Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
The chance of life increases over time? Really? Go figure.
Uh, you just imagined it. Just face it: there is no life, certainly not in our solar system. We would have detected it already. Life is not Star Trek. We have plenty of imagination - but that is what it is : imagination. Plus, it is "teeming" not "teaming".
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'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.
We the humans are stupid to think we have any ideas on how life is in the universe.
There was a Star Trek TOS episode where a giant cheeseburger ate tunnels through the stone underground on a planet. Since I saw that as a child, I've always wondered if we would even recognize life from other planets if we encountered it.
WE KNOW NOTHING.
It that you, Sergeant Schultz . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
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.
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.
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.