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607 Comments
- Disgod, on 07/13/2009, -0/+405I think one hugely overlooked factor on why we've never contacted another alien race is the time factor. We've been searching for ~40 years at best in a Universe which is 13.73 billion years old. It maybe that there was a galaxy spanning empire a hundred million years ago, or 9 million years ago, or the last civilizations' last radio transmission may have passed the Earth 15 minutes before the first radio telescope was turned on, but we'd never have a clue, because the radio evidence which may have existed is gone. There could be intelligent civilizations popping up all the time on a cosmic scale, but it might still be only a once every 10,000,000 years thing. The odds of two civilizations evolving close enough in time and space to be able to contact one another is incredibly unlikely.
- GalacticRerun, on 07/13/2009, -3/+294Sometimes I struggle to find intelligent life around my office. No wonder these guys are having trouble.
- novenator, on 07/13/2009, -61/+189There is very little doubt that life exists all over the galaxy. Earth itself has been terraformed by the biosphere to make it more conducive to life itself, and this process has to take over and over. The mathematical odds alone should make this obvious. However, why has alien life not visited us?
My answer, and this is something I blogged about a few years back, is because of what I term the 'Technological Threshold.' "Simply put, this means that anytime a civilization reaches a certain advanced stage in its development, the species that created it will inevitably destroy itself. "
Please read if this topic interests you: http://andyetanotherstupidblog.blogspot.com/2005/0 ... - crash331, on 07/13/2009, -1/+1062.31 = N = the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which communication might be possible
- znicket, on 07/13/2009, -9/+108I subscribe to the Time-Scale theory which states that every civilization has a a certain expiry time - they become extinct after some thousands or hundreds of thousands of years. Some catastrophe or other will kill them off. So a certain segment of the Milky Way may have been the home of several civilizations but they may have been around with millions of years interval. The chance of two planets evolving life and then intelligent life and being around at the same time? Astronomical.
- CasaMan, on 07/13/2009, -4/+94The Drake equation states that:
N = R* * fp * ne * fl * fi * fc * fL
where:
N is the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which communication might be possible;
and
R* is the average rate of star formation per year in our galaxy
fp is the fraction of those stars that have planets
ne is the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
fℓ is the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop life at some point
fi is the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop intelligent life
fc is the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space
L is the length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space.
Current estimates:
N = 7 × 0.5 × 2 × 0.33 × 0.01 × 0.01 × 10000 = 2.31 - NervousEnergy, on 07/13/2009, -3/+91A theory that I have always liked, is that if our Sun is only a second or third generation star...isn't it very possible that there simply hasn't been enough time for millions of advanced civilisations to develop? We're still quite early on in the evolution of our Galaxy.
I love this quote by Arthur C Clarke:
"They will have time enough, in those endless aeons, to attempt all things, and to gather all knowledge ... no Gods imagined by our minds have ever possessed the powers they will command ... But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of Creation; for we knew the Universe when it was young.."
Another huge problem is of course distance. It is not feasable for a species to conduct a star-spanning Empire if it takes five, ten, fifty years to get from one end to the other. If the light speed barrier really is the ultimate speed limit on the Universe, then it means that each new intelligence that springs up is effectively isolated within it's own backwater; with maybe easy access to a handfull of planets and one or two solar systems.
And even if there is some sort of Galactic Empire, then they certainly would not be using radio; which would be far too slow for it to operate properly. So maybe SETI is looking for entirely the wrong thing. - jmvallejo, on 07/13/2009, -14/+91God is the easy way of explaining things you don't understand...
- Shogi, on 07/13/2009, -2/+79"The chance of two planets evolving life and then intelligent life and being around at the same time? Astronomical."
Well I guess it's a good thing that we're talking about astronomy. - Bulk70, on 07/13/2009, -3/+70"It is known that there is an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the product of a deranged imagination."
-- Douglas Adams - Dereliction, on 07/13/2009, -7/+66We're dumb asses.
What I mean is that contacting alien civilizations is the last thing we need. We can't even figure out how to be diplomatic with one another let alone some seriously advanced alien species. Not that they'd be diplomatic in the first place, as Hawking suggests. No, I suspect we'd become pets or slaves, or perhaps pets to the slaves of the advanced species we tip off as to our existence here.
No, best we keep our mouths shut and try to work out the mess we've already got under foot. - tgc1, on 07/13/2009, -17/+72I surmise that there IS life out there. We just haven't found it yet. Keep in mind that if more of our budgets were targeted towards space programs we'd probably be a little closer to that eventuality.
I also surmise that If there IS intelligent life out there and they possess the technology for inter galactic or inter stellar travel. That they would look upon our species as rather primitive and probably not interact with us because we can barely interact with ourselves. We are not enlightened as as species. We have not yet reached that age in our development. I would consider us more young teenagers based upon the way we act and how our motivations play out. One need only look in a lab to see how scientists do not typically try to interact with their subjects. When is the last time you heard a biologist try to talk to an amoeba?
Sure, maybe there's one out there who has tried. But for the most part it is very isolated. Advanced life more than likely observes us from afar. Maybe they've been studying our species and our world for centuries, maybe thousands of years. I gather that if they had the technology for that sort of travel, they'd possess the means to cloak their presence as well. Maybe they move too fast for us to even see them. I would put that theory on the same level as the interstellar travel. Because we're talking about light years here. They'd have to possess the technology to interact with space time or manipulate it in order for that sort of span to be even remotely possible to cross in any reasonable time.
In summary, life is out there. We just have to look harder. Consider how vast the universe is. How much of it have we searched? A billionth of a billionth percent? A trillionth?
My grandfather has another theory. That we are an aliens creation. That is why humans constantly look to the sky for their god (aliens). Religion seems to be universal in the search for a god, or gods. The people who left us here. THey probably left us here because we were a ***** pest. We are like a failed experiment. Greed consumes us and we consume everything else. We're like a virus. Spread out of control. We've been put here, in my grandfathers words, to find enlightenment. If we behave ourselves, maybe the aliens come back for us one day. If not, they leave us here. Abandoned like an experiment in some dark chasm in some archive somewhere. - UselessTrivia, on 07/13/2009, -0/+54It's also a little silly to assume that every advanced civilization communicates via radio waves. Not to mention the way we look for them is a joke. We point our telescopes at a star, listen for a few minutes on a range of frequencies and then move on. We rarely sit and listen to one star for any significant length of time.
Maybe radio communication is just part of the technological adolescence. Maybe in 20 years we'll find some other form of communication that isn't detectable via a radio telescope and that's what the aliens have been using.
Also, I would wager a bet that a huge portion of our galaxy is completely inhospitable to life. If you get near the core, there are all kinds of crazy huge stars, supernovae, etc. If you get within 600 light years of a supernova your earth-like planet is probably toast.
if you get smacked by the beam of a neutron star, your planet is toast. If you're within several thousand lightyears of a magnetar when it has a "star quake" your planet is toast. - Gareth321, on 07/13/2009, -1/+52My theory is that such large stretches of travel or communication is simply impossible. Perhaps all our notions of wormholes are flawed, and we truly are limited to the speed of light. If advanced civilizations have reached the point of realising and accepting this, we'll never be able to communicate with them.
- AmnesiacJack, on 07/13/2009, -9/+59Buzzkill.
- pilgrim3970, on 07/13/2009, -15/+64"There is very little doubt that life exists all over the galaxy"
With virtually no empirical evidence (well, except for a little methane here and there), sounds like faith to me. - NervousEnergy, on 07/13/2009, -4/+51Theoretically, it is possible to get up to 99.9999% of light speed. The thing is you need to have a mass of a fraction above zero to get to it.
It's an interesting dilemma; you have a spacecraft that wants to attain, say, 50% of C. To do this it needs to have a high delta-V (i.e. a lot of reaction mass to propel it forward). But as you get faster, you are going to need more and more reaction mass; and so your total mass will increase. This means you will need even more reaction mass to compensate..and well, it just goes into a spiral until you reach something ridiculous like a total mass of a small country to power a five-manned vessel.
You have two main ways to get from Point A to Point B in space; a Hohmann trajectory, or a Brachistochrone trajectory. The former sees your spacecraft doing a number of small burns to gain speed into an elliptical or circular orbit, and then switching off the engine and coasting the rest of the way until you reach your destination. They use barely any delta-V, but take the longest time.
The latter sees your spacecraft doing a constant burn for half of the total journey to accelerate up to a high velocity, and then flipping over, and doing a constant burn for the other half of the journey to decelerate to a standstill. It takes the shortest time, but uses the maximum delta-V, and you will need a hell of a lot of reaction mass.
Of course...if you had a reactionless drive..then it solves most of these problems. Unfortunately; reactionless drives (with the exception of a solar sail) seem to be impossible by our current understanding of physics. - TobiasParker, on 07/13/2009, -18/+61No it is because they are too afraid to look into the night sky and realize that they are truly insignificant and alone.
- PatsFan78, on 07/13/2009, -4/+46I would really hope that there is more than this, A Planet full of those who kill each other over Gods and Oil.
- Mark1981, on 07/13/2009, -8/+50The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth. - Sideshowslob, on 07/13/2009, -2/+43.02 cents is not a whole lot of cents. I usually try to throw in at least 2 full cents.
- Exhibitionist, on 07/13/2009, -17/+54For *****'s sake, I thought we killed all of you loopy assclowns off in the great troll culling of '08. You guys are worse than cockroaches.
- SirBruce, on 07/13/2009, -0/+34The Drake Equation is largely useless; you can guess at any equally plausible probabilities for certain factors and get wildly different results.
The underlying problem of the Fermi Paradox is that even with primitive space travel, going at low speeds, so long as a civilization decides to devote even modest resources to colonizing other planets, the entire galaxy will be filled in 5 - 50 million years. Given that the Milky Way is itself billions of years old, chances are very high that if more than one civilization is going to evolve in the Milky Way galaxy, it would have done so already, and would already be here. So where is it?
Personally I think the three most likely answers are:
1. They've already been here. Even if you discount theories about ancient astronauts and UFOs, even an alien expedition who showed up say 10,000 years ago would have discovered at best primitive man. Maybe they have a Prime Directive and decided to check back in another 10K or so years to see how we're doing. Maybe the last expedition failed, so there's an unusually longer gap between visits this time. Or maybe they'll show up any day now and make direct, unambiguous contact.
2. Some catastrophic event recently destroyed the previous galactic civilization and we're one of the first new ones. Again, the others could be on our doorstep any day now. Or maybe even only part of the galaxy was effected and the previous civilization hasn't re-colonized the area yet.
3. We're the first. A depressing possibility, but if life is really rare, then we could be the first and probably only civilization in our galaxy. There's still certainly intelligent life in other galaxies, but we're unlikely to ever encounter them.
4. One civilizations reach the point of being able to colonize galaxies, other alternatives become preferable. At the rate of technological advace, maybe it turns out moving between universes is much easier and more rewarding than spending thousands of years crossing the galaxy. If there are an infinitie number of parallel worlds, some completely uninhabited, why bother colonizing other planets when you can colonize your own over and over again? Or perhaps the Singularity is just that amazing, and every civilization winds up in a self-sustaining Borg-like virtual reality where you can imagine anything you want, so there's no desire to go anywhere. - TankFox, on 07/13/2009, -1/+33There's no question in my mind that SETI is looking for exactly the wrong thing.
SETI is the only option we have currently for searching for other life in the universe, but what it's looking for is sustained broadcasting of radio signals on specific frequencies. However, look at our own technological development; We only started 'broadcasting' analog radio signals in the last 60 years or so, and from the looks of things we're going to STOP DOING SO in the next 60 years as we convert to a digital communications environment. Shorter hops wirelessly, point to point, specific to the users in range, useless white noise to anyone else.
The kinds of transmissions SETI is looking for are the equivalent of a baby crying, a society capable of creating these transmissions will soon stop doing so in favor of more efficient communications methods. Researchers are bummed because, when they drove down a suburban block, they didn't hear any babies crying through their open car window; thus the street must be devoid of life. Not so, it's that most inhabitants communicate quietly and efficiently rather than via volume alone.
The light speed limit is also an intense limiting factor. While humanity can spread to other stars, with the speed of light limitation on any sort of communication it would put a significant damper on our desire to move out. I would suspect that many intelligent species become frustrated looking out at the stars and instead turn inward to virtual environments for their expansionary needs, dreaming until their sun burns out and beyond. - Mujokan, on 07/13/2009, -0/+32I don't quite get why they feel the need to write three separate articles on an easy-to-understand lecture from over ten years ago, and why they don't link to the official site. Just read the original. http://hawking.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content ...
Anyway, besides that bitching... Amino acids have been found floating around in space, and some say they can arise fairly easily. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2558-amino-a ... http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/04/thermody ...
If you ask me, the biggest obstacle is getting a stable but non-thermodynamic-equilibrium biosphere that provides enough complex order to allow large-brained creatures that can live in large social groups. Our current friendly climate hasn't been the norm over Earth history.
On top of that, we were lucky both to get chased out of the trees by more successful foragers, and also to have the savannas nearby where we could develop a social system that allowed the development of language and culture and therefore consciousness. We happened to have the right kind of bodies for tool use, also needed for culture. You can make a good argument that humans only became conscious in the sense that we understand it now with the development of agriculture and large, settled populations, a few thousand years ago. And the ancestors of modern humans were once whittled down to a group of maybe only 20,000 people -- we were lucky to survive at all.
Simple life may be common, but conscious life is probably pretty rare. - jmvallejo, on 07/13/2009, -5/+34There might be intelligent life around, but distances are long enough to keep us away. When you talk about hundreds of light years it's just nonsense to think anyone could move from one place to another. BTW is it even posible to travel near light speed?
- cfuse, on 07/13/2009, -1/+26If they've seen any of MTV's crap then I suspect that we'll be purged to ensure the safety of rest of the universe.
- Stevethegreat, on 07/13/2009, -3/+28Why do you people suppose that "intelligent life" is the result of an one way street that we call evolution? I mean evolution (which most possibly is a universal phenomenon as long as enough complexity is there) does not have to lead to intelligent life AT ALL.
It's easy to think that abiogenesis happened in different parts of the cosmos and going from there to where we're standing today (a terraformed planet, with intelligent species roaming) require dozens more astronomically improbable (one could say) events (like DNA instead of RNA, eukaryotes instead of prokaryotes, multicellularity instead of single cells, neural systems, brains, brains complex enough to create abstraction irrelevant to one's survival, etc, etc). It's not as if we reached where we're standing in one single step, maybe for all these steps to happen in one single place is far more improbable that we give it credit (far more improbable than life itself). That's where -I think- Fermi's paradox falls, it's far more lenient to the chances of the creation of intelligence than the creation of life itself (which seems to be by some orders of magnitude more probable).
What if Intelligence, -indeed- is as improbable that one could safely name it as impossible under normal circumstances? Why should we think that civilizations are normal for the universe, if we were not biased to this conclusion by sci-fi myths? I have no doubt that the universe IS teeming with life, I'm very doubtful that intelligence is anything more than EXTREMELY rare (even a singular event) though... - cfuse, on 07/13/2009, -0/+24"The chance of two planets evolving life and then intelligent life and being around at the same time? Astronomical."
Not really, and that's the point. Even if you are talking a 1-in-100 billion odds, there are still so many stars as to make that occurrence a virtual certainty. - haelios, on 07/13/2009, -0/+24@crimson117: Maybe for a non-curious person like you, mate.
Although I am familiar with what NervousEnergy outlined above, I still enjoyed reading his response. It was well written and, I imagine, useful for the majority of people who dugg this article. - inactive, on 07/13/2009, -4/+27Where do you get these assumptions? How did you calculate the probability of extraterrestrial life ALL being single-celled and unintelligent? Seriously, if humans are able to build a spaceship, then why wouldn't an alien race? It sounds like you just don't want to believe that an alien race could be technologically superior to ours.
- DavidinBoston, on 07/13/2009, -13/+36Ahhhhh, God Trolls. One of my favorite Troll species. Always good for a laugh.
- JaysonthePirate, on 07/13/2009, -14/+37Wait, so you're saying God might have created life on other planets? Thats nonsense!
- vman81, on 07/13/2009, -2/+24What if abiogenesis is so rare that it is limited to a handful of planets?
And interstellar spacetravel might actually be impractical/impossible. - rocknog, on 07/13/2009, -0/+22This true, but because none of it is actively directed, the signals all become incredibly weak as you move away from the Earth. It may be theoretically possible for an extraterrestrial civilization to pick them up, but they certainly wouldn't be the shining beacon in the dark most people imagine they would be.
- PhantomRogue, on 07/13/2009, -4/+26The reason we haven't seen other Civilizations is one simple fact...
Space is HUGE, Mind numbingly big, so big that our minds can't comprehend how large and empty it is.
We are a reasonably advanced civilization and STILL haven't been able to land a man on the moon, 30 years after we first went, when technology should make it easier to do. There are other civilizations out there, but we won't ever find them if we can't even get to the damn moon again. - vman81, on 07/13/2009, -1/+23Well... We only have 1 confirmed example, so it's pretty hard to make any kind of educated guess, we can only speculate, but it might be extremely rare, or the prerequisite condition might be very broad, making it virtually unavoidable.
I like commas. - dhudson0001, on 07/13/2009, -2/+24Ok my .02 cents..coming from someone who appreciates the technological threshold argument, I can see that maybe as a contributor. However, and I may be coining a new phrase here, but it seems to me that "planetary privacy" would be important for those civs that reach a certain level of evolved ability. There might be a rational compultion to keep snooping eyes from eavesdropping on each other. Who likes nosy neighbors? So,perhaps every sufficiently advanced civilization may be compelled in time to develop a way to keep their broadcasting localized. Some sort of shield perhaps...who knows, maybe the Galactic federation mandates it...lol. If this conjecture were to be true, then we could safely say that we humans have a rather short window of opportunity to detect a civilization before it goes dark...
- Benno, on 07/13/2009, -3/+24My favourite theory is that type II and III civilization exist and they have watched enough star trek re-runs to adopt the prime directive. They're going to continue feeding our probes and telescopes false data till we manage to do something interesting.
- XHashmeerX, on 07/13/2009, -2/+23Wow, I never thought about missing a radio signal 15 minutes before turning our radio telescopes on...That's terribly tragic if that has happened.
- snds, on 07/13/2009, -1/+21Also how is it "Christian", Mr. Presbyterian, to insult another person? Just because you believe in Christ does not mean you get a free ride to insult someone without provocation.
- barth2k, on 07/13/2009, -1/+21If intelligent aliens ever come to Earth, I am toast. I'm too ugly to f*ck and too skinny to eat, so they'll probably just pull my limbs off for kicks.
- premiumballin, on 07/13/2009, -1/+21@skatiN64
CAPS LOCK MAKES YOU LOOK LIKE A DICK - inactive, on 07/13/2009, -4/+24ne is where it gets very speculative. What kind of life are we talking about, couldnt "life" exist in any (non-)atmosphere therefore on any planet + moon (which this equation completely ignores!!) and even stars, meteors, comets etc.
fl is where I stopped reading because it's too speculative
there is no way this can be measured
fL should be completely ignored because time is relative to the observer - gijoe86, on 07/13/2009, -1/+20I'm surprised no one has heard of the flaws of inductive reasoning before: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction
Essentially, just because we have observed something happen, does not give reason for it to happen again.
And yes, one implication is that the scientific method IS limited in obtaining the truth. It's an automatic digg-down to say this "heresy", I know, but hopefully I'm at least expanding your thinking here.
The point is, you can't induce that alien life exists simply because terrestrial life exists. It's flawed logic. - gte879p, on 07/13/2009, -3/+22The obvious answer to the Fermi Paradox is that Galactus is eating planets with life forms on them. This was explained in Marvel's Ultimate Extinction comic books. Reed Richards explains it clearly and solves yet another mystery of the universe!
- Whatasillyhat, on 07/13/2009, -12/+30So what does the number 2.31 mean?
- PowderedToasty, on 07/13/2009, -3/+20David you need to read a book on evolution.
- swimtwobirds, on 07/13/2009, -9/+26for what? expressing irritation at the logic-less burblings of those who would rely on an imaginary ape god to hug them and tell them everything's fine? we wrote the bible. we made up god. for a long time, we needed the crutch as a cushion to explain our sentience. by and large we don't anymore. if we haven't already killed god, we are definitely in the process of doing so.
- pinchduck, on 07/13/2009, -1/+18I think that, the daily galaxy should, hire an editor who knows, how to use commas,.
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