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Stephen Hawking Thinks Aliens Likely
Posted by
timothy
on Tue Apr 22, 2008 08:31 AM
from the they-think-much-the-same dept.
from the they-think-much-the-same dept.
OMNIpotusCOM writes "Noted astrophysicist Stephen Hawking thinks that alien life is likely, albeit primitive, according to a lecture delivered at George Washington University in honor of NASA's 50th anniversary. It begs the question of if we need to consider a Prime Directive before exploring or sending signals too far into the depths of space."
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Why is this newsworthy? (Score:4, Insightful)
Hawking has said this before earlier as well. Just because he makes the same statement again instantly makes this news??
Come on the Drake Equation has been around for a long time now guys.
But...but... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:But...but... (Score:5, Informative)
Justin.
* "sending signals too far into the depths of space" - see 'inverse square law' and 'size of solar system', not to mention 'microwave background'
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Re:Why is this newsworthy? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Why is this newsworthy? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Why is this newsworthy? (Score:5, Informative)
What this means is that in an infinite universe that has totally random initial conditions, every possible state will be realized somewhere. That means that somewhere in the universe, conditions very similar to our local conditions will be realized. Not only does this mathematically guarantee that life exists somwhere, but also that "copies" of Earth and you and me exist somewhere. All possible variants of matter organization are realized somewhere in the infinite universe (and in fact may be repeated over and over). Of course, the distances over which you will see a repeat may be fantastically large (much, much larger than the observable universe, for instance). Also, life-forms in causally-disconnected volumes can never communicate with each other. (So you may say... who cares?)
In any case, it's not known with certainty that the universe is infinite (or that the big bang was ergodic)... but our current theories allow for models where the multiple emergence of life (and all physically reasonable variants) is in fact mathematically guaranteed. Kinda interesting.
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Re:Why is this newsworthy? (Score:5, Funny)
But we'll have goatees.
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Re:Why is this newsworthy? (Score:4, Funny)
It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.
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Re:Why is this newsworthy? (Score:4, Insightful)
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No begging (Score:4, Informative)
No, it doesn't [begthequestion.info]. There. Got that out of the way.
Re:No begging (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Not only does the old usage hardly exist anymore, but when you try to use it people have no idea what you are talking about.
Language changes.
Re:No begging (Score:5, Insightful)
The view that language is good enough as long as it is fairly likely to get the point across is - even putting aside that it is usually harder to parse incorrect, intelligible writing than correct prose - antithetical to the "standards" culture espoused on Slashdot. It is the permissive, lackadaisical Internet Explorer approach to HTML. And it is born, I fear, of the average nerd's mediocre ability in his own language, and his desire to change the rules to suit his own lack of interest in a discipline at least as complex, and millennia older, than his own - that of effective communication. Put down the Knuth, pick up the Fowler, and learn to express yourself as elegantly to your fellow man as you might to your computer.
Anyway, I've met no reasonably educated man who does not know the correct usage of "beg the question". A few minutes ago I was reading a book published in the last decade which employed it correctly. Had the author wished to indicate that a particular question was "raised", he would have done so. While I'm here:
Here endeth the rant.
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Re:No begging (Score:4, Informative)
This usage of 'begets' was somewhat common in 18th c. English. Take a look at Hume, Enquiry, sec. XII, pgh. 2 [eserver.org]
Belloc
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Re:No begging (Score:4, Funny)
You stil don't have it right. "I bought a soda for your wife, and a double shot of rum for myself, because your wife is so fugly that even drunk, she scares me!"
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Re:No begging (Score:5, Funny)
Fixed that for you.
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Prime Directive? (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean seriously -- if we think our technology and culture is okay for the entire planet, why should we stop here?
okk.. (Score:5, Funny)
You're absolutely right! We should definitely set hold back on all the space exploration we've been doing. Also, we should set physical limits for our transmissions to "expire" after a certain distance, so we don't send them "too far". In fact, that would be the only responsible thing to do for Masters of the Universe such as us.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
we should set physical limits for our transmissions to "expire" after a certain distance
New York - April 22, 2008 - The RIAA/MPAA today announced a new initiative targetting so-called "transmission sharing." A spokesperson for the group is quoted as saying "just because an intelligent alien signal has been put out there - illegally - in the public domain doesn't mean the recording label doesn't deserve their fair cut of the action." As with the ongoing file-sharing battle, technology will play a pivotal role in the battle against transmission sharers. Several not-for-profit SETI organizations
Directive Prime (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No (Score:5, Insightful)
Hawking isn't an astrobiologist (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Hawking isn't an astrobiologist (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Hawking isn't an astrobiologist (Score:4, Insightful)
Parasites and diseases which are common in household animals seldom accept human as a host. Furthermore, I have never been infected by a tree fungus. I guess they don't find me favorable for symbiosis.
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Prime Directive my shiny metal ass! (Score:4, Funny)
Humans are designed to trade, travel and exploit resources. Then move on when there are too many tourists.
Frankly, I'm surprised there isn't aready a Prime Directive that reads:
"See that blue/green planet with all the space junk and EM noise? You want to leave that one well alone!"
Re:Prime Directive my shiny metal ass! (Score:4, Informative)
Yes. Two episodes of TNG come to mind and they illustrate the Prime Directive. I don't know the names of the episodes (and too lazy to look them up) but here are their descriptions.
The first involved Riker being found out while on a mission to make contact with a civilization that was beginning space exploration. The actress who played Lillith is the female doctor who realizes what he is and wants to hump him at every opportunity (no argument from me). In the end, Picard meets with their leader and is asked not to return until the people are ready for the fact that there are other beings in the universe.
The second involves Deanna's mother and her infatuation with David Ogden Stiers (Charles Emerson Winchester III). On his planet, when people reach a certain age, they are required to commit suicide. Deanna's mother can't come to grips with this and begs him not to go through with it. She even asks for Picard to offer him asylum. Picard refuses and things go on.
In both cases, while contact had been made, the balance of the civilizations was not upset. One could argue that in the first case, the fact that certain people knew about these visitors fundamentally changed things but since only a select few knew, the general populace went about their business none the wiser.
Personally, I think those two episodes, along with the one where Picard has to convince a group of pre-industrial people he is not a god despite his "powers", are the three episodes which best illustrate the Prime Directive and some of its permutations.
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Nope (Score:5, Funny)
The problem with Hawking's statement (Score:5, Informative)
The only problem I have with his statements at GWU is that he is focusing too much on radio waves. He is speculating that since we haven't detected any radio waves, it is unlikely that any intelligent civilization exists close to earth (and by close, I mean in astronomical measures).
In my opinion, scientists are taking too much for granted when looking for life. We assume that it is more likely to find life wherever water exists and we constantly assume that the conditions must be earth-like. And regarding the radio waves, I don't understand why an extraterrestrial civilization would even need to use such technology. It is just as likely that they communicate in entirely different ways. After all, hearing and seeing is just one way of living, but not a necessity.
I realize that radio waves occur from more than just television shows, but this is mainly the type of signals we look for since the odds of intended communications from other planets are insanely small.
Re:The problem with Hawking's statement (Score:4, Insightful)
Then it's just a matter of settling on WHICH photons to look for. Some don't work well for communications (like the visible spectrum). Some won't travel very far. We are capable of producing photons at just about any desired wavelength, and yet we've settled on a narrow range for communications.
You could argue that we don't understand the natural world completely yet, and so there could be other means of communication. This is absolutely true, but how would we look for something that we don't know about? Electromagnetic waves are so easy to detect and discover that any technologically advanced culture is bound to use them eventually.
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The Prime Directive is Evil (Score:5, Funny)
"Hello Mr. Alien. Welcome to our planet. Boy, you sure are more advanced than us!"
"Why, yes, we are, thank you. By the way, I couldn't help noticing that many of you still die from cancer."
"'Still die'? You mean you don't?"
"Oh, no, we cured that a long time ago. Same for that crooked politician thing you've got going. And war. Oh, and that thing you call 'Alzheimers', too. And global warming. We don't have any of that. They all turned out to be really simple to fix, in fact."
"Really? that's wonderful. Will you teach us how to solve these things."
"What? No, no, child, your culture isn't ready for all that. Besides, you're so cute the way you are. No, we'll just stay up in our ships and watch you figure it out. It will probably take several more generations, but that's OK, with our advanced medical technology, we will live long enough to see it... unless you wipe yourselves out in the process, that is. He he. You amuse us."
"Asshole"
Noted? (Score:4, Informative)
Ahem, I suspect he is a little more tha noted. He holds the same chair as Sir Isaac Newton did at Cambridge University, worked out how black holes work and is probably the most famous scientist in the world. Even the article [yahoo.com] says:
because the aliens compress their data stream! (Score:4, Interesting)
Plans to recognize alien signals are all based on finding redundancies in the transmission. But from the point of view of an alien signal engineer all redundancies are opportunities to save energy and transmission time by adding compression! The more compression you add, the more your signal looks like random noise. Also the aliens might be using spread spectrum techniques which make a signal even more difficult to detect.
Think of it, the FCC is already starting to require TV signals to move to digital in order to save bandwidth that can be resold to the cell phone companies. How long will it be till the FCC requires that these signals be compressed? Our signals are already becoming more difficult to detect.
Probably in the natural technical evolution of any species there is only a very small window where the species is smart enough to use radio energy for communication but not smart enough to use enough compression to make its signals look like random noise.
Thus our SETI efforts are looking for a needle in a heystack and failure only indicates that species in a transitional phase like us is very rare.
Stephen Hawking should have thought of this.
I don't care much for meeting advanced aliens (Score:4, Interesting)
And if we are more advanced than them, we will exploit them.
I think it's more likely that, in an evolutionary time-frame, we'll colonize our solar system (and beyond), and extra-terrestrial humans will evolve in different directions and become the "aliens".
Just Because They Have FTL . . . (Score:4, Interesting)
If something hard to us maybe easy to them, the oppisite may be true too.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:But The Real Question: (Score:5, Insightful)
What makes you think life forms entirely alien to earth will even have heads? Starfish have no heads, jellyfish have no heads.
I think it's a bit early to worry about TFS's "Star Trek Prime Directive". Sure, there is probably life alien to earth but face it, guys - we haven't found any. Not yet.
There are folks who think an advanced civilization from some other star has already come here to study us (Roswell), but if in fact those are aliens come to visit us, I think it more likely that it is a species descended from us come back in time to do some archaeology rather than visiting from Betelguise to work on a Wikipedia entry on us..
Travelling faster than the speed of light is, after all, just as impossible as time travel. Humans have been human for less than a million years, what will we be like in another ten million? Will we have found that time travel is as impossible as air travel was 1000 years ago?
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Re:But The Real Question: (Score:5, Informative)
Travelling faster than the speed of light is pretty much the same thing as time travel. If you could travel faster than the speed of light, then you could time travel.
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Actually, some things make sense (Score:4, Insightful)
Or even better explained: they make sense when you
A) want an alien at least evolved enough to hold a conversation with. Bacteria are exciting for biologists, but an alien you can actually make contact with, has damn good reasons to indeed look kinda like us.
B) take evolution and RL constraints into consideration. It's easy to imagine giant amoeba creatures, or sacs of gas floating on Jupiter, but those tend to either (I) have blatant disadvantages that natural selection would discriminate against, or (II) they're bloody impossible. E.g., a cell is really just a drop of sea water in a lipid membrane, and evolved from some aminoacid chains which originally started replicating in plain sea water without a membrane. And from there it's been baby steps towards any complex organisms. It was first just bacterial films, then some "worms" which were just a toroidal bacterial film and "sponges" which were just a bacterial colony with holes in it, and so on. Most fantasy extraterestrial forms proposed, like those giant gas sacks, it's not clear how they'd evolve in the first place.
But anyway, that in mind, I'll say that, for example:
- to start with the easy part, any creature of any complexity above "bacterial colony" will have specialized cells for specialized tasks. Simply because it's a huge advantage to. Cells on your skin need to largely insulate you from the uncontrolled outside world, while cells inside need to allow a freer flow of nutrients, for example. As an added bonus, specialization also means that each cell only needs a smaller set of proteins and reactions to do its job, which reduces its energy and nutrient needs and also the number of things that can go wrong.
So basically this rules out any ideas some may have about sentient amorphous blobs.
- almost any creature has either bilateral or radial symmetry, simply because it saves on DNA. Your left side is largely a mirrored copy of your right side. It also has advantages like that it's easier to swim or walk when your left and right legs/fins/tentacles are the same length. And having redundant organs is an advantage by itself too.
- any complex creature will have _some_ sensory organs, because again it's a great advantage to. Even some of the most primitive cells can detect changes in the environment, and react to them in one way or another. Some unicelular organisms already have light sensors. Over time some stuff will remain rather distributed, but high-bandwidth stuff like eyes, it makes sense to have a small number and complex/high-res, rather than photosensitivity all over your body. Other stuff tends to work _because_ it's a single structure instead of a widely distributed array, e.g., hearing. Etc. Basically given enough time and evolution, see the previous stuff about specialization: a lot of things will get concentrated and specialized.
- almost any complex creature will have a mouth at one end and an arse at the other end, simply because it all evolved out of some ultra-primitive worms which were just a thin tube that pushed water from one end to the other. And evolution works in baby steps, small changes to what already existed. Even the exceptions tend to be actually really built the same way. E.g., gasteropods have a funkier configuration, but start as the above described tube anyway: later a diagonal muscle twists them into an different configuration.
- neurons (or whatever the alien equivalent is), are inherently slow, compared to transistors. They're chemical things, just because they evolved out of other cells, and that's how cells work. They don't have to just transmit the signal, they actually have to produce chemicals to excite the next neuron's receptors, and then neutralize those so the next one doesn't keep firing for ever. Again, _because_ they evolved from other cells, which are just a complex chemistry run
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Re:Actually, some things make sense (Score:4, Insightful)
B) A radically alien environment is going to evolve radical alien organisms. Starfish have no heads, like I said. Mammals have no eggs, lizards don't have milk. Snake eyes and cat eyes have a different pupil than other reptiles and mammals.
sentient amorphous blobs
I've often wondered if an ant were an animal, or if the ant colony was the actual animal?
almost any creature has either bilateral or radial symmetry, simply because it saves on DNA
I wonder if extraterrestrial life would necessarily be dependant on DNA?
any complex creature will have _some_ sensory organs
Which may or may not be the same as our senses. Sight nay be in the radar band yet be blind to visible light. They may even have evolved senses that earth creatures lack.
So now we have a mouth on that "head" too
You wouldn't need a head to have a mouth, eyes, or antennae.
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Re:But The Real Question: (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll have you know that I, as an enlightened being, have been liberating lesser beings for years. I have personally liberated hundreds if not thousands of civilizations of ants. I've also liberated civilizations of bees, wasps and hornets. I'll tell you... the totalitarianism they were subjected to would make a civilized person weep.
They must have been captives, because once I slew their rulers and set them free, they all left and I never saw them again. But I'm sure they were singing my praises, whatever happened to them.
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Re:But The Real Question: (Score:5, Funny)
(Paraphrasing Calvin)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
This attitude comes straight out of reading too much science fiction. Whether it's 'friendly' or not paints wayyy to sim
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
1) Independence Day types, which go around trying to use the resources of other planets, and probably destroying other races so that those races won't even become a threat.
2) Loners who don't care about us, and are doing their own thing (probably something we can't fathom as this stage in our scientific understanding).
I figure if a race is evolved enough to fly all the way to our planet, if they wanted something they would not just do a "fair trade" th
Re:too much st (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:too much st (Score:5, Funny)
1) Subjugate and conquer any species you encounter against which you can prevail with military might.
2) Use diplomacy and survelliance/espionage techinques to undermine any species against whom you are not guaranteed to prevail to bring about their downfall and leave you in control of their resources.
3) Attempt to avoid or form favourable alliances with anything you come across which is stronger than you.
4)
5) Profit
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Re:too much st (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:too much st (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Fictional rules will be no help (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Some Notes on Alien Life (Score:5, Insightful)
Put another way - we (humanity) went from fairly small mammals to now in about 65 million years. If the dinosaurs hadn't fallen victim to $extinctionLevelEvent, they could easily have become as evolved as we are now - just a whole lot earlier. So, if intelligent/sentient life could have evolved here 60 million years ago, why wouldn't that be the case in another solar system?
For all we know, it's entirely possible that 15,000 light years away there's a planet with a civilization that is EXACTLY as evolved as we are. Why haven't we heard from them yet? Physics - would take 15,000 years for any signal to reach us. Hell, 200 light years away would suffice for that argument, and in both cases Fermi would look like an idiot.
As an aside, I see his paradox along the lines of creationism - after all, we can't prove that something doesn't exist. Only that it does.
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