Well tipping the balance is the whole point. Strangely enough it still appears to be a cycle, but tipping it will take long enough. We'll be busy for some time.
edit: ..well long enough for me not to be too worried about what comes next.
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Geobiologist finds potential signs of ancient life in Mars rover photos
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Well tipping the balance is the whole point. Strangely enough it still appears to be a cycle, but tipping it will take long enough. We'll be busy for some time.
edit: ..well long enough for me not to be too worried about what comes next.
The difference from 2000 years ago to now isn't really that big of a deal on a cosmological scale. We think it is because we're very human-centric, which is normal, but we're only marginally less locked into Earth today than we always have been.
Even if we shatter the theory of relativity and create an FTL drive, the odds of contacting intelligent life would remain very low for the reasons I specified. The galaxy is extremely BIG. The amount of space and time in it is BIG. I don't dispute that we'll be a spacefaring species someday, and I would love it if we found a way to transit distances at a speed that would make even leaving our one solar system a feasible prospect, and we're likely to find microbial life someday, but intelligent life like us? A lot of things have to coincide for that to happen.
I'm not speaking at all like anyone who thought the world was round. In fact, I'm not even sure why anyone would disagree with anything I'm saying? I haven't said there's no intelligent life or that it's impossible for us to find it. I'm saying that there almost certainly is intelligent life all over the universe, but even if it's "common" and even if we break modern physics and develop the tech to meet it, the odds will still be very low of us contacting it because of the distances in time and space that are involved.
That's really all I'm saying here.
foxdvd
Member
Where do you people learn this sort of stuff from?
?
ActuallyHulk
Banned
How exciting. Call me when they find Dejah Thoris there.
More like Venus probably.
Ninja Scooter
Member
the devil put that evidence there to test us
I get this reference and it makes me smile. My favorite sci fi short story.
Only a gaffer can make what could possibly be the most important discovery in human history sound boring.
He just doesn't know what he's talking about. That happens. It doesn't sound boring at all. We don't even know how life began on our own planet, much less on another planet. Confirming that life has existed on another planet so close to ours could help us learn more about our own origins, which is still arguably the greatest mystery in all of science. We kind of have a rough idea of "what we are" but we have no idea "how" we're here or "why."
Because there is literally no evidence to think that Mars had human-style civilizations, why believe that there were?
foxdvd
Member
but I mean...my post was obviously a joke..how could anyone take it otherwise? (not to mention a spoiler for a popular tv show)
Tal Shiar Agent
Member
If life evolves on another planet and is carbon based, doesn't it stand to reason that it will at least be recognizable to us if the conditions on said planet are very similar to those on Earth? Mass, rotation, seasonal cycle, temperature, presence of water, metals, and organic compounds, so on and so forth.
Convergent Evolution and all that.
Convergent Evolution and all that.
Fuck that nonsense. We can't even observe the full universe. To build a hypothesis based on the life we observe is inherently flawed.
If you knew what you were talking about, you would either:
a) Not use the word "odds" when there is no way to see the future and know what kind of leaps we are going to make that enables us to explore the galaxy, nor to know how abundant intelligent life is in the universe, much less any way to describe our future abilities or this abundance in a way that can be mathematically calculated
b) Be psychic and know for certain that we are not going to pull it off and/or there's nothing out there to see.
You are pulling shit out your ass, as is evident here:
a) Why would aliens have visited durren the barren times? Are aliens like monkeys at typewriters, just randomly rolling the dice and going places, or are they going places that look like this from space and put out tons of radio signals into space that travel light years?
b) What the hell do you know about how long it takes to get to exoplanets for aliens, or future humans? What do you know about their ability to survey systems through direct observation instead of through a telescopic instrument where they're getting old information?
c) Even given that, there has been intelligent life on earth for hundreds of millions of years. You should probably look up when the Jurassic period was for just a kickoff. Personally, I would be pretty amazed to land on a planet full of alien animals and figure out their strategies for survival, their food chain, their ecological system and their evolutionary history. It takes intelligence for animals like that to survive -- they may even have vocalized communication among each other and travel in packs/families/tribes/societies. But to you I guess that would all be bullshit, because we should have waited hundreds of millions of years for them to evolve and have alien Xboxes so we can play Call of Duty 9000 co-op or whatever.
super-heated plasma
Member
Soon....
Also assuming anyone is listening for radio signals. Not many of us look for smoke signals now a days, who knows what advanced civilizations use to communicate.
Anoregon
The flight plan I just filed with the agency list me, my men, Dr. Pavel here. But only one of you!
A bit off topic, but it's awesome how you can actually see the I-95 corridor as a steady line of light with nodes at the major east coast cities.
If you knew what you were talking about, you would either:
a) Not use the word "odds" when there is no way to see the future and know what kind of leaps we are going to make that enables us to explore the galaxy, nor to know how abundant intelligent life is in the universe, much less any way to describe our future abilities or this abundance in a way that can be mathematically calculated
b) Be psychic and know for certain that we are not going to pull it off and/or there's nothing out there to see.
You are pulling shit out your ass, as is evident here:
a) Why would aliens have visited durren the barren times? Are aliens like monkeys at typewriters, just randomly rolling the dice and going places, or are they going places that look like this from space and put out tons of radio signals into space that travel light years?
b) What the hell do you know about how long it takes to get to exoplanets for aliens, or future humans? What do you know about their ability to survey systems through direct observation instead of through a telescopic instrument where they're getting old information?
c) Even given that, there has been intelligent life on earth for hundreds of millions of years. You should probably look up when the Jurassic period was for just a kickoff. Personally, I would be pretty amazed to land on a planet full of alien animals and figure out their strategies for survival, their food chain, their ecological system and their evolutionary history. It takes intelligence for animals like that to survive -- they may even have vocalized communication among each other and travel in packs/families/tribes/societies. But to you I guess that would all be bullshit, because we should have waited hundreds of millions of years for them to evolve and have alien Xboxes so we can play Call of Duty 9000 co-op or whatever.
Unless reality works very, very differently than we think it does (which is possible, but unlikely), we will never encounter intelligent life outside of our solar system. The distances are simply too great to cover beyond possibly reaching a few of the closest stars, and they are highly unlikely to have civilizations in them at all, let alone civilizations whose developmental and extant stages coincide with our own eventual explorations of said systems.
It's not that intelligent life doesn't exist elsewhere in the universe. It almost assuredly does. But the notion that we'll ever encounter each other is frankly absurd. The universe is just too big, and there's no way to span the distances in a reasonable timeframe.
foxuzamaki
Doesn't read OPs, especially not his own
What amazing times we live in
lastplayed
Member
eot
Banned
What's a reasonable timeframe? Intelligent life could have existed for a billion years for all we know, and life has a tendency to spread exponentially.
Fenderputty
Banned
Alice in Chains had an album titled this .... well almost. They used dinosaurs instead of evidence.
Fenderputty
Banned
Even with reality working the way it does this is semi possible. Bending space and time like event horizon. The possibility of worm holes. I mean shit even an awesome proton propulsion system would get us up to 99% the speed of light then time slows for the travelers. We might have to become cyborgs mixing non biological pieces with our brains making the human life span much much longer. The implications of time moving slower for humans who explore compared to the ones who don't seems wild. But maybe this is something all civilizations have to face.
abstract alien
Member
So the very first planet we do some solid research on, we find heavy evidence of life? If it's a rarity in the universe, we are lucky as all fuck. The first one?
Or there is no "Great Filter" and Mars just got the shit end of the stick. Probably happens all the time.
And_Gignac
Member
Sure about that?
And I don't see how this would be a terrible thing. One case of a failed global ecosystem doesn't provide for hard evidence that such is the destiny of most life-abled planets nor it predispose ours to such destiny.
Wasn't there a cartoon which had planets with giant engines to allow them to travel across the galaxy?
Escape Goat
Member
We have established the foundation for life exists on Enceladus. It shoots water into space which contains the requisite components. It does say there is or waa life on tge moon, but that conditions are favirable for organic life. Water is suprisingly common in our solar system which is good for our colonization prospects.
I honestly don't even know what you're even arguing with me about. Absolutely nothing that I've said in this thread is, like, in any way controversial. Space and time are unspeakably massive. The probability of us meeting intelligent life, which has to coincide with our place in space and time when we meet them, is low. I haven't even said it's impossible, but it is low. But since I have no work to do today I'll just cover your points because why not.
A/B) There's no way to see the future, but there is a way to see that the nearest star to Earth is 4.26 light years away. We could possibly reach that star within the century if we were to devise a new power source that would allow us to reach a percentage of the speed of light. We're nowhere near that right now, but it's possible and there are positive indicators in that direction.
I haven't made any speculations about our future technological ability, I've said that in order to conduct meaningful interstellar exploration we'd need faster-than-light travel. FTL is currently impossible with our modern understanding of physics. In order to have FTL, we'd have to break our understanding of physics, which is theoretically doable, but again, the odds are pretty damned low.
Going on...
A-B) How is that pulling anything out of my ass? Good lord, I didn't even make that up, Neil Tyson has said the same thing, is he also pulling it out of his ass? My statement wasn't literally about what aliens would or wouldn't do, it's about how throughout 99.999 percent of the space-time continuum, as it currently exists, we're not here on this planet.
We've only been here a microscopically short amount of time to date, and who knows how much longer we have. Why would aliens visit Earth during barren times? How should I know? Why do we visit Mars during its barren time? The point isn't aliens visiting Earth, the point is that when we explore an potentially habitable exoplanet, we're there at a moment in time and space. For there to be intelligent life to be contacted on this exoplanet, they also have to inhabit that same time and space. But since this potentially habitable exoplanet could be at any stage of its billions of years worth of evolutionary cycle, the odds of us actually being there to meet an intelligent species are ridiculously low. I haven't said it's impossible, I said it's really freaking low!
So for us to meet intelligent life that doesn't come to us, we have to A) Develop new technologies based on absolutely revolutionary understandings of physics that destroy our concept of reality (not saying this is impossible to happen), B) Travel the vast distances of space-time and find a habitable planet/gas/whatever the hell, C) Be there at the same time an intelligent life form has evolved in order to meet it. EDIT: D) We could also get really freaking lucky and find intelligent life close enough to Earth that we can there without needing to fly thousands of years with no FTL of any kind.
C) Yes, I know when the Jurassic period was, thanks. We're defining intelligent life differently here. This whole time I've been speaking about "intelligent life," I've been speaking about aliens roughly comparable to us in a sociological sense, I don't mean dinosaurs. BUT I don't only mean "us," either. I said we've only had intelligent life on Earth within the last million years, if I'd meant "like us", I would have narrowed that timeframe down even further. The other species of human that used to exist on this planet and their ancestors (which actually would be within the last 4-5 million according to the fossil record), I would comfortably refer to as "intelligent life," and I would be just stunned if we found it elsewhere. I wouldn't be stunned that it exists elsewhere, I would be stunned -if we found it- because of all the variables in play.
Does that, at last, make sense?
To be fair mars and earth have collided with eachother in the past.
sonikokaruto
Banned
if this is the only reason you want for humanity to find this, then you're the fanatical one.
If you knew what you were talking about, you would either:
a) Not use the word "odds" when there is no way to see the future and know what kind of leaps we are going to make that enables us to explore the galaxy, nor to know how abundant intelligent life is in the universe, much less any way to describe our future abilities or this abundance in a way that can be mathematically calculated
b) Be psychic and know for certain that we are not going to pull it off and/or there's nothing out there to see.
You are pulling shit out your ass, as is evident here:
a) Why would aliens have visited durren the barren times? Are aliens like monkeys at typewriters, just randomly rolling the dice and going places, or are they going places that look like this from space and put out tons of radio signals into space that travel light years?
b) What the hell do you know about how long it takes to get to exoplanets for aliens, or future humans? What do you know about their ability to survey systems through direct observation instead of through a telescopic instrument where they're getting old information?
c) Even given that, there has been intelligent life on earth for hundreds of millions of years. You should probably look up when the Jurassic period was for just a kickoff. Personally, I would be pretty amazed to land on a planet full of alien animals and figure out their strategies for survival, their food chain, their ecological system and their evolutionary history. It takes intelligence for animals like that to survive -- they may even have vocalized communication among each other and travel in packs/families/tribes/societies. But to you I guess that would all be bullshit, because we should have waited hundreds of millions of years for them to evolve and have alien Xboxes so we can play Call of Duty 9000 co-op or whatever.
My contention is that a species advanced enough to do all that would have no need to study a distant primitive world. I think looking back at our history of colonizing the planet and applying the same logic to advanced aliens is foolish.
Further I would hope by the time we are able to travel to distant world we would know better not to interfere with their civilization.
Napoleonthechimp
Member
We didn't come to exist and then get dumped on a random planet that just happened to support life. That would be lucky.
If life ended on a planet, even complex life to our level, and it died, and a billion years passed, would there be any evidence?
Not saying that there was life on mars, but absence of evidence isnt evidence of absence, as some religous people say, but its especially true on mars because we really haven't studied the planet much at all, like 3 craft have landed on it to take some soil samples, and a few satellites have taken pictures.
But if life ended at dinosaurs, the meteor was big enough to do that, completely screw the planet for life, there would be no evidence on the surface right now.
Not saying that there was life on mars, but absence of evidence isnt evidence of absence, as some religous people say, but its especially true on mars because we really haven't studied the planet much at all, like 3 craft have landed on it to take some soil samples, and a few satellites have taken pictures.
But if life ended at dinosaurs, the meteor was big enough to do that, completely screw the planet for life, there would be no evidence on the surface right now.
The Earth is going to die out at some point, it's a matter of when rather than if. Could be a billion years or several but it's going to happen.
Even if nothing else goes wrong with the planet, the Sun is going to die and take the Earth with it.
Well, we do have evidence of 3 billion year old microbial life on Earth, so yes there'd probably be some evidence. Finding it would be hard, but life generally leaves traces behind.
However, if a civilization progressed to our current stage of advancement a billion years ago, there'd be no evidence of it for any aliens to know we'd existed and could walk and talk and such. Even Mount Rushmore will be unrecognizable after a few million years have gone by.
I remember a 3D animation one made by the guys who did "Reboot" IIRC. Although in that case there was a giant evil machine world trying to eat their planet or something like that.
That'd certainly be a kick in the pants to get shit done.
Yes yes, that might be it! What's it's name??
You have made lot of bold assumptions about the probablity of finding intelligent alien life that may or may not be true.
Lets go over some of the unverified assumptions that you have made:
1) The timeframes of us and a potential alien civilisation have to match up, and that is unlikely.
The problem with this is that it assumes that all intelligent civilisations eventually become extinct, which is definitely not proven.
If all civilisation don't necessarily become extinct, then they have the capacity to live through a significant percentage of the timeline of the universe. This would mean that it is not unlikely for us to be alive at the same time as other intelligent civilisations.
2) We can only explore a fraction of the galaxy, therefore the odds of spatially approaching an alien civilisation is very low.
This implies that alien civilisations, like humans thus far, can only occupy and/or explore a small fraction of the galaxy.
This article has some interesting math on how a potential self-replicating machine could colonise an entire galaxy in 3.75 million years, a tiny fraction of the timeline of the universe. This is using relatively conservative estimates on travel time (well below light speed travel), and with 500 years of colonisation required per planet.
Remember, we are talking about civilisations that potentially have millions of years of technological advancement under their belt.
TL
R - Nobody knows the odds of finding another civilisation is, so no, you cant just say it is extremely low. Attempts to estimate the odds, such as with the Fermi Paradox, have indicated the probability of other alien species to be quite high. The reason it is a paradox is because we haven't already made contact!
Insane Metal
Member
You have my axe.
I was going to answer this, but:a) Why would aliens have visited durren the barren times? Are aliens like monkeys at typewriters, just randomly rolling the dice and going places, or are they going places that look like this from space and put out tons of radio signals into space that travel light years?
^This.
Sorry, the possibility is very very very small. It does exist. But it's very unlikely.
What would a potential exoplanet telescope see if they looked at Earth? Pyramids from thousands of years ago?
Anyway exciting news, but I agree the odds are very much stacked against us Earthlings finding intelligent life in the universe...Paul Davies, chair of SETI, talks about such in his book The Eerie Silence and a video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5vPLSj3cNs
Anyway exciting news, but I agree the odds are very much stacked against us Earthlings finding intelligent life in the universe...Paul Davies, chair of SETI, talks about such in his book The Eerie Silence and a video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5vPLSj3cNs
If one does the math, there should be over 1,000 Type III Civilizations in the Milky Way alone. But there are no signs of them, and there should be.
A Type 3 Civilization is supposed to be able to harness the power of an entire galaxy. Our galaxy. You'd think out of that 1,000 in our galaxy alone someone would make contact. And forget about all the other galaxies with amazing Type III Civilizations... Civilizations that are 5+ billion years of technology ahead of us and that could travel between one edge of the universe to the other like we travel from our kitchen to our dinning room.
So as Occam's razor would suggest the reason there are no signs is simply because we're it. Regardless of how we came to be "it", we seem to be "it".
This is the Fermi Paradox in a nutshell.
A Type 3 Civilization is supposed to be able to harness the power of an entire galaxy. Our galaxy. You'd think out of that 1,000 in our galaxy alone someone would make contact. And forget about all the other galaxies with amazing Type III Civilizations... Civilizations that are 5+ billion years of technology ahead of us and that could travel between one edge of the universe to the other like we travel from our kitchen to our dinning room.
So as Occam's razor would suggest the reason there are no signs is simply because we're it. Regardless of how we came to be "it", we seem to be "it".
This is the Fermi Paradox in a nutshell.
Anjelus, I've just seen your second post here and I keep finding more and more that I disagree with.
The certainty at which you ascribe the odds of finding intelligent life is baffling considering that it is a question that has anything but a consensus on in the scientific community.
Really, a read of the Fermi Paradox Wikipedia page will probably dissuade you of your line of thinking.
This is one of the key arguments that you make which I disagree with in your second post:
This is not true in the slightest. You can explore and colonise the galaxy at slower than light speeds, it just takes a long time. Even if it took millions of years, it is an insignificant span of time compared to the timeline of the universe.
The certainty at which you ascribe the odds of finding intelligent life is baffling considering that it is a question that has anything but a consensus on in the scientific community.
Really, a read of the Fermi Paradox Wikipedia page will probably dissuade you of your line of thinking.
This is one of the key arguments that you make which I disagree with in your second post:
This is not true in the slightest. You can explore and colonise the galaxy at slower than light speeds, it just takes a long time. Even if it took millions of years, it is an insignificant span of time compared to the timeline of the universe.
Raonak
Banned
The first evidence of non-earth life. how is that NOT exciting?
I mean, yeah, living intelligent aliens would be more interesting, but finding evidence of extra-terrestial life will be a landmark moment for the human race.
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