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.
“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…
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!
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?
“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.)
“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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
Actually, the above poster, Robin, summed up my thoughts well.
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!!
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.
Francis Drake: Sort of like J. P. Morgan then (actually two people)?
“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.
You inspired my latest blog post: http://things.auditblogs.com/2008/02/17/the-drake-equation/
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.
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…
“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.
“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.
You guys need to all read some Jack McDevitt
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”.
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.
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.
[img]http://phillyist.com/attachments/philly_jim/i-want-to-believe.jpg[/img]
“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.
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.
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.
“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!
“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.
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.
Peter, I believe Mollishka mentioned it.
Testing if HTML works.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Amy: http://www.youtube.com/Roswell73 watch his videos before you decide whether you want to hang out with that psycho or not :P.
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.
“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.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/02/080219-planets-life.html
Yes, look away from the solar system… AWAY, we say!
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.
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”
Life by who’s definition?
Funny how what I said 2 replies up can be so easily summarized by Nix’s post…
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.