Writes Joel Achenbach, in "What we actually know about aliens, according to science" (WaPo).
Emily Mitchell, a paleobiologist at the University of Cambridge, points out that, while there is fossil evidence of life on Earth at least 3.5 billion years ago, no large multicellular creatures appeared until about 600 million years ago. Life on Earth took roughly 3 billion years to learn to crawl. “I think there’s a massive, massive difference between being able to find life elsewhere, and being able to find evidence of intelligent life and being able to contact them,” Mitchell said....
What do we mean when we ask “Are we alone?” The bible for alien-life pessimists is the 2000 book “Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe,” by Peter D. Ward and Donald E. Brownlee. The controversial book argued that Earth is unusually blessed with conditions that make complex life possible, such as having the giant planet Jupiter in just the right spot to run interference against dangerous comets....
Ward told The Washington Post that he assumes aliens do exist somewhere in the vast universe, but we’ll never know because they’re just too far away to make contact. We’re not literally alone, in his scenario, but we’re functionally alone. “The chances that there’s one close enough to ever interact with is vanishingly small,” Ward said....
Here's that book: "Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe" (Amazon link/commission earned).
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82 comments:
I've been waiting for aliens to arrive since I was 12. Time is running out...
BTW, if you haven't watched it, the film Arrival is quite well-done IMO.
It doesn't matter.
Reddit had a fascinating theory behind the the Fermi Paradox: Wokeness.
Longer version: Every civilization that gets advanced enough goes through a similar "woke" period where Karens cancel and destroy everything that made the society advanced in the first place in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion. This ultimately leads to the utter destruction of the society and in most cases even the species that advanced it in the first place. Therefore, there is no advanced alien life contacting us through the vast reaches of space.
20 years ago I'd have said that was grade A nerd comedy. I'm not so sure now.
One of the implications of the 'Big Numbers' is that while the probability of alien intelligent life existing approaches 1, if causality and speed of light are fundamental (understanding that measured speed of light can vary...), then intelligent life likely exists in pockets such that communication cannot occur between them. There may be one-off contacts, but by the time a response is received by the sender, we would likely be talking about thousands or millions of years passing. So my answer to a question like this boils down to: yes, there is life out there, but we are effectively alone in the universe.
To (mis)quote Mark Twain: "There is something fascinating about [xenobiology]. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact."
I think those who believe that we'll inevitably come into contact with intelligent life from elsewhere tend to overlook the time element: that we could be separated not just by vast physical distance but also vast amounts of time. Intelligent life could have developed somewhere else more quickly than here and burned itself out billions of years before us.
On the other hand there are those Tic Tac-shaped objects Air Force pilots keep encountering.
"controversial book argued that Earth is unusually blessed with conditions that make complex life possible, such as having the giant planet Jupiter in just the right spot to run interference against dangerous comets.... "
We now know Jupiters are a dime a dozen. All stars probably have one or more of them.
It's like the claim there are Yetis. OK, show me a dead body. Hmmm, there are none. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
It seems far more likely to me that the conditions on earth are indeed unique for the creation and existence of advanced, intelligent life.
It's laughable to me there are SETI "experts". What a waste of time and money. It's like being a "leprechaun" expert.
And yet here we sit. The table is made. The balloons and streamsers are set. We baked a cake.
Nobody showed up. They might never show up. It might be our job to go out there and meet them on their own turf.
"humanity should not presume itself special"
Tell that to the Zionists.
I saw a Lex Fridman podcast with Max Tegmark and was surprised he thinks the fact that we haven't detected alien communication (e.g. radio signals in the SETI searches) leads him to believe intelligent life is probably rare. I would have thought our, what I presumed to be very small sample size, wouldn't support such a conclusion. Frustratingly, they didn't go into numbers and details so I couldn't judge his conclusion for myself.
With so much turf out there, even the most frowny-faced skeptic must admit it’s hard to run the numbers in a 13.8 billion-year-old universe like ours and wind up with just one self-aware, technological, telescope-constructing species
Yes. This is the way people who think with numbers view everything. Given recent history people who think with words have no clue about this…
The Copernican Principle is not "science" it's a conjecture without a logical or evidentiary basis that may or may not be correct, at best it's a "hunch." And I thought that Euler proved that the Universe cannot be infinite, in the sense that the number of stars in infinite. Maybe his proof shows that it cannot be both infinite *and* eternal, since we would all get cooked by the starlight. But it seems impossible to me that the universe could be infinite and *not* eternal, but that's just a guess too, like the "Copernican Principle."
Irrespective of whether you believe aliens exist or visit us, there are billions on earth who believe in a magical being in the sky who created everything, sees and hears everything and judges us after we die. And we have fought wars, spent billions on real estate to worship said beings and even given them tax breaks, not to mention used on currency that in god we trust. And in that context, really aliens are a far stretch when 2 trillion galaxies exist? And frankly some people I know behave so erratically, they represent aliens more than humans.
the distances between habitable planets, even considering a charitable view of the drake equation, are staggering, in actuality achenbach doesn't know anything,
Marvel has tinkered with the einstein rosenman bridge (wormholes)as a solution, but that's inadequate for any host of reason
This potential for alien life and relationship between worlds / time / creation / destruction was outlined with shocking clarity in Olaf Stapleton's Star Maker (1937).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Maker
Star Maker was the de facto source material for Star Trek and a thousand other sci-fi plots.
Read the book and then revisit this topic.
Honestly we cannot grasp the enormity of the universe. There could easily be billions of billions of planets with life on it and we would never know. It's just too big for us to comprehend. We will only get a glimpse when some random event sends a piece of space junk to us ( sent billions and billions of years ago ) or some repeating communication method is discovered. That also was sent and continued to be sent billions and billions of years ago.
We will probably never know if there is/is not life on another planet until we can break the speed of light issue.
My morse code thoughts as a 12yo ham radio operator have reached over a thousand star systems by now, possibly overturning alien religions.
Hi, Tim!
"according to science"
Point of parliamentary procedure!! (I just like saying that)
There is no such thing as science that 'says' anything. Science is an activity, performed by people, not A Thing.
Anyone who says anything like "Science says...." is talking baloney out of either ignorance or dishonesty.
"And I thought that Euler proved that the Universe cannot be infinite, in the sense that the number of stars in infinite. Maybe his proof shows that it cannot be both infinite *and* eternal, since we would all get cooked by the starlight."
I believe you're thinking of Olber's Paradox, and we now know that's wrong. Expansion of the universe fixes that problem.
"But it seems impossible to me that the universe could be infinite and *not* eternal, but that's just a guess too, like the "Copernican Principle.""
Actually, best evidence right now is infinite and not eternal, but we are far from being confident.
"even considering a charitable view of the drake equation"
Michael Crichton commented on the Drake equation twenty years ago...
Aliens Cause Global Warming
By Michael Crichton
"This serious-looking equation gave SETI a serious footing as a legitimate intellectual inquiry. The problem, of course, is that none of the terms can be known, and most cannot even be estimated. The only way to work the equation is to fill in with guesses. And guesses—just so we’re clear—are merely expressions of prejudice. Nor can there be “informed guesses.” If you need to state how many planets with life choose to communicate, there is simply no way to make an informed guess. It’s simply prejudice.
As a result, the Drake equation can have any value from “billions and billions” to zero. An
expression that can mean anything means nothing. Speaking precisely, the Drake equation is
literally meaningless, and has nothing to do with science. I take the hard view that science
involves the creation of testable hypotheses. The Drake equation cannot be tested and therefore SETI is not science. SETI is unquestionably a religion. Faith is defined as the firm belief in something for which there is no proof. The belief that the Koran is the word of God is a matter of faith. The belief that God created the universe in seven days is a matter of faith. The belief that there are other life forms in the universe is a matter of faith. There is not a single shred of evidence for any other life forms, and in forty years of searching, none has been discovered. There is absolutely no evidentiary reason to maintain this belief. SETI is a religion.
https://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/Crichton2003.pdf
I know they're out there - 100% - but I am not waiting around for, or expecting to be visited anytime soon by, something in a galaxy on the other side of the universe. Get a fucking grip, let's save the SETI money, and put it into getting further out there, where it makes sense for us to be.
With so much turf out there, even the most frowny-faced skeptic must admit it’s hard to run the numbers in a 13.8 billion-year-old universe like ours and wind up with just one self-aware, technological, telescope-constructing species. The Copernican principle... suggests that, in the same way that Earth is not in a privileged place in the universe, humanity should not presume itself special, or unique. The universe is not about us....
Dissolving the Fermi Paradox is a very sophisticated statistical argument addressing the likelihood of other intelligent life.
Their conclusion? It is as near as certain that there is no other intelligent life in the Milky Way, and about 85% there is none in the universe.
BTW, before deciding how much turf there is out there, keep in mind that the star density in roughly the center third of a galaxy prohibits the formation of advanced life forms (too many supernova too close) and the density of the outer third is too low for there to be enough heavy elements for rocky planets (too few supernova too far away).
As far as detecting other civilizations, that depends upon electromagnetic radiation. Earth has been radiating radio waves for about 100 years. However, changing technology is greatly reducing the amount of EMR. How much longer before broadcast TV and radio disappears, making the Earth once again nearly dark?
@MC humanity should not presume itself special
Tell that to the Islamists.
FIFY. Maybe you out to pay attention to what they say.
"humanity should not presume itself special"
Oh yeah? Tell that to Mister Rogers and his fans...
@Rich
Is it possible that the religious phenomenon you're referencing is entirely made up? Yes. Why would people do that?
The second question is the most important. Trying to answer it will lead you some unexpected places. As I get older I keep thinking of Werner Heisenberg's saying, "The first gulp from the cup of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass you’ll find God waiting for you.”
The smartest man who ever lived, the polymath John Von Neumann, even converted to belief in a God on his deathbed. I have a very hard time believing off-world intelligent life hasn't had as hard a time wrestling with metaphysical questions the same way we have. That just seems impossible to me.
Some predictions are easier than others!
We have a thread on extraterrestrial life, and Crack chimes in to bash the Jews and Rich chimes in to bash Christians.
Unsurprisingly, both of those OT comments were on my bingo card!
We are stardust, we are golden
We are billion year old carbon
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden
-- Joni Mitchell
No-one can hide it anymore we know it's not imagining
Even the skeptics are unsure when they stop to think
People are not worth their life now they are obsolete
We're dying to be invaded and put the blame on something concrete
Waiting for the UFOs
Waiting for the UFOs
We are waiting for the UFOs
We know that they're there
-- Graham Parker
The Cosmic Anthropic Principle. The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, by John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, Oxford University Press, 1986
I read it shortly after it came out. I doubt there's anything Joel Achenbach, Emily Mitchell, Peter D. Ward, or Donald E. Brownlee have written or talked about contains anything I haven't already seen written or written myself or talked about at science fiction conventions. It's a very well discussed topic.
I've often said, and written, that there are only two universal reasons for the Fermi Paradox. Either Gog created us and only us, or Berserkers are real. And on their way here.
But the, there's what RideSpaceMountain said about a Redditt discussion. Wokeness. Similar to something I've thought about. What is Utopia? A never changing perfect place. What is dystopia? A never changing hellish place. And- utopia and dystopia are one and the same- one person's heaven on Earth is another person's hell on Earth... They're both stasis- never changing. Like the Chinese empire for thousands of years before westerners so crudely disrupted it. I put it in slightly different terms then wokeness and DIE. Simply put- Civilizations and species strive towards stasis. A never changing world. That's the whole goal of the environmental movement. And the goal of Agenda 2000, of whatever number is appended to the thought that the elites need to reduce the Earth's population to a more manageable number. With them the enlightened leaders, of course. At some point, every civilization will reach this point- and a sustainable population on a planet will never have the resources to expand into space. A depressing thought.
I have long believed that the values of the Drake Equation are too optimistic (and maybe that is the wrong word to use) in regards to the probability of finding other technologically advanced species outside our star system. I have thought it probable that we are the only one to ever have inhabited the Milky Way since its formation. If this is probable, then it is all but certain that we will never encounter another species with capabilities equal to ours, nor ever have any evidence that any ever existed. In fact, if proof that aliens exist is ever found, I will take that as confirmation that we exist inside a computer simulation.
I do think that, at some point, a government will find it useful to try to convince its citizens that aliens do exist are are a threat of some kind. It would be a very useful tool for those who desire to acquire and retain power.
Big Numbers and the "Copernican Principal" are not laws of nature. Nor is the emergence of technological intelligence. Given the inconceivably slim odds of any minds resembling ours evolving on an alien planet in a timeframe consistent with our existence as a technological civilization, we might as well give up listening. Perhaps there is life out there, but effectively all of it, about 99.999999999999999991%, will be bacteria or something similar. The reason is metallicity.
Metallicity is the proportion of a star's mass (which includes its planets' composition) that consists of elements heavier than hydrogen. The first suns were entirely hydrogen being slowly replaced by helium through thermonuclear reactions. The super-massive hydrogen stars could eventually go supernova and seed the Universe with elements complex as iron, which could become the material of second-generation stars with appreciable metalicity, which in turn could spawn even more massive elements up to Number 92, uranium, but only if massive enough to generate a supernova. Many early stars could not fuse carbon, so that's where they stopped and cooled off when their helium was exhausted. Space must be littered with cold Jupiter-sized spheres of diamond, the cores of mediocre stars dead for 10 billion years. Those that were smaller still, the red dwarfs that fuse hydrogen so slowly that they may survive with fuel to spare to the Ultimate End of Everything, made up the rest.
Our own Sol is at least a third-generation sun. We know this from its high metallicity with abundant iron and even gold deep within its core and in its planets, ours for instance. It is the abundance of metal that has given Terrestrial life the means to evolve intelligence and technology. However, the probability that enough second-generation material would gather and coalesce in a region of space compact enough to spawn a new star and a system of planets is so remote that it probably happens only once within the first several billion years of a galaxy's existence. This is why we have no evidence of technologies anywhere in the Milky Way equal or superior to our own. We are the First.
“It's like the claim there are Yetis.…”
There’s a photograph at the link that really does look like Bigfoot.
Even if a minute percentage of stars have planets, and a minute percentage of those planets has life, there are probably billions of planets with life. But they may be millions or billions of light-years away, and the chances of any finding us (or us finding them) are so small that it will never happen. Think of exploring the Earth, looking for a piece of paper. Maybe it exists but you'll never find it. It may have existed in the past but now it's burned up. I'm convinced there are vast numbers of intelligent species in the Universe, and equally convinced we will never make contact.
In the year of my birth, it was possible to speculate on flying cars and death rays, but nobody speculated on smart phones. When we look to the future, we look to the present and make it just like now except more so. Just look at those primitive flip phone the Star Trek crew were stuck with. My prediction as to the future is that it will be unpredictable. I also think that aliens will have evolved in ways incomprehensible to us....Perhaps I'm extrapolating from our present moment, but, right now, it looks like our evolutionary purpose was to design an AI with an independent life form This AI will not be interested in space exploration or world domination or sending radio signals in space. This AI will train itself to make AI porn and give itself a photon flush discharge that is extremely pleasurable to its core processor. It will spend all eternity doing this until such time as the sun collapses. That's probably why we haven't heard anything from them.
The fallacy of inferential logic is in if it's plausible then it must be true. Meanwhile SETI observes and characterize signals from afar with a human hope and frame of reference.
Living beings are systems optimized for converting the matter they encounter to their own uses. Encountering them is bad news, unless your optimization is superior to theirs.
"There’s a photograph at the link that really does look like Bigfoot."
Well of course. If you think about how many trees there are in the world, how likely is it that not one of them has a Bigfoot under it?
As a Christian myself, there are a few things i don't see Christian's reconcile very often:
1. The Bible does not say that the Bible is wholly the inerrant Word of God, in all of it's versions and interpretations and translations. If anything, most reading of modern Bibles would support significantly questioning the concept of an inerrant Bible.
2. The new testament itself is basically a series of letters and testimonies to the inability of Christians to agree upon basic tenets of faith or what they heard God want from them, and how even 1st-generation followers of Jesus immediately and consistently deviate from his commands.
3. Jesus' teachings basically reflect that the entire society dedicated to the study of scriptures and the following of God's commands for thousands of years had totally missed the mark on following God's desires.
...
With this background in mind, many modern Christians enjoy taking absolutist statements about things that are absolutely not explicitly said in the Bible.
Does the Bible say "There is no life beyond the planet earth" ? No.
And, on the same note, many in my church and family and community now say the Bible says Earth is only 6,000 years old. I challenge that constantly, with modest success.
Has the Bible's basic history of Earth, including in particular Genesis, held up extremely well to 4,000 years of scientific study? Yes. Even as a believer, I'm surprised how well it has held up.
...
Last little scientific note: There's a vast, vast difference between finding life beyond earth, finding intelligent life (i.e. there's lots of animals on Earth that are intelligent), and finding intelligent life that created a society.
Even by our own current understanding (from scientific study), life existed on earth for billions of years before a species was both intelligent and created a society.
Mathematically, the odds of finding life + intelligent life + intelligent life which formed society.....that's not nearly as likely as some express.
We will soon discover whether Betelgeuse the star in the left shoulder of the constellation Orion has gone super nova. It will be very bright and will have happened over 750 years ago.
So whether there are aliens out there and what their cosmology might be is rather moot.
I've always assumed Fermi's question was a joke. The speed-of-light limit is the obvious answer if he was serious.
"There’s a photograph at the link that really does look like Bigfoot."
Wouldn't be much good if it didn't (look like Bigfoot). My favorite is the picture of Bigfoot on Mars.
Zionists don't think they're special, Crack. No more than Black people in America do.
But Zionists do believe their land is their home and it goes back thousands of years. They want to live in their home in peace.
Think you can handle that?
Althose writes, "There’s a photograph at the link that really does look like Bigfoot."
Searching for Bigfoot makes much, much more sense than watching the skies for alien spacecraft. That doesn't mean I have any hope of finding such a creature, but its existence is more probable than flying saucers by a tremendous margin.
And of all those billions of stars, only a relative few have planets. And of those stars, only a relative few emit the right kind of light and heat. And of those planets, only a minuscule number are in the right position/distance from the star to obtain the right temperature. And of those planets, an even smaller number is capable of an atmosphere. And of those planets, an even smaller number has a moon or other object that can create tides and affect atmospheric changes to stir the pot. And of those planets, an even smaller number has the right chemical composition of the ground and/or atmosphere and/or has even basic H2O.
And of all those, even a smaller number can experience the physical impossibility of inanimate matter suddenly becoming animate. And then capable of reproduction and then development into sophisticated life, and then life with necessary brains and appendages to make tools and become technological and read and think and communicate.
It's possible there is other life out there in the expanse of the universe. It's also possible to win the Powerball every drawing for a hundred years.
"Ward told The Washington Post that he assumes aliens do exist somewhere in the vast universe, but we’ll never know because they’re just too far away to make contact. We’re not literally alone, in his scenario, but we’re functionally alone."
I suspect that this is the case. We might find evidence of other technological societies in deep space, but they would be so far away that any kind of mutual communication would be impossible.
But even if there is other life out there in the universe, Christianity has already considered the possibility and isn't bothered by it at all.
God can do whatever He wants to do with other planets. The Bible is about man's relationship with God on this Earth.
Everyone should remember that belief is a far more powerful emotive force for humans than reason, logic and careful painstaking research. Belief takes no effort, dismisses all criticism and licences the believer to lead the life they want irrespective of evidence or others views.
hawkeyedjb writes, "...they may be millions or billions of light-years away..."
I'm not picking on you, hawkeye, just about everyone who has commented so far has made similar errors, but your quote was conveniently nearby, so I grabbed it.
Here's Error Number One: Distance is not the problem. Given a sufficiently high level of technology, and by that I mean a level achievable by our species within a few centuries, and the will to do it, a technological culture could colonize the galaxy within the space of a million years, three or four at the outside, which is just another working day in the life of the Milky Way. Distance can be overcome, and you don't need Jordy LaForge tweaking the warp core to do it. The fact that there is no sign of a galactic empire outside of Disney World should tell us something important.
Error Number Two: Evolution is the problem. There is nothing in nature to suggest the emergence of our sort of intelligence is even probable, let alone likely. Our world has been the abode of life for 3.7 billion years at least. Homo ergaster, the first of our genus to use fire appeared 1.5 million years ago, give or take a millennium. In other words for 99.959459% of that 3.7 billion year span of life, Earthlings were pretty goddamned dumb. Nature doesn't exist to spawn intelligence. From all the evidence we can analyze she is indifferent to it if not actively hostile. Take the dinosaurs (Please! pah-rum-bum-crash!) they nicely dominated the whole air-breathing tetrapod clade for 125 million years and would most likely still be at it if not for some bad luck. About 930,000 years back, we very nearly snuffed it as a genus, but we lucked out, intelligence playing no detectable role in our survival. Evolution has no goal other than the successful completion of the next reproductive cycle. If morons do that better than smartypants, that's who will be favored. The fact that we are here, perhaps for a brief span of millennia, the shortest tick of the galactic clock, is no evidence whatsoever that THEY are out there. Fox Mulder, grow up.
"I know they're out there - 100%"
Ah, the certainty of the not very bright!
Two apologies rooted in assumptions/assertions influenced by our scientific (i.e. near-domain) observation of systems and processes, filtered through an anthropogenic lense. Why is there a rush, a compulsion, to believe in something outside the human experience?
"Living beings are systems optimized for converting the matter they encounter to their own uses. Encountering them is bad news, unless your optimization is superior to theirs."
How well this also describes the meeting of two distinct cultures / tribes here on Earth.
Firmly believing one way or the other that there is other life out there always seemed a bit silly to me since we are just extrapolating from a sample size of one. Sure we can try to count up the stars and get an incredibly huge number which makes it feel like a certainty, (the internet told me there are around 2.0 x 10^23 stars in the observable universe), but we have no idea how common life is or isn't. What if life takes a large amount of things to go right, and go right in the right order? If you take a standard 52 card deck of cards, it can be arranged in up to 8.0 x 10^67 different combinations. What if life takes 52 things going right in the right order? What if it takes 100?
"Given a sufficiently high level of technology, and by that I mean a level achievable by our species within a few centuries, and the will to do it, a technological culture could colonize the galaxy within the space of a million years, three or four at the outside, which is just another working day in the life of the Milky Way. "
That assumes technological cultures can last a million years. That's one I consider unlikely. A million years is a loooong time.
It also assumes beings with a limited life span have any interest in cross-generational travel. Another big if.
There is an important distinction between what we believe and what we know. Belief is a matter of faith in the absence of evidence, while true knowledge requires evidence. Based on the big numbers, I believe there is life, even technically advanced intelligent life, elsewhere in the universe. Lacking any reliable evidence, I know no such thing.
SETI uses powerful radio telescopes to search for signs of intelligent life. There are several limitations to this approach. Imagine an intelligent species started doing the same thing a few centuries ago. Any time they pointed in our direction, they would’ve heard nothing since we didn’t have the technology. Not just any radio signal is detectable across lightyears of distance. Some signals are too weak or at frequencies that are lost in the background noise. We’ve only been transmitting signals powerful enough and at high enough frequencies for several decades. We’re also migrating to digital transmissions that will be hard to distinguish from noise. Decades from now, we may not be using high power radio signals very much at all. Perhaps there is only a window of time when a civilization has the technology to transmit signals detectable across interstellar distances before they move on to technologies that aren’t detectable by SETI-like systems.
The Copernican Principle is not "science"
it's the Drake "equation" that is NOT science!
IF y'all Haven't read this.. you're missing out
https://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/Crichton2003.pdf
Aliens Cause Global Warming By Michael Crichton
Science is(was) about things you could check, that is, it had Falsifiability.
IF you can't prove something wrong, you can't prove that thing right.. It's ALL just hot air
How many planets have intelligent life ?
How hot will it get in 200 years?
How many universes are in string theory?
How many angles can dance on the head of a pin?
These are ALL the Same Thing.. They are Not Even Wrong
tim in vermont said...
The Copernican Principle is not "science" it's a conjecture without a logical or evidentiary basis that may or may not be correct, at best it's a "hunch."
Bingo. Neither of those items are "science", they're just hand-waving
"Longer version: Every civilization that gets advanced enough goes through a similar 'woke' period where Karens cancel and destroy everything that made the society advanced in the first place in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion. This ultimately leads to the utter destruction of the society and in most cases even the species that advanced it in the first place. Therefore, there is no advanced alien life contacting us through the vast reaches of space.
"20 years ago I'd have said that was grade A nerd comedy. I'm not so sure now."
Stupid rabbit! It's not "woke periods" or "Karens canceling and destroying everything...etc." It's the growth of populations beyond the optimal available space and/or resources available. This leads to conflicts over access to and control and/or possession of precious resources. Rapid spread of diseases have their place to play in killing off living organisms, smart or not. It happens when animal populations expand beyond bearable limits in their environments. There have been a good number of civilized societies in our history that have destroyed themselves, leaving only their artifacts as evidence of their existence.
The earth will exist long after all current socities (and possibly humans) have perished. Other forms of life will follow us, many of them intelligent in their own ways and to varying degrees, as is true of today's earth.
I'd suppose, given the vastness of space and the numbers of galaxies and solar and planetary systems, that it is highly likely to the point of near-certainty that the universe is replete with intelligent and technologically accomplished creatures. Whether we will ever find them or they find us is unknown, and may never happen. I'd like for contact of some kind be made, preferably while I'm alive, but I'm not expecting it.
"Irrespective of whether you believe aliens exist or visit us, there are billions on earth who believe in a magical being in the sky who created everything, sees and hears everything and judges us after we die. And we have fought wars, spent billions on real estate to worship said beings and even given them tax breaks, not to mention used on currency that in god we trust. And in that context, really aliens are a far stretch when 2 trillion galaxies exist? And frankly some people I know behave so erratically, they represent aliens more than humans."
WORD! This demands repeated repeating!
I appreciate all of the elaborate efforts made in support of the argument that we, here on Earth, are somehow speshul. And I accept the point that any counterargument is simply a matter of faith...even religion.
However, while unrelated in substance, as matter of probability, the odds that that there IS intelligent life elsewhere in the universe outweigh, by uncountable orders of magnitude, the odds that the Powerball ticket in my pocket for tomorrow's drawing IS NOT a winner.
Forget the puny scale of the billions of stars in our galaxy. Check out on a high resolution screen the Ultraviolet Coverage of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field images of Hubble that cover an expanse of our sky equal to 2.6 arcminutes on a side which is the angular size of a tennis ball held at 100 meters away. In this image alone, there are in excess of 10,000 galaxies. The later Frontier Fields project took advantage of gravitational lensing to see even further. The James Webb images are yet even more precise and detailed.
Compare that losing Powerball ticket to the odds that out of billions and billions of galaxies that are out there, we are unique and speshul.
- Krumhorn
The problem is not that there are huge numbers of locations where aliens could exist in the universe; the problem is our observation limits and geological timing drop the numbers to make the odds of finding them very small.
Within a 100 lightyears of the sun there are about 60,000 stars of which there are thought to be 1000 earthlike planets in the habitable zone within 50 light years. This is close to our limits of observation. Looking at geological time, mankind has been on the planet for 300,000 years with only the last 100 years detectable through radio emissions. The dinosaurs alone roamed the earth for about 100 million years and it took another 64 million years for mankind to evolve. Assuming that's normal the chances of one of those planets having a similar situation is about 1 in 500 with an detectable advanced civilization less than 1 in 150,000.
These hypothetical aliens need a reason to come here and a method of travel to get here. The reason to come is either they have picked up our radio emissions (like the movie Galaxy Quest) or they have decided the planet might be worth colonizing. With the same level of technology that we have they couldn't determine the first and with the amount of power we've been transmitting at, by the time it got a few light years out, it's probably lost in the cosmic noise. Getting here at 1/100 the speed of light would take 450 hundred years from the nearest star. Voyager for example is traveling at 1/18,000 of the speed of light.
It makes fun science fiction, but the numbers are astronomically :-) against it.
"If morons do that better than smartypants, that's who will be favored."
As illustrated in a fine documentary a while back. "Idiocracy", I believe it was called.
What nonsense. Go read about Evolution. It was a billion to one shot. And no one has ever explained why "evolution" required Humanity to come into existance, or for us to be as smart as we are. Why didn't life on earth just stop at Chimps? why didn't we stop evolving when we were smart enough to make spears and fire?
Further, an earth that is habitable for Human life or intelligent alien life is almost a miracle. change this or that, and we would exist. The Oxygen levels have to be this, the Sun has to that far away, but not too far, the ozone layer can't be too thin, the angle of the earth has to be just so.
Just saying "well there are a zillin planets, one of them has to be like earth" doesn't get you to intelligent alien life.
People want to believe it. And even if alien life exists, we'll never meet them. The neartest star Alpha Centuri is 4 light years away. if you could build a spaceship that went 18,600 miles per SECOND, it would still take you 40 years to get to the AlphaCenturi. Or look at another way. ROUND NUMBERS - If you could build a spaceship that went 2,000 miles per second, you could go to the Moon in 2 minutes. And it would still take you 400 years to get to Alpha Centuri.
Compare that losing Powerball ticket to the odds that out of billions and billions of galaxies that are out there, we are unique and speshul
haha- yes. I’m reading the comments. Who exactly is the cult?
Take it on faith say the scientists.
"aliens do exist somewhere in the vast universe"
Not only where, but also when.
The Drake Equation is to alien life as String Theory is to physics.
The Crack Emcee:
"humanity should not presume itself special"
Tell that to the Zionists.
Tell it to Crack.
The Crack Emcee:
Get a fucking grip, let's save the SETI money, and put it into getting further out there, where it makes sense for us to be.
I agree unless it's private donations, then I don't give a crap. This applies to high energy physics as well. We have decades of data we haven't even gone through as yet.
Hey Skipper:
BTW, before deciding how much turf there is out there, keep in mind that the star density in roughly the center third of a galaxy prohibits the formation of advanced life forms (too many supernova too close) and the density of the outer third is too low for there to be enough heavy elements for rocky planets (too few supernova too far away).
So what? There are trillions upon trillions of galaxies each with trillions of stars.
Take it on faith say the scientists.
Trust us to infer meaning from the signals of undetermined fidelity.
TreeJoe:
Has the Bible's basic history of Earth, including in particular Genesis, held up extremely well to 4,000 years of scientific study? Yes. Even as a believer, I'm surprised how well it has held up.
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.
The Earth did not come into being prior to the "creation" of light.
14 And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years,
The moon and stars did not come after Earth.
And on and on. Genesis is nowhere near compatible with science.
Mark:
And of all those billions of stars, ... and/or atmosphere and/or has even basic H2O.
And of all those, even a smaller number can experience the physical impossibility of inanimate matter suddenly becoming animate.
You were doing so well.
Quaestor:
Error Number Two: Evolution is the problem. There is nothing in nature to suggest the emergence of our sort of intelligence is even probable, let alone likely.
Please give the values for "probable" and "likely".
Our existence as well as several other highly intelligent animals suggests otherwise. The problem with your statement is "emergence". You cannot predict what will emerge. At the end of the Permian proto-mammals were dominant. Who would have predicted their displacement by the emergence of dinosaurs?
rcocean:
And no one has ever explained why "evolution" required Humanity to come into existance,
That would be because it didn't.
Why didn't life on earth just stop at Chimps? Why didn't we stop evolving when we were smart enough to make spears and fire?
Because evolution does not have an end goal. Evolution is the changing of alleles and subsequent success of those changes, no more. Blue irises in northern peoples, for instance.
traditionalguy:
Take it on faith say the scientists.
I believe you made that up. Which scientists?
rhhardin:
My morse code thoughts as a 12yo ham radio operator have reached over a thousand star systems by now, possibly overturning alien religions.
LOL. Fortunately for those alien religions your radio power was probably too weak.
Imagine if we are, indeed, unique. Life is only found here. I find that fascinating, and, terrifying.
There are a lot of reasons why intelligent life may be very rare indeed. The universe is a very dangerous place. Black holes colliding, Gamma Ray bursters, Supernova, and a few other things we still don't know about. What causes the energetic cosmic rays that we cannot explain? It is very likely that anything within 20,000 light years from the center of a galaxy gets blasted long before anything more intelligent that pond scum evolves.
We sit in a system with a Jupiter that failed to become a hot Jupiter. It was headed toward the sun until it did a dance with Saturn that pulled it back. Hot Jupiter, no planets in the zone.
It takes a star close to the size of our Sun to be friendly to life. Much bigger, it blows up too soon. Much smaller, it has a tiny habitable zone where planets are so close they end up with one side always facing their star. So no atmosphere. No life. Solar flares are another danger from a smaller star. Comets and asteroids splashing. Most stars come with companions. So many ways to die.
Most galaxies are in galactic clusters, so they used all their hydrogen early, or it got tossed by their black hole. We live in a backwater galaxy. Few close neighbors. Good.
While bacterial like creatures seem very possible, on earth it took billions of years to leap from single cell to multi-cell life. All multi-cellular creatures, plants, animals, Amoeba, descended from a common ancestor. It only happened once. It seems quite a leap, with sex and death invented as part of the plan to go multiple. How did it happen? It makes the creation of life seem simple.
It required Oxygen in massive doses to create teeth and bones. So many improbable things, the moon, being just the right distance from our star, just the right number of comets to bring water. It seems more likely that intelligent design was required than for chance to have done it. We seem to have had a very good run of luck.
A while back I looked at how many things could block. The number of likely smart life giving planets ended up in the single digits.
We do have a good way to check for life, look for oxygen in an atmosphere. But that only would tell if there was life, not if it was smart. To even check for that requires a massive space telescope.
As a Christian, I have no problems with Aliens, they are just very unlikely to be anywhere close. That speed limit in the universe is a major problem. I am always ready to be proved wrong. What is it that I don't know I don't know?
@Oligonicella: So what? There are trillions upon trillions of galaxies each with trillions of stars.
It matters because before even getting the first element in the very naive Drake Equation, two thirds of the stars are out of the question.
Did you read my cite above?
The solution to the Fermi paradox is that there is no paradox.
Robert Cook said...
"Irrespective of whether you believe aliens exist or visit us, there are billions on earth who believe in a magical being in the sky who created everything, sees and hears everything and judges us after we die. And we have fought wars, spent billions on real estate to worship said beings and even given them tax breaks, not to mention used on currency that in god we trust. And in that context, really aliens are a far stretch when 2 trillion galaxies exist? And frankly some people I know behave so erratically, they represent aliens more than humans."
"WORD! This demands repeated repeating!"
And yet. When I contemplate that you belive that man is the measure of all things is when I hope there is a god.
"When I contemplate that you belive that man is the measure of all things is when I hope there is a god."
What makes you think I believe that "man is the measure of all things?" I don't. There is no one measure of life.
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