. would have trouble with the technology of fucking.
Come on aliens, you've had same amount of time as we.
One problem with rebuilding a technological civilization is that it's built on the availability of energy resources. You start with wood then coal, oil, gas, then nuclear for example. They tend to build on each other and each one requires the energy production of the one before. If you need to rebuild from scratch you may have already used up the easily available resources from before.
No. May be some resources are depleted, but look at the earth today. Let's say nuclear war happened and we have 2-3 millions scattered around the globe. Do they really need to burn as much coal as our ancestors did to obtain steel? No, they will scavenge existing resources. Plenty of steel. One single steel bridge is going to be The Source of good steel for everyone to maintain XIX AD level of technology. No need to smelt iron at all. Think about all railroads and other steel structures that will last for many, many centuries. Think about car engines of aluminum, ready to be melted with little amount of charcoal. Think about all the glass around. Think about all asphalt roads, you can turn them into the fuel in primitive furnace. Etc, etc. Advancing into XX century is hard, yes. But not impossible with solar wind power, especially if basic scientific knowledge is preserved.