Aliens?
Space has been a little disappointing for the last few decades. Since the moon, everything has turned out kind of barren. Every SETI-related result of the past 30 years has been disheartening — “there was once water on Mars” doesn’t really do it for me. There are two big exceptions. One is Jupiter and Saturn’s moons, which are still cool and could do with more checking out.
The other is the search for other solar systems. Starting in 1995, we’ve been finding craploads of planets around every star we look at. The better we build our telescopes, the more planets we see. It seems more and more likely that a lot of stars have solar systems like ours. And if Mars could’ve had water, and we have water, water probably isn’t uncommon. Things are looking up for life in the universe, even if they’re looking down for our neighborhood.
I think we haven’t made contact with aliens by radio yet because we’re looking in a very limited set of places, not because they’re not there. I think it’s more likely that ET is using tight-beam lasers to communicate between star systems; it’s silly to expect them to dump powerful uncompressed signals toward us on the few frequencies we’re searching at the times we happen to look toward them. I think it’s very likely that there’s a lot of life out there; we’ve barely started searching.
In the next decade or so, we’re gonna get a lot better at seeing other solar systems. We’ll be getting new planet-finding telescopes built — there’s immediate-future stuff like Kepler, and there’s also the possibility of giant optical arrays in orbit or on the moon that can directly image earth-like planets around other stars. The data will start pouring in soon, and space will be exciting once more.
All that said, most applications of the Drake Equation are pretty shoddy. You can’t extrapolate from one damn data point no matter how much you want to. But this isn’t really Dr. Drake’s fault. He’s doing the best he can.
Edit: Regarding today’s comic: Dr. Drake’s first name is Frank, not Francis. He is an astrophysicist, not a 16th-century British Vice-Admiral. Thank you to the several readers who wrote in to correct me — I had always thought Francis Drake was just one long-lived and supremely-accomplished person.
February 15th, 2008 at 5:35 am
There’s gotta be life out there *somewhere*. The universe is just too big for me to be able to accept that there’s not some form of life somewhere else. Maybe we’ll never find it. Maybe we’ll never find it during my lifetime. But I’m sure it’s out there somewhere.
I am looking forward to when scientists are actually able to tell us something reasonably substantial about earth-like planets, or, hell, even display pictures. That’d be awesome :).
February 15th, 2008 at 6:31 am
Typo:‘Dyson Equation’. Methinks you’ve got too many Dyson spheres on your brain.
February 15th, 2008 at 6:33 am
>>even display pictures.
The pictures will be pathetic. The spectra have the potential to be mind-blowing.
I don’t know how plausible I believe local ETI is after being introduced to Ray Kurzweil’s law of accelerating returns. It faces us with a stark dilemma. Either the nearby universe is lifeless besides us (else smart matter would have already saturated the galaxy) or technology has definite, universal limits that cannot be exceeded. A third alternative is that hyperintelligent AI/ET civs go straight for the interesting stuff like black holes and engineer themselves an infinite array of new computational universes at the event horizon. And just maybe some proxy to their meta-society will bump into us at some point.
February 15th, 2008 at 7:14 am
Due to the massive timescales involved, it’s quite possible that life is quite common during the lifetime of a galaxy (or the stars in our vicinity, for that matter), but that only very few civilizations exist at the same time.
Planetary systems have a lifespan of ~10 billion years. It takes ~5 billion years (earth references only) for an intelligent civilization to arise. A civilization might not exist for longer than a few million years, if that much. It means that if a nearby planet with excellent condiitons was formed not too long after ours in the cosmic scale, say half a billion years, it may be completely devoid of life.
One argument to counter this, is what I believe to be a glaring omission in the Drake Equation: the equation seems to assume that life will only arise just once on a life-supporting planet, roam about for a few thousand years, and die out. I postulate that even if humanity were to die out after a few million years - or whatever - new intelligent life forms will evolve eventually, and this cycle may be repeated many times in the lifecycle of a planet.
That of course doesn’t match very well with our evidence which seems to indicate we’re the first intelligent civilization on earth.
February 15th, 2008 at 8:17 am
Obviously the equation simply requires another variable for the inhibitor/wolves, which is itself complex based on whether you can communicate through alternate worldlines.
February 15th, 2008 at 8:26 am
I agree. Radio is inefficient, prone to interference (as compared to light, for instance), and there is little reason to use it other than in space to ground applications (and even then, weather can easily corrupt the signal, being a direct source of radio signals itself.) A nice, deep infrared laser will get from space to space or space to ground under just about any imaginable condition, and a laser puts more tightly focused communications in a small package (at both ends) than anything else we know of; but — if there *is* something more tightly focused (let’s postulate a single particle wide stream of some kind), then (a) we’re even LESS likely to catch it [approaching zero, too], and (b) we’re not looking in the right place at this point anyway, and (c) the right place is the other end of the transmission, which, not to put too fine a point on it, isn’t here anyway.
My feeling has always been that the window for radiating radio is about a couple hundred years out of any civilization, unless they stagnate for some reason at just the right time, which also seems unlikely. Look at us; we’re going to cable, satellite to ground (which no outer space entity is ever going to hear), optical, and so on. In a hundred years, we’ll probably only use radio to warm up lunch. If that. Only the military is really radiating (OTH radar is the big candidate) and that stuff is designed to hop around inside the atmosphere anyway, only leaks make it out. Bet it detects like crap at a distance.
There are too many kinds of life in our single biosphere for me to swallow that life won’t grab hold anywhere it is even remotely possible. Extremophiles tell the tale — life doesn’t care what we think, basically stick a power producing chemical reaction in that doesn’t actually destroy the area it occurred in and you’ll likely get something that can use it eventually.
Personally, I’m betting on Jupiter’s moons for our first non-earthly life sightings, not to mention our first non-earthly hydrocarbon mine…
If we ever get our thumbs out of our collective asses, of course. :(
You know what we really need? Inexpensive access to space. A space elevator or something. Antigravity (I know, I know, but wouldn’t it be great?) If could just get OUT there. Sigh.
February 15th, 2008 at 8:27 am
And I thought the Frank/Francis mix-up was part of your humor. Slightly disappointed now. ;)
February 15th, 2008 at 8:30 am
The problem being that the sky is so huge, and any signals, even if they aren’t tightly focused away from our system, will be so attenuated by distance that you can’t hope to search more than a fraction of it for signals that could possibly have come from other stars, if they’re any weaker than supernova radiation.
For our kind of intelligence to evolve, you need multicellularity and sufficient complexity of the nervous system. The first takes a couple billion years, and then a few more hundred million to work up to the second. It’s certainly possible in less than a billion years another intelligent species will dominate Earth. Of course, we’ve only had experience with one, so we’re bound to be biased by anthropocentrism in any search for ET.
February 15th, 2008 at 8:59 am
’splain this one to me. We’re the world that came up with gulags, cults, torture and American Idol. Who in the Universe would want to contact us? We’re doomed to die, alone and cold, in an unimaginably huge universe because of our own hubris.
Maybe we’ll leave some cool fossils & stuff behind…
February 15th, 2008 at 9:13 am
I’m sure there’s life out there, and almost certain there’s life in our 50 LY radius neighborhood. The question is, what kind? It seems extremely probable we’ll find single celled organisms, and every once in a while stumble across more complex ecosystems. If we’re lucky enough to find intelligent life, they’ll be either cavemen or highly intelligent, but probably not even close to our level.
February 15th, 2008 at 9:14 am
Jeez Snyder, don’t you know that the aliens will LOVE American Idol when they detect it. That will be the first contact, when they try to call in to vote for Kelly Clarkson.
February 15th, 2008 at 9:32 am
Incidentally, if we ever do make actual physical contact with aliens, I can imagine that both of us will probably drop like flies from all the diseases that we’ve never been exposed to. But at least it’ll be cool until the plague kicks in.
February 15th, 2008 at 9:41 am
The problem with interstellar communication using tight-beam lasers is that the method is still subject to the speed-limit of C. If it takes several years for a message to move from its origin to its recipient, it will have probably lost all relevance once it got there. If the aliens are communicating between star-systems, they’ve probably figured out a way to cheat the limit imposed by C, using artificially generated wormholes perhaps?
February 15th, 2008 at 9:43 am
A lot of arguments for extraterrestrial life in the universe (inc. Gene Roddenberry’s, in the preface to — IIRC — the original Star Trek novel) start from ‘we are life in the universe, so it must be fairly likely’. Unfortunately, this argument is soundly defeated by the weak anthropic principle (the probability of us being here, conditioned on the fact that we’re asking the question in the first place, is 1).
However, if one looks at almost any system beyond a certain level of complexity, one usually sees chaos and unexpected emergent behaviour — and in my book, such emergent behaviour is semantically pretty close to intelligence. And surely we care more about finding alien intelligence than finding alien life?
February 15th, 2008 at 10:16 am
This “search for life” continues to baffle me. While it sounds pretty damn cool to encounter life from other planets (hey, I saw “First Contact” just like the rest of you), if you look at life on OUR planet, any time two foreign populations of organisms encounter each other, they pretty much try to wipe each other out. It’s classic survival of the fittest, and competition for resources. So I’m not so sure that meeting life from other planets would be such a good idea.
February 15th, 2008 at 10:21 am
What excellent timing, considering today’s announcement of the first solar system analog (a Saturn-like and a Jupiter-like planet in the same system). One of the more exciting conclusions to be drawn from this result is that star systems like our own are very common (they have not been looking for planets with this technique for very long, and they have already found one like this).
February 15th, 2008 at 10:44 am
@iontom: Life doesn’t have to be rare for intelligence to be rare. There’s a few steps in our evolutionary history that could be quite unlikely to occur on any given world, but abiogenesis doesn’t seem to be one of them. The galaxy’s probably teeming with prokaryotes.
@Wouter: Are you sure we’re the first intelligent civilisation on Earth? There’s some speculation about stenonychosaurs. It has of course spawned a variant of the “reptilian alien” conspiracy theories, but the first thing I read about them was speculation that they were the reason for a drop in biodiversity shortly before the K/T boundary. (They supposedly herded triceratopsen.)
So… Was the Chicxulub impact the result of a fatally premature Lunar War of Independence, or did the Inhibitors get them?
@Ben: I think there’ll always be a place for radar. But maybe we *have* detected alien radar, and we think it’s a pulsar. Or maybe they’re all using LPI radar, and we don’t have the right scrambler keys to detect it.
Or, y’know, maybe we’re the first technological civilisation in the galaxy…
@Alex Johnston: Actually, we probably wouldn’t exchange many diseases with aliens. Justin B. Rye compared it to a shark catching leaf-blight. Most pathogens are too specialised—anthrax is the only one I can think of that might pose a danger to aliens. (Disclaimer: I am not a microbiologist.)
And xenopathogens would probably be easy to treat—the tricky thing about treating infections is finding something that’s lethal to the parasite *but not the host*. If it’s completely alien, that task’s probably easier.
@Richard Smith: There’s a world of difference between emergent behaviour and intelligence. You won’t find much intelligence in a random run of Conway’s Life, for example. Emergent behaviour *in biology* tends to be at least somewhat intelligent, mostly because it’s subject to natural selection.
@Abby: I think some view it as a question of finding aliens *before they find us*. Of course, under that view the recent transmission of a Beatles song to Polaris is a pretty bad idea.
Alternatively, picture a future in which not-overly-malevolent aliens have conquered Earth, and a human resistance leader says “Okay, but *apart* from immortality, world peace, interstellar travel, faster-than-light communication, perpetual motion, antigravity and fwyodkwf, what have the aliens ever done for us?”
February 15th, 2008 at 11:09 am
“’splain this one to me. We’re the world that came up with gulags, cults, torture and American Idol. Who in the Universe would want to contact us? We’re doomed to die, alone and cold, in an unimaginably huge universe because of our own hubris.”
Calvin & Hobbes: “I think the surest sign that there’s intelligent life is that none of it has tried to contact us.”
Futurama: Omicronians love Ally McBeal.
Of course, this is assuming that TV signals are detectable and decipherable (if aliens don’t have a TV, they would have to work out the encoding of the signals) light-years away. Aliens might not know or care about our bad parts, either. The disk on Voyager (the real spacecraft) had no mention of gulags, and it’s possible aliens would want to contact (or avoid contact with) _any_ civilization emitting radio signals.
February 15th, 2008 at 11:28 am
I am intrigued by the thought that aliens have developed better communications than just plain old radio waves. Maybe rather than lasers, they’ve discovered a way to use quantum physics to relay information. They just turn a quark here, turn a quark there, and boom, instant communication to anywhere in the universe. Now that would be cool. And impossible to detect.
February 15th, 2008 at 11:33 am
Planetary scientist Carolyn Porco makes a strong case that our mission to Saturn is the most important thing we’ve done since landing on the moon. I don’t know, I think Mars is right up there, but she’ll stoke the flames of your love for space…
TED talks: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/178
February 15th, 2008 at 11:41 am
What makes you think that Aliens would be using Lasers? There are Masers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maser which provide you with a tight em wave. But why would they use electromagnetic radiation for intra-star communication? By the time your message reaches destination, you are effectively extinct ;)
There has to be another way. Lets unify our forces & break out of this relative barrier.
February 15th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
I think the aliens are -avoiding- contact with us, for the same reason you lock your doors and don’t make eye contact with anyone when you drive through a bad neighborhood.
February 15th, 2008 at 12:29 pm
The Drake equation is not bullshit, it’s just not very useful. It’s technically correct, almost by definition, but it includes at least one parameter of which we can never really know the true value. So it amounts to little more than a guess.
It also doesn’t claim anything about the communication methods that ETs would use, so even if it told us that there are a million communicating civilizations, if they’re all using some advanced technology that we don’t have yet it’s of limited use to know. That wouldn’t change the answer though.
February 15th, 2008 at 12:41 pm
“’splain this one to me. We’re the world that came up with gulags, cults, torture and American Idol. Who in the Universe would want to contact us? We’re doomed to die, alone and cold, in an unimaginably huge universe because of our own hubris.”
South Park already explained this: Earth is just one giant reality show.
February 15th, 2008 at 12:56 pm
Even if aliens used only tight-beam communication, wouldn’t we expect to see signs of colonization and megascale engineering - Dyson spheres, say?
February 15th, 2008 at 1:05 pm
I do think tere is life out there. And probably intelligent. But, in addition to the problems pointed out about finding it, I wonder if any meaningful interaction can be achieved (aside from the very basic and not that interesting after a while “OMG, look, an ALIEN!!!! COOL!!!!”). Becouse really, just think about the difficulties we have understanding people fom different cultures (or even subcultures). Or the problems that arise when we try to communicate with - or to understend the “tinking” of - other animals.
February 15th, 2008 at 1:13 pm
Yeah, that’s true. Aliens are likely to have completely different mindsets.
“Even if aliens used only tight-beam communication, wouldn’t we expect to see signs of colonization and megascale engineering - Dyson spheres, say?”
Well, there are several problems with that. If our own civilization continues the way writers forsee, it will construct such structures. This assumes that civilizations actually survive to a stage where they can do so, that they actually want to and have the resources to do so, and that we’re able to detect them - which, considering that current techniques wouldn’t see any evidence of alien presence short of a full-blown Dyson sphere, is doubtful.
February 15th, 2008 at 1:19 pm
Come on… Isn’t it obvious why we haven’t found any aliens yet? It’s because THEY AREN’T THERE YET! We are the ‘precursor’ race, or the ‘ancients’ or whatever they’d call us later, when they found our ancient technologies and stuff all over the galaxies. But most likely we had wiped ourself out.
February 15th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
Consider how far humanity’s knowledge progressed from the year 1000 BCE to the year 0 CE. Then how far our knowledge expanded in the next thousand.
If you think about it, we didn’t learn very much.
Now look at how much our knowledge has expanded in the last sixty years.
I’m the first to admit I’m not particularly into math –but that sounds like an exponential curve. If we assumed that other cultures followed the same trend, once they hit the technology level to consider space, they’d have progressed to technology so esoteric that we can’t currently imagine it.
In fact, what are the chances our grandchildren will be using techology so far advanced that we can’t imagine it today?
Thinking of things in geological time makes me think that we’ll never see a spacefaring race as current popular sci-fi imagines them. I have the suspicion that any society with technology developed to that level would be imperceptible to us until we’re approaching their level of development.
Which is kinda cool, if you think about it. They could be right here, right now, watching us. And if such a people still had a sesnse of humor. . .
February 15th, 2008 at 1:51 pm
If there were another civilization like ours out there, the SETI project wouldn’t detect it. That’s the cold, hard truth. Our radio wave signature disappears into the noise after a few light-years. So it’s entirely possible that there’s intelligent life out there and we just have no way of knowing it.
It’s also possible that intelligence is quite rare. If you look at our own planet, many species have reached a certain level of cleverness — basic tool use and problem solving — but only humans have attained the level of intelligence needed to build a technological society. It could be that our level of intelligence is an accident of evolution that isn’t likely to be repeated.
February 15th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
I hope we find evidence of alien civilizations someday. It would interesting to compare it to ours.
February 15th, 2008 at 3:06 pm
Why is it always assumed that purported alien civilizations are more advanced than humans?
February 15th, 2008 at 3:33 pm
“Why is it always assumed that purported alien civilizations are more advanced than humans?”
Because the humans have developing for about ten thousand years, while the universe has been around for over ten billion years. The idea that we’re the first and that the rest have started developing after us is like flipping a coin and having it land on its edge.
February 15th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
Got it - Frank Drake’s equation. So I suppose the B_s term wasn’t there initially?
February 15th, 2008 at 4:52 pm
Oh but Francis Drake is just one long-lived and supremely-accomplished person. Not was, is. He’s still tinkering around out there somewhere, though he’d get a lot more done of he didn’t have to run outside every few minutes to tell those “meddling Delaney kids” to get off his lawn.
And by lawn I mean testicles.
They always look like landscape up close.
February 15th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
Oh, and @ Zeb/Josh:
I think we always imagine alien civilizations as being more intelligent because the notion that we’re the best out there is quite depressing.
February 15th, 2008 at 6:33 pm
You’re forgetting Ceres, which is probably the best and closest hope for finding extraterrestrial life.
“The surface of Ceres is probably made of a mixture of water ice and various hydrated minerals like carbonates and clays. Ceres appears to be differentiated into a rocky core and ice mantle. It may harbour an ocean of liquid water, which makes it a target of current searches for extraterrestrial life. Ceres may be surrounded by a tenuous atmosphere containing water vapour.”
from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceres_(dwarf_planet)
Probably not going to find intelligent aliens as we imagine them, but it’s not unlikely that you’d find some primitive forms of self-replicating life.
February 15th, 2008 at 7:26 pm
The mistake is thinking that evolution has a goal and that some animals are “more highly” evolved than others.
Intelligence is a survival advantage that really gets going a while after it evolves. It takes a sustained, communicating population to start to get stronger advantage than just using pointy sticks and hand gestures while hunting & gathering. Compared to insulating fur or 60 mph sprints, or flight, it doesn’t have as much general utility.
How often does semi-intelligence develop in the universe and it gets killed off by climate change or disease or a rise in predator populations, or any of the innumerable reasons that the vast majority of species that have ever evolved are extinct.
Try rephrasing it in terms of another highly specific trait. What’s the chance that planet X has a swimming animal that lactates and weighs over 100 tons? Probably pretty low. Intelligence isn’t special, it just seems like it “should” evolve because we want it to.
It may very well be a one in ten million kind of thing. And while there are certainly more than ten million earthlikes out there, how many thousands and thousands of years will it take us to perform even a cursory examination of all of them?
If ET isn’t a lot more sophisticated than us and actively looking for us or trying to make itself known, we’re unlikely to know about it for many many many generations.
February 15th, 2008 at 9:18 pm
The Drake equation needs to be modified to tell us the number of civilizations that might actually have something interesting to say. Too bad that rules us out of the results.
February 15th, 2008 at 10:52 pm
hm…
you believe unquestioningly that there is intelligent life out there
based on conjecture
with no solid empirical evidence
and your only argument is that “it HAS to be out there”
sounds like religion to me
and since when have any of you given religion any slack for its lack of proof?
February 15th, 2008 at 11:24 pm
This is most certainly not religion. The probability of the existence of a super-natural being (aka ‘God’) is much less likely than the probability for the existence of intelligent life in the universe. At least it is POSSIBLE to prove the existence of intelligent life out there. I haven’t seen a single one for ‘God’ thus far.
That being said, I think it’d be damn cool to build up a Dyson sphere someday just to prove we can :P
February 16th, 2008 at 12:04 am
“…giant optical arrays in orbit or on the moon that can directly image earth-like planets around other stars…”
If you look at the highest resolution picture of Pluto that we have, (Wikipedia is a good place) it has absolutely terrible resolution. Maybe fifty pixles across. And even this photo was rendered using clever techniques during a partial solar eclipse from Charon.
All the images of the other planets were taken by messenger spacecraft.
So what I’m trying to say is… It doesn’t matter how gigantic of an optical array we build. We will not be able to image a planet in another solar system, let alone do so well enough to determine if there is life on it.
February 16th, 2008 at 12:09 am
i doubt even if we make contact that we could live together. With all the planets out there you would think that there is a great chance of life. but chance are that they’re too far away to make a diffrenece
The next solor system is what ? a couple of lightyears away. so even if we did find them commucating would be next to impossible. It would takes years upon years to visit them.
also bring up grems again. Think about, when the english came over ,21 million native died from disease and that was one civilization. imagen an etire spieces. Assuming that we brought every cure and medicine know to man with us we would has trouble telling them to mass produce the medicine and then asking them for every cure they have so when they come back they dont wipe out humanity
Lets say that we are not the first intelligent life out there. But they live their lives as we do and due to golbal warming their planet returns to it’s first form ,a volcanic lava filled surface, and it erase life and starts over
like a cycle and with that whos says there has to only be 1 intelligent species on a planet what if 2 or 3 intelligent life apears on a plantet
Ok so lets say we find aliens out there. by law of life we cant travel faster than light. And the closer you trave to light the slower time gets. using that by the time you reach their planet it would a few months or years to us
but decades to everything else
so either we need to redefine the laws of the universe or it’ll never happen
but on a side note : how cool would it be if they have some kind of 6th sense instead of sight or taste that we cant think of
February 16th, 2008 at 12:20 am
I believe the existence of god to be unlikely until new information comes in indicating otherwise.
I believe the existence of life (any life, as the parameters of ‘intelligent’ have not been clearly defined) to be likely until new information comes in indicating otherwise.
February 16th, 2008 at 12:36 am
Re: Diseases
Given that aliens will probably have different biochemistry than we do, the odds that we’ll be able to contract an alien disease outside of deliberately engineered grey-goo style bugs seems unlikely.
Re: SETI
I mean, it is kinda a longshot. I think the program’s assumption was that a sufficiently advanced society would not be using radio for its own purposes, but would rather fund a project like SETI–the male half of SETI, to switch to a plug metaphor–that SETI would be able to pick up, and that’s why it scans the frequencies it scans: they have semantic value and are relatively free of interference. It’s a coordination game, on the location and frequency front, and an anti-coordination game on the transmitting/recieving front, with species that we’ve never met and wouldn’t understand for a while if we did.
Re: Comprehensibility
I think people tend to underrate how easily we’ll be able to talk to the aliens. Intelligence is an adaptive quality for a universe with, afaik, universal rules. Ergo, the processes and fundamental laws of other intelligences would probably be quite similar, even if their expressions and mechanisms were wildly different. Which leads to my next point:
Re: Evolution of intelligence.
The reason I tend to believe intelligence (defined as creativity+memory+communication+implementation) will evolve quite a lot is that it’s an adaptation that’s pretty much universally applicable. In a red-queen’s hypothesis world, it seems that sooner or later some species will need to escalate to the point of human-level intelligence, at which point its adaptive value will skyrocket. Although our direct ancestors might have been killed off quite easily, the primates were ready and waiting, and in a slightly different set of situations, the pachyderms, cephlapods, and god-knows-what-else might be too.
February 16th, 2008 at 1:12 am
Speaking of biochemistry isn’t possible that it will have something different than DNA.I mean when life began could of there of been somehting different than DNA but it just didnt surive for some reason. I’m not saying somehting completely different, but like instead of a double helix or something. I’m gussing it possible becuase in life there are no abosultes.
February 16th, 2008 at 1:45 am
Interstellar comm is pretty daunting. Follow me here:
Say you need 1e-3 photons / second / m^2 to pull bits at any rate off the signal. You want a 10 light year link, and you have a perfect diffraction limited laser spot, so all losses are 1/r^2. Assume visible wavelengths, so about 4e-19 J/photon. We can do the math — we need a 1e-3 * (10*9.5e15)^2 * 4e-19 Watt laser. Plug into Google…
About 4 terawatts. Continuous wave. That’s a couple times all the world’s electrical power. Bummer. That assumes you’ve got a 100% efficient laser. You’ve also got to get yourself a perfect detector, and a few hundred square meter telescope receiver. And I wouldn’t want to put the transmitter too near a star for background reasons. And it’s just 10 light years, which doesn’t get you very far in our neighborhood.
Now here’s an interesting idea — what if we deploy a solar sail like structure as a telescope - hundreds of square kilometers? Receiver area trades off 1 for 1 with laser power. Now we just need Hoover Dam to run the laser. We’ve got to keep it pointed accurately, the reflecting surface positioned accurately to a fraction of a wavelength, and I have a hunch you’d need to do adaptive optics to correct for general relativity and astronomical gravity waves, let alone any magnetic fields or solar light or charged particle pressure.
Now what about that Dyson sphere laser idea? Maybe we could get by with a giant set of shutters.
February 16th, 2008 at 6:33 am
Rich, I’m not familiar with this Dyson Sphere laser you mentioned but I couldn’t help but picture the death star.
“That’s no incredibly massive AU in diameter moon… it’s a Space-Station!”
February 16th, 2008 at 9:18 am
““Why is it always assumed that purported alien civilizations are more advanced than humans?”
Because the humans have developing for about ten thousand years, while the universe has been around for over ten billion years. The idea that we’re the first and that the rest have started developing after us is like flipping a coin and having it land on its edge.”
Which would be higher chance than this universe developing by chance alone….
:P
Hey wouldn’t it be totally weird if aliens were reading this blag laughing at us?
:D
February 16th, 2008 at 9:27 am
A well tuned version of the Drake Equation does explain why we havn’t (and probably never* will) meet intelligent aliens. While life in some form may be fairly common, and animal life might even appear on as many as one in every 100 stars (using very generous estimates), few of these will develop intelligent and EMR broadcasting species ^at the same time^ as ours! Even if all life supporting planets were eventually to develop a technological species (doubtful) the chances of us meeting one would still be slim.
During the 10,000,000,000 years that our sun will be life supporting we have so far only been broadcasting ourselves for 72 years. While we can’t know for how long we will continue to do so, I doubt it will be for more than a few hundred years: We’ll kill ourselves off or clean up our EMR spamming (by sticking to lasers and cables, or by coming up with something better than EMR broadcasting). If this pattern is even close to typical then the chances of another broadcasting civilisation existing in our galaxy at this time is very slim.
The best way to think about the problem is that we are certainly not unique, but just very rare. So rare that it probably isn’t worth looking looking for others. Still: Better safe than sorry, so it would be daft to stop funding SETI.
The only argument I’ve heard that keeps the Fermi Paradox going is that most technological civilisations will eventually develop Von Neumann probes, and will hegemonise their galaxy within a few million years. The fact that we havn’t met any could mean several things: We’re the first in our galaxy; Von Neumann probes aren’t feasible; They’re hiding! None of these seem likely to me… Take your pick.
*Never: Not within any timeframe worth thinking realistically about.
February 16th, 2008 at 9:56 am
“Even if aliens used only tight-beam communication, wouldn’t we expect to see signs of colonization and megascale engineering - Dyson spheres, say?”
Hey, maybe that explains dark matter! The matter is out there, but all its energy is being captured and used.
Soz for the doubblepost…
February 16th, 2008 at 9:56 am
My friend Robert once had an argument with a Christian about the existence of life on other planets. It went something like this:
Girl: “I don’t believe in alien life.”
Rob: “…but you believe in God, right?”
Girl: “YES! (Insert really long assertion of faith here)–”
Rob: “So you believe God made the Universe, right?”
Girl: “Of course.”
Rob: “Then you have to believe in aliens.”
Girl: “What?”
Rob: “Why would the smartest being to ever exist create an entire universe and put life on only ONE planet?”
Girl: “I- I never thought of it that way.”
Also, he convinced her that God recycles souls and that Heaven’s GATES ARE A LIE!
February 16th, 2008 at 11:51 am
It may well be simply that the laws of the universe impose narrower limits on what is possible than we want to believe.
Perhaps there is no way to travel faster than c. Perhaps we *already had* the technological singularity, and it lasted from 1940 to 1970–what have we done since then, really, that is *new* and not just a refinement of earlier technologies and techniques? We’re able to pack transistors closer and closer together on silicon wafers, but quantum mechanics imposes some very stark limits on *that* too, and we’re approaching them rather rapidly–note that core clock speeds for PC CPUs haven’t gone up in years, for example.
Maybe the future as we imagined it fifty years ago ain’t coming. Physical law proscribes it. You aren’t going to have a flying car and a silver jumpsuit and adventures in the jungles of Venus with an alien from Tau Ceti.
Maybe this is the real answer to the Fermi Paradox. There’s not a shiny silver hubcap flying saucer from Tau Ceti landing on the White House lawn because physical law makes it impossible to travel from point A to point B. Maybe our radios aren’t crackling with ET transmissions because the vast majority of other intelligent civilizations (to the extent that any exist–given that all the variables in the Drake Equation have unknown values, it’s entirely possible that ours is the only world in the Virgo Supercluster where life more advanced than blue-green algae exists) regard it as an impractical use for finite resources.
I’m just sayin’. Given the nature of the discussion we can only speculate. What if there’s nobody else out there?
February 16th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
“Now what about that Dyson sphere laser idea? Maybe we could get by with a giant set of shutters.”
Hmm… interstellar Morse code. Et tu, Brute?
“Why is it always assumed that purported alien civilizations are more advanced than humans?”
Because if any civilizations are more than a century beyond our own, assuming they take the same path of technological development, it’s completely impossible for us to detect them short of actually going there and looking at the planet. The only things we’ve ever sent out of the solar system are light and radio and a couple of probes, and there’s no way we currently would have detected a 17th-century version of Earth a couple light-years away. Therefore, our best hope lies in more advanced civilizations, and trying to catch some of their communications before they go extinct or advance even further.
“Why would the smartest being to ever exist create an entire universe and put life on only ONE planet?”
Well, the Bible says man was created in God’s image. It doesn’t mention creating ET in God’s image. I mean, medieval astronomers believed the stars were on a crystal sphere around the Earth. Maybe God created the entire universe just for us.
(Disclaimer: I am agnostic.)
February 16th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
“I’m just sayin’. Given the nature of the discussion we can only speculate. What if there’s nobody else out there?”
This would be extremely depressing, and leave all the SETI people with nothing to do. Of course there’s that possibility. It just doesn’t make for very good science fiction.
February 16th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
Riddle me this: What kind of civilization would deliberately be making its prescence known to the universe with radio waves? I think that the only civilizations that would be broadcasting their existence would be hunting for habitable planets that younger, naive, and more easily conquered races already live on. They get a nice green/blue planet and 7 billion slaves while they’re at it.
Not bad.
It is possible that there would be a race that would try to “help” or “Uplift”, as David Brin would say, existing intelligence, but why the hell would they bother?
We could be spelling our doom.
February 16th, 2008 at 2:49 pm
unfortunately i don?t do physics.
i rely on my friends that do physics to explain to me the whole of their A-level syllabus…
reading this has kept me amused :D
xxx
February 16th, 2008 at 2:50 pm
unfortunately i don’t do physics.
i rely on my friends that do physics to explain to me the whole of their A-level syllabus
reading this has kept me amused :D
xxx
February 16th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
Kobra, kewl that’s schweet. I want to meet this Rob dude. Yup I’m a Christian but I’m not a “normal” one I guess you could say. Our convo would have gone a lot different than the one you posted haha. I find this stuff utterly fascinating. Personally, I don’t think there is life on other planets. Then again, why not? I haven’t really studied it enough to be able to say. Anyway, after all, the Bible only talks about Adam and Eve but then all of a sudden when Cain is banished he goes off to another kingdom and marries some girl. Where did that whole line come from?? I guess all I’m saying is not everything is spelled out. Maybe it’s like the whole “if a tree falls in a forest and no one knows it fell did it really fall?” type of thing. If we don’t know there are aliens are there really any? Maybe that makes no sense I’m not thinking too clearly right now haha. Either way, Vulcans are really kewl. If anyone ever meets one, tell them to stop by and say hi, okay? Live long and prosper, Spock! :D
February 16th, 2008 at 5:02 pm
As far as Adam and Eve, etc… I am definitely a Christian, and I really believe the Bible. I am also a scientist.
It occurred to me once that humanity has a long history, for tens of thousands of years, that we have pretty much no record of. What sort of things happened then? Modern humans were alive at the same time as Neanderthals and other species of human.
Perhaps things like the Bible and other recordings are a tale of our species, or at least a reconstruction of the tale of our species? To read the Bible makes one realize that people have not changed much, in intellectual or social ways, in the last two or three thousand years. The Greeks had many concepts that we agree are accurate (such as atoms, etc., along with things that we know are not true). Biologically speaking, they had the same reasoning ability that we have today. Who’s not to say that people, elders, leaders, historians put together their best verbal histories of the beginning of the most modern Clan of Man, which those of the “Recent African Origin” propose had a population of between 1,000 and 10,000 individuals in the Late Pleistocene stage that ended 10,000 years ago. Many people believe that many of the “pre-Flood” Bible characters represented entire tribes or clans, not just individuals, making the corresponding Young Earth hypothesis obsolete and unnecessary.
Some Christian authors have expressed an acceptance, even an embrace, of the role of evolution in the story of mankind in the hand of God. C.S. Lewis is one of them. He views Christianity as a sort of next step in the process of evolution, whereby humans cease to think merely of their own wants and start to love others as themselves. Of course, there have been cancerous trends in some parts of Christianity (the Crusades, anyone?), but evolution often produces dead-ends that must either adapt or die. The Christian subspecies has grown rapidly in the last 2 thousand years, including 2 billion individuals (or about a third of the human population). If you include the Muslim sect, you get another billion people, reaching a total of about half the human population.
Love of neighbor is certainly required for the long-term survival of the human race, as many of you have pointed out, since today’s greatest threat to man is man himself.
February 16th, 2008 at 5:24 pm
Hm, has this turned into a religious discussion?
I’m a Christian, but I don’t believe in Genesis or Exodus, or most the Old Testament for that matter. The New Testament is what I believe in.
On the topic of Extraterrestrial life, I think it would be interesting if the world we visited was just a developing life, of the caveman persuasion. We would be their mythological deities, the gods. Who came from the heavens with the gift of fire and sewing.
February 16th, 2008 at 5:25 pm
Actually, the above poster, Robin, summed up my thoughts well.
February 16th, 2008 at 6:12 pm
Though outdated I think the future will be more like the CoDominium, Falkenberg’s Legion, The Mote In God’s Eye series. Or the Bolo series…Hell it may even end up like Warhammer. Maybe im just pessimistic or have a grim outlook, but i just think even if we find alien life there are several points
A. IF there is Itelligent Life will be rare, most planets that do have life will be basics..i.e. bacteria, fungi, plants(in whatever chemical makeup that planet develops)
B. Intelligent Life, sentience, will be either technologically inferior or superior to ours.
C. If we discover b, if Inferior, i think we’ll do the Human thing and conquer and subvert the species of sentient beings so they never become a threat, if Superior, i think someone’s gonna fuck up like they did in Babylon 5 when the Human’s fired on the Minbari flagship and kill their leader (because they misunderstood that races customs) and there will be war anyway
All in all, i think war with intelligent life is inevitable, just becuase sentience breeds hostility ( conflict over resources, territory, blah blah blah) and the idea that we can carve up the galaxy and coexist peacefully is wishful idealist bull, since in the end someone’s gonna say “why the fuck are we going out of our way to be nice to these aliens”. A feeling of Racial Superiority is going to develop somewhere, and then its all down hill from there my friends….
Thats why we need PlanetKiller warships first, you hear that Humanity get your shit together!!
February 16th, 2008 at 6:23 pm
TheChaosStrain, your post is exactly why mankind will probably destroy itself unless we all learn to love each other. Seriously. We’ll die, unless we progress beyond selfishness and into agape.
February 16th, 2008 at 6:38 pm
Francis Drake: Sort of like J. P. Morgan then (actually two people)?
February 16th, 2008 at 10:33 pm
“That being said, I think it’d be damn cool to build up a Dyson sphere someday just to prove we can :P”
A sphere of any mass has null gravity inside. Newton developed his differential calculus partially to prove this fact. How do you propose to keep the star in the center of the sphere? I recommend magic, which I think is the solution Freeman Dyson was thinking of. I can’t think of a more credible one.
February 16th, 2008 at 11:02 pm
You inspired my latest blog post: http://things.auditblogs.com/2008/02/17/the-drake-equation/
February 17th, 2008 at 12:18 am
Robin,
Doesnt make it true or untrue, thats just how i see the Human race. It just so happens my theory on the future of the human race is a violent future seems to be corroborated by several thousand years of our civilization, and by the very nature of bilogical evolution if you want to argue that much. There will always be ignorance, violence, hate, racism, and many more of the like. Sure we can ‘all learn to love each other’ but thats an ideal. And you have to keep in perspective ideals arent measurable goals…just a level of perfection we must always aspire to reach but in the end know that it can never actually BE reached. Thats just where im coming from. War, conflict, hostility..its inevitable…why cause its part of the human equation and the human experience. So why can’t i say its a sentient thing to wage war? I guess there is a saying
“Man has killed man since the beginning of time, why should the future be different. With each new frontier, brings new ways of killing”
Can anyone say “Throw him out the airlock?” lol
Im sry Robin, but i just cant see your point other than for what it really is an Ideal, and sadly we dont live in an idealist Universe.
February 17th, 2008 at 12:43 am
There’s clearly plenty of intelligent life out there, leaving vague building plans on Mars and robot’s heads on the Moon. We’re just not spending enough time looking at tetrahedrons and examining what happens at 17.5 degrees latitude on every planet we discover…. XD
If only more folks would listen to poor Richard C. Hoagland, so he wouldn’t have to write his books in the 3rd person when talking about all the conspiracies he’s uncovered at NASA /joking sarcasm I’d be interested to hear what Mr. Monroe has to say about him from his robot building time at NASA, if indeed Hoagland is as beloved there as he seems to think he is.
I’ve personally always found the Drake equation a little suspect for not really accounting for the time frame involved, but at the same time the mathematician in me can’t help but think that given the time frame involved, it’s seems unlikely that Earth is the only place to have hit the high end of the bell curve (or low end, judging from some of the other posters opinions about humanity ;p). But will we ever bump into these outer space folks? I honestly couldn’t compute the math involved in that one…
February 17th, 2008 at 1:18 am
“A sphere of any mass has null gravity inside. Newton developed his differential calculus partially to prove this fact. How do you propose to keep the star in the center of the sphere? I recommend magic, which I think is the solution Freeman Dyson was thinking of. I can’t think of a more credible one.”
No, the theorem states that a spherical shell creates no net gravitational field within it. The sun’s own gravity would still act on the sphere and keep it in equilibrium - although I’m not sure of the stability.
February 17th, 2008 at 1:23 am
“I’ve personally always found the Drake equation a little suspect for not really accounting for the time frame involved”
I was under the impression that the equation had a factor for the amount of time a civilization could be detected. Upon further research, it’s L, the (second to) last term.
February 17th, 2008 at 1:30 am
You guys need to all read some Jack McDevitt
February 17th, 2008 at 3:29 am
I’ve read him, and his idea of two (IIRC) intelligent species within a few hundred light years might be more realistic. But he falls into the same old trope of “ancient starfarers that died out”.
February 17th, 2008 at 4:02 am
Hey, neophyte here…
So I was thinking about telescopes, and the restrictions of radio telescope, and - and I’m a music ed grad, so take this with a grain of salt - I thought to myself, “if only we could create a telescope with a mirror larger than life…” which I imagine to be the dream of many an engineer.
But then I thought, why do we need one mirror? Don’t photons travel in rays, and don’t they get fewer and farther apart as you move from the source? To us on Earth, a star is just a few (if I may) “pixels” wide. But other photons are jauntily speeding their way along to the right and to the left of me. And others farther away. So what if we covered, say, a portion of Antarctica (or, better yet, space) with a giant grid of small mirrors, reflecting their few pixels at the secondary mirror. Certainly it would be cheaper to produce and even maintain than a new Hubble, since they won’t be fixing it any more, and since it would be picking up a larger spread of photons, it would have a much higher resolution.
I do wonder, though, how much degradation would occur with a segmented mirror (like using a loosely-weaved afghan to block the wind) vs. a solid one, and if it would still be worthwhile.
But I’m a lowly music teacher with no clout in some big space agency, like the ESA or that other one… erm… NASA or something? Too bad I don’t know any physicists who work with engineers there. That’s a real shame. It’s why I general just refuse to think.
February 17th, 2008 at 5:17 am
Another possible reason for SETI’s failure is (At least according to the discover channel’s earth after man special) that radio-waves degrade over time, and may become indistinguishable from the background static around 2 light-years out.
February 17th, 2008 at 10:15 am
[img]http://phillyist.com/attachments/philly_jim/i-want-to-believe.jpg[/img]
February 17th, 2008 at 10:38 am
“I do wonder, though, how much degradation would occur with a segmented mirror (like using a loosely-weaved afghan to block the wind) vs. a solid one, and if it would still be worthwhile.”
Are you sure you havn’t heard that somewhere before? Arrays of mirrors in space are exactly what many astronomers hope to do: There have been several articles in New Scientist over the last few years. Astronomical_interferometer
Basically, you get high resolutions because the mirror segments cover such a large area, but because most of the light slips through the net, you need really long exposure times. Of course it’s still expensive to put anything in space, so…
“B. Intelligent Life, sentience, will be either technologically inferior or superior to ours.
C. If we discover b, if Inferior, i think we’ll do the Human thing and conquer and subvert the species of sentient beings so they never become a threat, if Superior, i think someone’s gonna fuck up like they did in Babylon 5 when the Human’s fired on the Minbari flagship and kill their leader (because they misunderstood that races customs) and there will be war anyway”
The concept of “war” with aliens is incomprehensible. As you say, we’re never going to meet a species with the same technologies/faculties as ours, only those who are far ahead of or behind us. Our current situation is so fleeting as to be unnoticable on an evolutionary or geological timescale. Civilisation (in any form) has existed for less than 10% of our history as a species so far (c. 10,000 vs. 100,000 to 500,000 years) and 0.0002% of the history of our sun so far (c. 10,000 vs. c. 5,000,000,000 years). And most of the last 10,000 years of civilisation is incomparable to ours now. If we ever meet any aliens, the chances of them being anything close to us is negligible. Like I pointed out in a post yesterday: It’s not the likelihood of intelligent life on a star that matters, it’s the likelihood of intelligent life at any particular time!
Our species has many examples of contact with unrecognisably different cultures: There was probably never a war between our species and neanderthals, our ancestors most likely just took up their space and killed them when they became dangerous, the same way they might have treated a group of bears or lions. When the UK colonised Australia, they didn’t “enslave” or “wage war” on the Aboriginals… They were irrelevant! If they became a threat, they were culled! Any contact with hunter-gatherer or animal aliens would be similar.
But… Things might not be so bad: Mankind is in the slow process of recognising the moral value of different beings. We have always justified the mistreatment of others based upon arbitrary distinctions between “them and us.” Previously common distinctions would have been culture, sex and race: To a British colonist in Australia an Aboriginal didn’t count because he was dark skinned and uncivilised. Today those criteria could never be used to justify mistreatment. Peter_Singer argues that we should stop using other criteria that are still common, such as intelligence and species. Every day millions of beings are killed for the enjoyment of humans, just because they are less intelligent or “have no souls” … Animals! Humans don’t ^need^ to eat animals to survive (In fact: Vegetarians live longer on average, and crop > meat > consumption farming is a huge waste of land and energy compared to direct crop > consumption farming), so we only eat meat because we ^like^ to! Meanwhile for every roast chicken eaten a being had to die, justified solely by its different species. Animals may be unintelligent, short-lived, generic, (possibly) not self-aware, and unable to speak, but the same goes for human babies! What matters is their ability to feel pain and their desire to stay alive. Maybe we will have stopped ignoring the welfare of other species before we meet any aliens who we (or our super-advanced future equivalents) think of as animals. And if any super-advanced aliens find us, and see our 21st century society as animal-like… let’s hope they’ve done the same. With a bit of luck, things might not be so bad.
February 17th, 2008 at 11:00 am
I didn’t realize that the response interface does not like images. That was supposed to be a picture of the famous “I Want to Believe” poster. Because I really do want to believe that intelligent life is out there, and that maybe it’s closer than we think. Maybe I’m an optimist. Maybe I’m delusional. Maybe I just want to get off this rock. Intelligent or not, finding any other life out there will be absolutely phenomenal. The trick is not accidentally killing it.
Just a few notes on some other comments:
“On the topic of Extraterrestrial life, I think it would be interesting if the world we visited was just a developing life, of the caveman persuasion. We would be their mythological deities, the gods. Who came from the heavens with the gift of fire and sewing.” Jef, I think Stargate SG-1 proves why that is a bad idea…
“Even if aliens used only tight-beam communication, wouldn’t we expect to see signs of colonization and megascale engineering - Dyson spheres, say?” Felix: No, actually, we wouldn’t, because a Dyson Sphere would block out most of the light coming from a star, so to us it would like a very big, very dim body…like a dying red giant…and, thus, a very unlikely candidate for extraterrestrial life.
“Calvin & Hobbes: ‘I think the surest sign that there’s intelligent life is that none of it has tried to contact us.’” Cesium: True, so true.
February 17th, 2008 at 11:32 am
Force42: My “Dyson spheres explaining dark matter” post was intended humorously. Looking back I really should have made that more obvious. Sorry guys, I just feel so cheap putting a “lol” or a ” :) ” at the end of a post.
February 17th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
“I was under the impression that the equation had a factor for the amount of time a civilization could be detected. Upon further research, it’s L, the (second to) last term.”
Ack, what I was trying to say was that, when computed, when trying to take account of the time frame involved, I don’t think we’d get the usually cited 3000 some alien civilizations that should be out there at any given time. The math isn’t working in my head, but that’s not necessarily a good proof, I fully confess. Granted, that specific number comes from Warren Ellis’ solution to the equation, and he is definition not a mathematician, and is a little crazy at times.
Sorry for the confusion!
February 17th, 2008 at 2:55 pm
“Sorry guys, I just feel so cheap putting a “lol” or a ” :) ” at the end of a post.”
I’m a fan of using (insert hilarity here) or (big fat sarcasm sign), for example.
February 17th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
At first I assumed that the latest comic was in reference to this article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/15/science/space/15planets.html?ref=science
But no one even mentioned it. It seems like it’s the best information so far on possible life-bearing extra solar planets. Just thought y’all would like to read it.
February 17th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
Peter, I believe Mollishka mentioned it.
Testing if HTML works.
February 17th, 2008 at 7:05 pm
Our sample size for “intelligent species” is one. Maybe. Two if you want to count dolphins, zero if you suspect any species that finds the doings of Britney Spears newsworthy, doesn’t quite make it as “intelligent”, even if it can do basic reasoning.
Bottom line, we do NOT have enough information to speculate about how common “thinking life” is, or any kind of life at all. We could be it. We could be just one of a billion examples. I see no way to chose between these possibilities. Until we come across anything that replicates, and didn’t come from Earth, there’s no basis for discussion.
Especially, discussing radio waves and laser transmission… c’mon. Radio doesn’t work over long distances, period. Laser travels at c, and if you have a limited lifespan, that’s an annoyingly slow way to chat over interstellar distances. But even that begs all sorts of questions. Would another species want to communicate with others? Maybe they are self-sufficient and have nothing to say to others. Because they’re locked into the same sort of patterns of conflict and hatred that humans are, and worked out that being noisy and attracting neighbors, will just bring more troubles to their own door. Maybe they communicate routinely, but we don’t recognize it as structured information because they think nothing like us at all (if they live for a billion years, and form a syllable every couple centuries, would we figure it out? Doubt it.) And maybe there’s just nobody home but us.
There’s no data, people. And there’s plenty of stuff on THIS world yet to figure out - like how to get along, how to produce energy without hurting ourselves, and what cos(heart) is.
February 17th, 2008 at 7:18 pm
Kobra writes:
Rob: “Why would the smartest being to ever exist create an entire universe and put life on only ONE planet?”
Girl: “I- I never thought of it that way.”
Because it pleased Him? Speculating without any data, about the motives of something so intelligent that it can speak a word and form a cosmos, is pretty hopeless. Unless He chooses to tell us why he did something, we’re unlikely to figure it out. For all you know, God’s got a couple trillion universes whipped up, with an intelligent species tucked into each - safely separated from each other, so they can develop to their full potential without interference. Perfectly plausible, as far as anyone knows…. Sure, “entire universe” sounds big, but what’s big, to God? This “argument” suffers very badly from a failure to operate on the scale of its own subject.
February 17th, 2008 at 8:24 pm
I’d settle for finding life. Wouldn’t it be fascinating enough to see something that has evolved within it’s own surroundings, with it’s own unique environment acting as the vague blueprints to building an alien life-form? Of course incapable of sharing some supposedly incredibly advanced technology, but would herald new discoveries of it’s own. Oh and many times less likely to wage war.
Also, how do you assess a technology more advanced than our own? I believe if there is another technological pathline, then it would be tangential to our own.
February 17th, 2008 at 9:20 pm
“Bottom line, we do NOT have enough information to speculate about how common “thinking life” is, or any kind of life at all. We could be it. We could be just one of a billion examples. I see no way to chose between these possibilities. Until we come across anything that replicates, and didn’t come from Earth, there’s no basis for discussion.”
But because we’re the only model for us to look at, there’s no point in speculating about other forms of intelligence. There are too many possibilities to search the universe for signs of any of them. So we have to go with something we know can evolve to intelligence - i.e. us.
“I’d settle for finding life. Wouldn’t it be fascinating enough to see something that has evolved within it’s own surroundings, with it’s own unique environment acting as the vague blueprints to building an alien life-form? Of course incapable of sharing some supposedly incredibly advanced technology, but would herald new discoveries of it’s own. Oh and many times less likely to wage war.”
The temptation to interfere would, I fear, be too great, Prime Directive notwithstanding.
February 18th, 2008 at 4:05 am
I find it hard to believe that in over 13 billion years we would be the first sentient life to be bred by the(our) universe. The more time I spend thinking(and reading) the more the Fermi paradox bothers me. I look for explanations of why we don’t see sparkles of life all around us. The most plausible to me is a Gamma Ray Burst capable of wiping out all but the most primitive life.
Someone previously mentioned: “Why do we assume any extraterrestrial life is more advanced than us?”
What if this is the mean time it takes to produce a sentient civilization?
We could be on the horizon of major discovery, or the most disappointing (and frightening) realization that we’re all alone in the night.
Thoughts?
February 18th, 2008 at 5:08 am
I think the chances of us ever actually encountering or communicating with alien life in our lifetimes are unfortunately nigh-on-impossible - we’ve only had radio for about 100 years, and think about how long we’ve been around in galactic terms. science as a whole has barely started, and already we’re cutting down on the random crap we’re sending out there, so what are the chances of us being within communicable distance at the same technological level at the same time? - then there’s the fact that space is just seriously huge, which obviously gets in the way of everything.
you should read some of stephen baxter’s manifold series, if you haven’t already. it’s all up in the fermi paradox.
February 18th, 2008 at 9:35 am
Thinking about water on Mars…there is evidence to believe that the water found on Mars, the moon, and indeed asteroids and comets, all comes from the Earth. The same theory that explains this (The Hydroplate Theory) also provides compelling evidence for there being a gigantic planet-wide event at some point in the Earth’s history…involving lots of water, and eventually a flood.
I’ve just recently discovered this theory, and after nearly making my way through the book that describes it, I have to say it raises some interesting questions.
http://www.creationscience.com is the place to look if you’re interested.
February 18th, 2008 at 10:05 am
In reply to Alex Jones who said that if we ever had physical contact with aliens, we would both drop dead from the diseases we each had:
It’s very rare for viruses to move from species to species, and viruses work on the basis of cell replication. Who’s to say that aliens will have DNA like us? who’s to say they’ll even have cells? I think it is extraordinarily unlikely that any form of virus would ever be compatible between intergalactic species.
February 18th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
Amy: http://www.youtube.com/Roswell73 watch his videos before you decide whether you want to hang out with that psycho or not :P.
February 18th, 2008 at 3:40 pm
some things to consider …
Here on earth, we are living on the freaking cold end of the possible temperature spectrum. What’s to say that there are not other forms of ‘life’ that have adapted to live in higher heat ranges? Perhaps they check out all the suns for life, and ignore the surrounding planets as too cold (just as we ignore the suns).
If there is life on a planet similar to ours, what is the likelihood that cells and so forth would have evolved - do we know if cell-based organisms are a universal constant, or are they an evolutionary chance? Even our earth is something like a cell .. soft on the inside, a cell wall on the outside. Maybe one of these aons it will split into two. (joking!!)
On the subject of religion, since it’s been brought up - this is where it’s cool to be a mormon, since they basically have scripture that says - there is intelligent life on other planets, including the gods (as if there would only be one) who somehow visited earth and populated it with intelligence. (to all the naysayers, just remember that their god isn’t omni-whatever, so there can be more than one).
My personal theology currently involves aliens .. I mean, if you’re going to believe something crazy, it might as well be something cool.
February 18th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
“Here on earth, we are living on the freaking cold end of the possible temperature spectrum. What’s to say that there are not other forms of ‘life’ that have adapted to live in higher heat ranges? Perhaps they check out all the suns for life, and ignore the surrounding planets as too cold (just as we ignore the suns).”
But we can’t possibly check every cubic meter of the galaxy for life. We haven’t found any signs of self-regulating organization in, for example, gaseous environments, more complex than the Great Red Spot. Again, we’re the only example of intelligence we have, so we’re better off looking for types of life we know can exist.
February 18th, 2008 at 4:39 pm
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/02/080219-planets-life.html
Yes, look away from the solar system… AWAY, we say!
February 18th, 2008 at 11:41 pm
Note- It would appear I accidentally went on a rant, if anyone actually reads this comment, they can stop after the first paragraph if they get bored. If not, cool.
It is interesting how people so often generalize their concept of “intelligence” and the forms life must take. Unless you are a fundamentalist, “intelligence” can be defined as the complexity and efficiency of ones central nervous system. But then again even in the possibly infinitesimally small sample of human beings, the absence of a microscopic clump of DNA cold result in anywhere from a negligible defect to making the organism incapable of sustaining its own life.
If we consider this variability in human beings, along with the disconnection people feel with organisms as close to them as bears (on a universal level bears are practically our identical twins I should think), then we can only begin to imagine how foreign and unrecognizable life on other planets would be. Beyond recognizing something as “life”, we would further be faced with the challenge of deciding if it is “intelligent”. From a rock’s perspective, a blade of grass is intelligent, and from the perspective of a void, a rock could be an unimaginably sophisticated life form. So how would it be possible for a race as focused in its consideration of intelligence as humans (who see even mildly retarded individuals as “retarded” and as complex a thing as a bear to be incapable of self awareness) to accept a race that developed on another _planet_ altogether as intelligent?
I personally think that the mere concept of finding even microscopic life, let alone an “intelligent” civilization, would be one of if not the most significant discoveries in the history of science, especially considering that if there are two places in which life as we know it arises in the area of space we can explore (or if found in the seas of Europa then even in the same solar system), then the universe must be filled with life, which is a very significant thing to know.
But again, one needs to realize some of the issues with alien life. For a final example, look at bugs. People are almost universally disgusted by bugs, and the bigger they are the more grotesque and terrifying they are. For example, even someone who is fairly tolerant, and who would set a spider or a moth outside, would think very differently if a moth that is 2 feet long, and as detailed in all its features as its magnified size would imply, were to fly or crawl in front of their head. Many people have or imagine nightmares of waking up to find normal or magnified insects in their bed, and find even imagining such things terrifying. It seems that this fear of bugs comes from the fact that bugs are so basically different from humans or mammals. Although their body shapes are similar in the presence of eyes, a head, and legs, the antennae, fuzz, black giant eyes, wings, and various other features seem to make them completely foreign. Yet this effect would seem silly when one sees that people too have eyelashes, different types of hair, oily skin, etc. So if people are so terrified of something that must on a universal scale be very similar to them, it seems unlikely that they would respond well to life that comes from another planet. Unless of course it is so different that it in fact is beyond recognition as a life form, and so would less commonly have more effect than a bar of soap. But that’s just my opinion.
February 19th, 2008 at 12:35 am
If you count dolphins and Britney, there is one intelligent species On Earth. Remember Monty Python?
“I hope there is intelligent life up there cause there’s bugger all down here”
February 19th, 2008 at 12:49 am
Life by who’s definition?
February 19th, 2008 at 3:10 am
Funny how what I said 2 replies up can be so easily summarized by Nix’s post…
February 19th, 2008 at 11:24 am
Right, well, there are many ways to define intelligence, beyond the merely biological (nervous system complexity). For example, awareness of the thinking ability of oneself and others. However, I imagine this would be difficult to assess when we don’t know if we could even communicate effectively with aliens. I agree, finding life alone would be worth it.
February 19th, 2008 at 1:09 pm
It makes no sense at all to believe in the new testament without believing in the old one, Jef.
Either Jesus of Nazareth was the fulfillment of millenia of Judaic mystical prophecy, or he wasn’t. Without the context of the old covenant, there can’t be the new covenant that Jesus purported to create. Even new “Christian” prophecy - Israel back to the Jews, the reconstruction of the temple, the second coming of the first Messiah - it’s all related to that old testament.
As far as I can tell, it’s all a bunch of horse puckey; prophecy always IS a bunch of horse puckey.
But nothing gets me madder than so-called “Christians” who don’t understand their own religion, wouldn’t agree with it if they did, and therefore substitute this lite, lo-calorie pablum version of it that basically boils down to “Be nice and have faith in Me”.
February 19th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
I have a sneaking suspicion that the same comic could have been made with Bayes as the punchline…
February 19th, 2008 at 4:48 pm
read “they’re made of meat” by terry bisson:
http://www.terrybisson.com/meat.html
not me, but brilliant.
February 19th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
“I have a sneaking suspicion that the same comic could have been made with Bayes as the punchline?”
Probably not.
February 19th, 2008 at 9:16 pm
Multi-celled organisms lived on earth for a billion years or so. Dinosaurs dominated the earth for about 150 million years. Humanoids (more or less) began to evolve about 1.5 million years ago. Modern man has been around for *maybe* 50,000 years. Radio transmission was discovered/invented about 100 years ago. We’ve been looking for extraterrestrials for maybe 20 years.
Of COURSE we’re unlikely to detect any life in space using these methods. No two solar systems cooled and developed at precisely the same time. For any system in proximity to ours, we’re almost certain to be out-of-sync by millions of years. And as others have pointed out, even mankind has found better means of exchanging information than radio waves.
We have a much better chance of winning the lottery, even with the best of the new radio & optic telescopes, than of detecting life on other nearby planets.
February 20th, 2008 at 2:24 am
It is true that we’re unlikely to stumble upon incidental ET communication. There is always the chance, though, that others are looking for life, as well. It isn’t that unreasonable. If there are civilzations more advanced than us, then they would have much better methods of looking for us. Ideally, they would also assume that possible life could be less advanced, and listen for more primitive communication; here’s to hoping that their communication evoltuion paralleled our own.
How cool would it be if one day some other planet’s equivalent to our ‘Voyager’ came smashing into Earth? Erm, as long as it was an unpopulated area.
February 20th, 2008 at 3:26 am
There are is one big assumption that alien life depends on: Evolution has a goal.
It dosen’t. Evolution is a word which sould be forbidden, because it creates a false picture of itself.
What we call ‘Evolution’ is nothing but a series of errors in genetic code which get passed on to the next generation. For better or for worse. When a species ‘Evolves’ those errors have accumulated to the point that they affect the majority of the species.
Look at us- who does the most breeding? Who’s genetic code get’s passed on the most? Not the acidemics. Look at your average university student- no children, but can name several classmates who didn’t go to any higher education and are pregnant.
Perhaps we are on the peak of devolopment for a species- that moment just before a species breeds inteligence out of itself. Where the concentious are careful and introspective about birth controll, and the impulsive and stupid ignore it.
February 20th, 2008 at 7:52 am
Come on! Evolution is a “theory” that was developed by a theologian named Charles in the days when they thought that cells were made of some structureless mud called protoplasm; and to this day it has no meaningful scientific evidence despite its academic acceptance and popularity.
You get it? He was a theologian!! And named like the son of Queen Elizabeth!
Until we find some agent in the Universe that can oppose the enthropy laws and create higher order from chaos (and no, freemasons don’t count); I personally find it more probable that the Universe and life are a product of Intellgient Design.
Yes that’s right; this whole Universe can’t just be the product of chance events that are mathematically remote. So maybe this Designer may have entertained the idea of life on more planets than ours.
If He’s crazy enough to contemplate the idea of making an existent universe, then maybe he made aliens.
With regard to the comic about the Drake Equation I have to fully agree with the humor! The formula is a clearly a product of speculation, not of any meaningful observation.
All the plantes we’re discovering outside our solar system are Exo-planets, meaning they are mainly masses of gas like Jupiter and Saturn.
For this reason I find myself biased towards the idea that life on other planets is either inexistent, not carbon based or not so well developed.
Regarding the subject of chance of Earth-like life and ET Intelligence I’d recommend searching video.google.com for a 1hr movie called ‘Priviledged Planet’. It has some interesting points to consider.
February 20th, 2008 at 8:05 am
Atlan, you are implying that university students just don’t have children. Your average student doesn’t have children because most people don’t have children at that age. Most students will go on to have children.
You also assume that intelligence is completely determined by genetics. I know lots of people who have stupid parents but are very intelligent.
Even if there is a high correlation with genetics and intelligence, evolution occurs fastest in small, isolated groups with short life spans. Evolution is occuring incredibly slowly, if at all in humans now. Even if we are breeding ourselves into stupidity, it probably won’t occur for millions of years - by which time we will have realised this and done something about it, or died out.
Personally I believe that most people have the capacity for high intelligence (and genetics has very little to do with it) and that it is our limited teaching methods and our concept of intelligence that holds us back.
“Perhaps we are on the peak of devolopment for a species” If you are referring to a genetic peak, I doubt this. Evolution may have stopped for humans, but we will almost certainly start altering our genes in the future to reduce disease and illness, probably to improve physical and mental capacity and possibly for cosmetic reasons.
February 20th, 2008 at 8:21 am
Ok, Mark, there really is overwhelming scientific evidence for evolution, and its really quite a fantasic idea.
I’m not disputing a creator made the universe, but if he did then he almost certainly implemented evolution as part of it.
Although Darwin lived in a time of limited biological understanding, he actually didn’t describe how evolution might work - he literally had no idea. He simply observed creatures around him and came up with a theory.
Its a theory that can help us understand how lots of biological processes work, the fact the we have (allegedly) evolved from the same genetic material as other creatures allows us to find cures for diseases using other animals with similar genes. Just like theories of gravity, mechanics and aerodynamics allow us to build aeroplanes that fly.
The theory of intelligent design might be the real one, but it doesn’t help us accomplish anything, and for that I consider it less valuable.
February 20th, 2008 at 10:45 am
“No, the theorem states that a spherical shell creates no net gravitational field within it. The sun’s own gravity would still act on the sphere and keep it in equilibrium - although I’m not sure of the stability.”
Uh, no, it wouldn’t. This is elementary celestial mechanics. No matter where you position an object within a hollow rigid sphere, its net gravitational pull in all directions cancel out on the sphere. If the star is closer to one arbitrary side, it will, by virtue of proximity, exert a stronger pull on that side. However, now there’s more of the sphere on the other side, which although further away, has greater mass. Newton proved that it always cancels to zero. Anything in the sphere is free-floating relative to the sphere. There is no equilibrium to be had.
If you actually do the calculations, you will see. A Dyson sphere is unstable, will drift relative to the star, and is impossible to keep centered. Even a physics undergraduate should have a clear enough understanding of Newton to figure this out.
February 20th, 2008 at 11:28 am
The theory of intelligent design might be the real one,
I doubt it, Darwin’s theory of evolution was a reaction to the then accepted theory of “natural theology” (which got relabelled “intelligent design” by people wiht more money than scientific cojones), which is why he spends a large part of Origin debunking things like the watchmaker hypothesis and why it took him a couple of decades for him to gather enough evidence for him to be happy in the theory’s correctness. Evolutioin replaced ID as the “accepted theory”, and I somehow doubt ID’s gonna suddenly turn out to have been correct all along.
Here on earth, we are living on the freaking cold end of the possible temperature spectrum. What’s to say that there are not other forms of ‘life’ that have adapted to live in higher heat ranges?
Actually according to Asimov (who was a skilled biochemist remember) the only chemical basis for life that would require hotter temperatures than our own is pretty much a molten sulfur/carbon based one.
On the flip side however liquid ammonia, methane or even hydrogen all offer chemical enviroments where life might emerge but which we aren’t really looking at because it’s “ouside the habital zone” for the terracentric conception of life due to the low low temperatures (or high pressures) required for each.
And that’s just life forms with a carbon based chemical structure.
Blood Levitz? posing miss? recaptcha is very goth today
February 20th, 2008 at 12:45 pm
= basically stick a power producing chemical reaction in that doesn’t actually destroy the area it occurred in and you’ll likely get something that can use it eventually =
Chernobyl (dunno if it’s spelled right) has produced fungus that feds off radioactivity. I think life is possible as long as chemical reactions can take place and enough time is given.
February 20th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
“There are is one big assumption that alien life depends on: Evolution has a goal.
It dosen’t. Evolution is a word which sould be forbidden, because it creates a false picture of itself.”
Actually, evolve means to unroll. Nothing about a goal.
Plus, we evolved intelligence, didn’t we? Intelligence is a survival trait, not perhaps the best one, but who’s to say alien ecologies, once strength, speed, size are taken up, won’t develop intelligent species?
“Yes that’s right; this whole Universe can’t just be the product of chance events that are mathematically remote. So maybe this Designer may have entertained the idea of life on more planets than ours.”
Anthropic principle. If the Universe couldn’t support life, we wouldn’t be around to see it. Plus, probabilities are useless unless you don’t know whether an event happens, which obviously we do, because the Universe is here. Your argument is like flipping ten coins, getting HTTHTHHTHH, and saying “That outcome has a probability of 1/1024. It couldn’t have happened on its own, so something made it happen that way.”
“With regard to the comic about the Drake Equation I have to fully agree with the humor! The formula is a clearly a product of speculation, not of any meaningful observation.”
The equation wasn’t designed to be accurate. How could it be? We’ve observed exactly one intelligent species on one life-sustaining planet around one star in one galaxy. Obviously it’s speculative. It’s a way of separating at the factors so one can examine them and perhaps estimate. No point in claiming it’s anything more.
“Uh, no, it wouldn’t. This is elementary celestial mechanics. No matter where you position an object within a hollow rigid sphere, its net gravitational pull in all directions cancel out on the sphere.”
Sorry, my mistake. Hm, by Newton’s third law, if the shell exerts no force on the Sun, the Sun can exert no force on the shell… correct?
February 20th, 2008 at 9:47 pm
Regarding Cesium’s observations on the Drake equation….
*”The equation wasn?t designed to be accurate. How could it be? We?ve observed exactly one intelligent species on one life-sustaining planet around one star in one galaxy.”*
There is one set of observations that we have access to that might get around the fact that we’re limited to a single planet - palaeontology.
We have a sketchy record that goes back more than 3,500,000,000 years. We only have one life-sustaining planet to observe, but on that planet, life appeared as soon as there were rocks capable of recording traces of life. It seems to have sprung up instantly (in a geological sense).
This could still be a single observation sitting at the bottom end of a bell curve, but i find it pretty impressive somehow.
((Also, Mark wrote: “All the plantes we?re discovering outside our solar system are [...] mainly masses of gas like Jupiter and Saturn.” May I just point out that we’re only discovering those types of planets because those are the only types of planets we *can* discover. If we find a technique for finding Earth-sized planets around Sun-like stars (rather than pulsars), then i’m sure we’ll find squillions of them.))
February 20th, 2008 at 9:51 pm
“This could still be a single observation sitting at the bottom end of a bell curve, but i find it pretty impressive somehow.”
…just to clarify why it ought to be impressive when it’s still a sample size of 1 - it’s the only observation that gets around the anthropic principle.
February 21st, 2008 at 3:28 am
“May I just point out that we’re only discovering those types of planets because those are the only types of planets we *can* discover.”
Right — they’re at the edge of becoming stars, so they’re the ones we can see, or infer from their gravity, most readily.
February 21st, 2008 at 4:53 am
In the search for life in the universe I have come the conclusion that we should just start seeding planets with bacteria. Then there would be life on other planets. Seriously, I find myself wanting to build a rocket and just plant life forms on other planets. If no one ever finds out about my rocket then many peoples dreams will have come true.
Don’t know why we feel we have to keep the universe pristine anyways. We should experiment. For science!
(really I just want to own a dinosaur ranch on mars)
February 21st, 2008 at 12:24 pm
I think it’s more likely that they intentionally avoid talking to us.
Seriously, humanity is dangerously intelligent *and* barbaric at the same time. In the last 70 years, we’ve built (and used) a bomb which renders thousands of square miles uninhabitable; a quick perusal of the airwaves reveals that we hate each other on the basis of skin color, geographic location, choice universally omnipotent yet conspicuously absent deities, where we place our naughty bits, etc.
If I were smarter than us, I’d stay the hell away from us. Who knows what the presence of a super-intelligent, technically superior being would do to those who crave power on this planet? What would it do to people who’ve been waiting for the return of Jesus Christ (et al)?
February 21st, 2008 at 12:43 pm
I tend to disagree with the idea that humans, as intelligent + violent beings, are some kind of horrible aberration (like in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy where we nearly destroy the planet and the Oankali step in to basically keep us as pets).
Competition drives innovation, and it’s hard to imagine a perfectly peaceful civilization being motivated to go anywhere very fast. Like the ancient Taoist ideal of the village where everyone’s so content, they don’t even want to hike over the hill into the next village.
Re: Jesus Christ and aliens - has anyone else read Ray Bradbury’s cantata “Christus Apollo”? As a Christian, biologist, and SF fan, I find the ideas in it really appealing.
February 21st, 2008 at 1:21 pm
I think we will just be driven to explore, no matter how peaceful and content we are. But of course I can’t speak for other species.
“In the search for life in the universe I have come the conclusion that we should just start seeding planets with bacteria. Then there would be life on other planets. Seriously, I find myself wanting to build a rocket and just plant life forms on other planets. If no one ever finds out about my rocket then many peoples dreams will have come true.”
And then they’ll say, “Hey, wait. This is E. coli. What’s it doing on Epsilon Eridani?”
February 21st, 2008 at 1:32 pm
Excellent cartoon - I’m going to use it in a talk someday :)
Imaging Extrasolar Planets - it *is* possible to image a massive extrasolar planet around a nearby star. The diffraction limit of most ground based telescopes with an adaptive optics could split a 10 Jupiter mass planet in orbit around a nearby (less than 10 parsec distant) star, if the system is young enough.
The planet will look like a dot of light and you won’t resolve the surface, but you CAN see it.
And as for the Dyson sphere - if the inside of the sphere is even slightly reflective, anyone on the inside surface of the sphere will see a neat optical effect as the star drifts out from the center - a ‘ghost sun’ image will appear at the other focus of the inside of the sphere, as the geometry will approximate the twin foci of an ellipsoid.
In fact, that’s your solution there. Have lots of mirrors that are shiny on one side and that cover a tunnel that passes out through to the outside of the sphere. If the star drifts towards your side, cover the tunnels with mirrors and photon pressure pushes you back into position.
Heck, make a Dyson ellipsoid and stick the star at one focus - presto! Two stars for the flux of one ;-)
Thanks for the comics!
Cheers,
Matt
February 21st, 2008 at 9:10 pm
first of all forgive me if someone has already said this, i’ve only read a quarter of the posts…
even if advanced civilizations have discovered FTL communication, im sure they would still use radio for everyday stuff. If they are as curious as we are and are actively searching for us they will send out radio signals hoping to find less advanced civilizations.
people tend to think that if intelligent life has created FTL travel we would have already been visited by them, but think about it this way, how long did it take after the boat was invented for us to go to every single island on earth? i ‘m pretty sure that even with FTL drive the chances of aliens bumping into us looking for habitable plants are rare.
If there isn’t a way to travel faster than light, that doesn’t mean that there are no galactic civilizations. taking 100 years to reach a destination doesn’t mean that its unreachable, so as long as chryo-genetic freezing is possible, there will be intersolar travel. at the very worst there will be city sized Ark-ships, which will bring the descendants of the travelers to the destination, which would really only be practical if the goal was colonization
February 21st, 2008 at 9:47 pm
Ben, radio waves ARE light waves, just a different frequency. It’s all electromagnetic radiation that travels at the same speed. The longer the wavelength the less interference there is, making radio our best bet. (anything from gamma rays to most ultraviolet gets absorbed by our atmosphere) We’ve detected many radio sources all over the universe (they’re called quasars), but they don’t come from planets, they come from super-massive black holes that are ripping apart other stars and producing light in the process. Just wanted to let you know, but I agree with you on Jupiter’s moons being our first discovery of life.
On a separate note: A lot of people don’t realize that when we look to the sky we are looking to the past. When you see a star 10 light years away, you see it as it was 10 years ago. When we look at other galaxies we don’t see them as they are today. On the reverse side, if intelligent life forms were searching for us and they lived a thousand light years away they would see Earth as it was a thousand years ago. Now imagine a few million light years, they would have probably moved on already and quit on us.
February 21st, 2008 at 11:39 pm
On the topic of “powerful uncompressed signals”, Greg Egan has an interesting and sort of relevant story by the name of “Riding the Crocodile”.
http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/INCANDESCENCE/00/Crocodile.html
Phil
February 22nd, 2008 at 1:48 am
[...] The drake equation [xkcd][wikipedia][related: aliens xkcd blag] > Fermi and Frost by Pohl (Hugo short story 1985) > Cats can has grammar [lingua [...]
February 22nd, 2008 at 11:50 am
if aliens communicate interstellar-ly using lasers or optical devices, what is the possibility that the message they receive are either corrupted or sniffed..
oh, and human technology must still suck since it cannot track any other alien signals other than EM waves and light thingies..
February 22nd, 2008 at 12:51 pm
“Know thou that every fixed star hath its own planets, and every planet its own creatures, whose number no man can compute.”
(Bahá’u'lláh, Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u'lláh, LXXXII, p. 162-163)
February 22nd, 2008 at 1:56 pm
First of all forgive any spelling mistake since english is not my native language :)
Randall, I definitely agree with you, and I know how these last decades have been very very frustrating in the search of alien life forms. But the answer might be that we are not looking in the correct places.
Of course, technology improvements in the last years have allowed us to discover a lot more stuff, and soon we will be able to scan the surfaces of those extra solar planets. But, the problem is WHAT we are searching for.
For instance, the life as we know it is based on carbon, and requires water to developing, and that is what scientists have been searching for in every other planet or solar system they discover, but… have you ever considered that not because our living forms are based on those elements all living forms have to be based on them?
What about possibly existing life forms based in other elements who don’t require water to live, but other elements such as mercury or nitrogen? Do other living forms have to have a solid body? How about intelligent ethereal entities that might inhabit other planets? These are things that scientists are not considering because they are so focused on searching for water and conditions similar to earth.
Space is so vast, we don’t know what more we can find out there, we don’t even know if God decided to create intelligent life on every inhabited planet to be radically different one from another in order to make it practically impossible to find each other? Do you know what would happen if we stablished constant contact with a radically different life form?
Musulmans and Christians can’t get their minds together fighting during milleniums to see who has it right, I strongly believe that if there are intelligent living forms in other planets they should also have had their prophets, and savior, and their own knowl