Aliens Are Probably Everywhere, Just Not Anywhere Nearby 334
rossgneumann writes If there's intelligent life in the cosmos, it's probably nowhere we can get to anytime soon. At least that's the finding of the astrobiologist who, for the first time in decades, has rendered a major update to the key formula scientists use to seek out interstellar life. That'd be the Drake equation, which was developed over half a century ago to determine where life might lurk in the universe. Using the new Kepler data, astrobiologist Amri Wandel did some calculations to estimate the density of life-bearing worlds in our corner of the universe.
Drake is Obtuse (Score:5, Interesting)
I've always felt that the Drake Equation is not worthy of the term 'equation' since its just a simple probabilistic estimate from multiplying a ton of other probabilities and instances together. Consider for instance, the Schrödinger equation, which has a differential formulation that provides solutions to so many physical situations that arise in quantum mechanics, or Maxwell's equations, which explain all of electrodynamics, including light, and were the inspiration for Einstein's theory of special relativity.
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Re:Drake is Obtuse (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Drake is Obtuse (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately the Drake equation is worthless even for that purposes, as several terms in it cannot be estimated with any accuracy at all, and may in fact never be able to. You can't for example, extrapolate the probability of life evolving on a given planet when you only know of a single example of life evolving (extrapolation requires at least two instances). That leaves 4 terms in the Drake equation (fraction of planets that develop life, fraction of living planets that develop intelligence, fraction of those that end up sending signals into space (though those latter two should probably be condensed into a single term), and length they send out said signals) that cannot be estimated with any accuracy until we discover some instance of them. Which, rather ironically, means the Drake equation is worthless for any kinds of actual predictions unless we actually discover intelligent life, at which point the entire problem it was meant to illustrate becomes kind of moot (because we'll then know the answer that yes, there definitely is other intelligent life in the universe).
You can sort-of put weak upper bounds on (at least some of) those terms, but we're a long way from being able to do that.
Re:Drake is Obtuse (Score:5, Informative)
I've always felt that the Drake Equation is not worthy of the term 'equation' since its just a simple probabilistic estimate from multiplying a ton of other probabilities and instances together.
It has a term on the left and a term on the right, and an equal sign in between. You can also see the Drake Equation as a Bayesian Network [wikipedia.org] combined with a Poisson estimator for the mean (n*p).
Yes but that is meaningless (Score:2)
Intelligent life (Score:4, Funny)
If we are merely looking for intelligent life, we should be ecstatic about finding an octopus. They are quite intelligent, and you don't even have to leave the planet to find them.
I mention this because what if we went to another planet in search of intelligent life and found something like an octopus? How would we communicate with them? My guess is by cooking them, and then eating them.
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you mean those dumb black birds that hit my window every so often? or bounce off my windshield once a decade generally on a curve such as highway ramp?
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The length of the civilization bugs me. It's one of the variables. It's measured in some thousands of years. The only one we know of is around ten thousand years, but as far as aliens listening to radio waves are concerned, it's closer to a hundred years.
But having a number there also places an upper bound on the timespan, and that does not reflect reality. As far as we know, civilization lasts forever, once started.
That's a big infinity in the equation. I'm just sayin'.
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For a rectangle, A is the area, W is the width, H is the height.
A = W x H. Do you deny that that's an equation? Good.
So what makes it suddenly *not* be an equation if W is about a cubit and H is roughly the width of my butt?
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Well, it's snarky, but this time I think xkcd is stupid...though more informed than most people.
It's not an equation that tells you what the answers are, it's an equation that lists your areas of uncertainty. Nobody has come up with a better approach (unless you claim "I don't care" is a better approach). And yes, the areas that are unknown are pretty big, which is good. My suspicion is that if they were better known it would be a very depressing equation. The most obvious simultaneous solution to the F
intelligent non-human life (Score:5, Insightful)
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Very well said.
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For all we know, most intelligent life exists on gas giants and in oceans.
We're probably just freaks.
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Hey, at lest we get to claim the title of "most dangerous species in large groups". Makes me proud to be human!
I thought the bubonic plague held that title.
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you're conflating intelligence and wisdom.
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intelligent non-human life is most likely everywhere around us
it is *not* most likely everywhere. the fact that your theory is not provably false does make it likely.
No Virginia, there are no Space Aliens (Score:3)
Humans have been extending their perceptual capabilities for centuries. What do you think a telescope, electron microscope, or mass spectrometer are? We've detected dark matter in other galaxies and as far as we can tell it barely interacts with normal matter. We've detected neutrinos. We've detected Kuiper Belt objects by the thousands. Goldfish may not be able to understand these extra-philial intelligences, but they can sure as hell see them.
Every species on the planet does this on a continuum of consciousness.. perceiving the less sentient, but blind to the nature of the more advanced.
Mystical bullshit. For one thing, in purely biological terms t
hang on (Score:5, Funny)
So you're telling me that things in other star systems are far away?
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Those huge arrays of radio telescopes being built in Chile and South Africa are able to detect things on the order of a planet in size. That doesn't mean that they can communicate with the planet, just see that it exists.
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You only point out why radio SETI is stupid. On the other hand, optical SETI with lasers makes perfect sense.
Great News Everyone (Score:2)
Support the supposition is right, that the nearest world with any type of life (likely single-celled) is on the order of ten to a hundred light years away. Do you know what we call that kind of world? Ours!!
Translation: We are alone (Score:2)
Best to keep this planet as stable as possible, 'cause we're stuck here and ain't no one coming to save us.
Just like in my personal life... (Score:4, Interesting)
The situation is very simple: The probability of all life being extinguished on Earth in the next 2 ish billion years is 100%. If we want to survive beyond that we need to get off planet. Earh is 4.5 billion year old. Talk of cost is ridiculous: I can fly from UK to US for less than one day's wages (on a good day) and I'm just a regular guy. 500 years ago it took the lifetime's savings of a wealthy man to make the same journey. It is ALL about energy. Once we have a reliable means of providing it on a sun-scale then we can do anything we want. We evolved to an understanding of relativity and quantum mechanics in a few million years, why the hell shouldn't we make a few more steps, given the same time again?
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Considering the human civilization is a few thousand years old, I don't think we have any way of knowing the limits of what we might achieve in the next million years, assuming we survive that long. I think the next big stumbling block we need to tackle is sustainability. How can we create a system as closed off as a spaceship or a space colony that can survive indefinitely without resupply? For that matter, how can we create an economy here on Earth that can survive indefinitely without self-destructing
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I'm thinking that didn't work out all that well for the Krell.
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We evolved to an understanding of relativity and quantum mechanics in a few million years
if by "we" you mean life, it's been much more than a few million years. if you meant homo sapiens, it's been much less than that. what arbitrary point in evolution are you picking?
Major update to formula? (Score:4, Insightful)
for the first time in decades, has rendered a major update to the key formula scientists use to seek out interstellar life
The formula hasn't changed, the variables are still unknown. Someone simply used recent data to make an educated guess as to the value of one variable. The Drake equation is basically a thought experiment, it was never meant to give a real answer. People who attempt to plug in "more accurate values" are missing the point.
Re:Major update to formula? (Score:5, Interesting)
Thought experiments are not inherently meant to not give "real answers". Galileo used a thought experiment to prove Aristotle's theory of gravity wrong. Aristotle held that heavy objects fell faster than light ones. Galileo asked us to imagine a heavy object tied to a light object by a rope. Based on Aristotle's hypothesis, tying a light object to a heavy one would make the heavy one fall slower; as the light object would naturally fall more slowly than the heavy one, it would 'hold the heavy object back' in its fall. However, also based on Aristotle's hypothesis, tying a light object to a heavy object would make the heavy object fall faster, as its mass had now been increased by the mass of the light object. Given the fact that assuming the same premise ("Heavier objects fall faster than light ones") lead to opposite conclusions, Galileo reasoned that the premise had to be false, on the basis of the foregoing thought experiment.
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An interesting argument, but apparently Aristotle thought that heavy objects only fall faster than light ones if identically shaped. This is because the heavier object must contain a higher ratio of the heavier elements (Earth and Water vs Fire and Air). See Aristotle on falling [wikipedia.org].
If you tied a lighter object to a heavier one, it obviously won't necessarily increase the Earth density of the resulting compound object.
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Aristotle was of course right, its just that for most everyday objects, the effect of buoyancy in the Earth's atmosphere is negligible compared to the effect of gravity. What Galileo did was separate out the two forces acting on the objects.
the key formula scientists use (Score:2)
Really? It was my understanding the Drake equation was just some back of the envelope shit, figuring in factors a human being could think of when it came to the possibility of extra-terrestrial life. Surely this has been modeled more accurately since?
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Either that or we're on the end of a galactic arm (Score:2)
Plus, we have really bad manners, and they really don't want to hang out with us.
meh (Score:2)
As much as I like the idea of anything confirming that life in the universe is abundant, this is again little more than an educated guess.
RTFA, he seems to be trying to update the drake equation based on the presence of planets in the goldielocks zones of local stellar populations. Fine as far as that goes, but I strongly suspect that such populations will derive more consistently from where they are on the main sequence, as well as their stellar neighborhoods.
This means that simply extrapolating our local
plenty of aliens I bet (Score:2)
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Pretty sure no one has yet got a starship going or they would be here and everywhere else too.
The Sol system is on quarantine until we get our shit together or self-destruct.
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The prime directive does definitely apply to us. Until we become a type 1 civilization its pretty unlikely this will change, assuming there is any kind of benevolent interspecies "Federation". A lot of that (depending on the technological level of the members of that Federation) depends on where we are too, In a Star Trek sense, our experience would be much different if we lived in Federation space and the prime directive was in force on our planet (though that might not stop them from dressing up as us or
Ground-shaking Conclusion Sherlock! (Score:2)
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We are a violent species that wastes a ton of resources on fighting each other. Other life may go about its business much more productively.
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Coincidence or a factor? (Score:5, Interesting)
The fact that we are in a small galactic cluster, per typical cluster, suggests its small size has protected us from being visited or invaded. If we had evolved in a medium or large cluster, the most likely case otherwise due to density, then perhaps we'd have encountered ET's by now. ET's are less likely to visit & colonize sparse clusters because it's too far to travel for too few resources.
Copernican Principle and Anthropic Principle would suggest that some factor is involved to "keep us out" of denser clusters, where probability would otherwise place us. The boondocks are protecting us. Nobody is bothering us because we are stellar rednecks hidden in the difficult-to-reach woods.
What is kind of cool and sad (Score:2)
What difference would it make if we were "it"? (Score:4, Interesting)
A lot of people seem so incredulous at the very notion that as far as intelligent life goes (that is, an organism capable of questioning its surroundings and its very existence), human beings are "it". Many suggest that it should be mathematically improbable for such a thing, and yet in reality, we only have a sample size of 1,and have absolutely no way to know how likely such life may actually be anywhere else. Neither, of course, do we have any particular reason to conclude that we *are* actually alone in the universe, but the reality is that if such life didn't actually exist anywhere else, absolutely nothing in our world would be changed by such a revelation, if it were possible to ever know that for certain.
If uniqueness can exist in a domain like mathematics, where actual infinities can be encountered and explained, it seems vastly more likely that in a universe that is quite clearly of finite age, uniqueness would be that much more common.
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This is the crux of the "intelligent life out there" argument. We literally have no idea how probable intelligent, industrialized life is to develop - even on planets proven to have life and what time scale or necessary events must take place for it to arise. Apes likely became intelligent on Earth because of extreme changes in habitats and multiple near-extinction events which forced survivors to adapt and adopt tool use to compete and thrive. Maybe such evolutionary pressures are rare, and maybe speci
Plug this into your Drake equation (Score:2)
Re:Astrobiologist (Score:4, Insightful)
Eh we have psychology even when we really haven't found a biological basis for consciousness.
Re:Astrobiologist or conscious of it (Score:2)
Eh we have psychology even when we really haven't found a biological basis for consciousness.
Well, to be frank, consciousness is phasic, so this bizarre fixation on a single steady state of consciousness might be what's in question, not the mind map projection itself.
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And it was a waste of time for Higgs et. al. to make equations and addition to Standard Model with the Higgs field and boson in them decades ago when we hadn't actually found any such bosons?
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yeah, there's a field with *cough* real application. A biologist that studies life in space when we haven't actually found any.
Space is a remarkably hostile environment - doubt anything lives there. Presumably astrobiologists study life as it might exist on another planet, presumably with a focus on "what to look for". Detecting life, even bacterial, on another planet would be a landmark moment in human history.
Re:Birthday paradox? (Score:5, Insightful)
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The birthday paradox is more than that. It also includes that the probability that you are close to some other planet is far more smaller than the probability that there is some 2 close planets. So the ideas are related.
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Re:Birthday paradox? (Score:5, Informative)
The birthday paradox depends on days being measured modulo 365. There is a finite bound on the birthdays available. That doesn't extend to planetary distances in three dimensional space over the span of the universe.
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If you assume the lifespan of a technological civilization is not infintie, you could probably work the Birthday paradox in. It's not exactly a "modulo", but its related.
(That said, I don't see it. Just because I think you could probably work it in doesn't mean I find it at all obvious.)
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The catch with measuring lifespan of intelligent life or more accurately technological life (the measure of intelligence is rapidly changing at this time but the measure of use of technology remains pretty clear) is bound to two things, firstly what really drives the evolutionary advantage of technology bound life and the other, the lifespan of the technology bound life.
It would seem the biggest driver for technology bound life is repeated frequent and fairly rapid climate change driven by what ever mech
Re:Birthday paradox? (Score:5, Informative)
The birthday paradox depends on days being measured modulo 365. There is a finite bound on the birthdays available. That doesn't extend to planetary distances in three dimensional space over the span of the universe.
The whole birthday "paradox" is a human failing of not taking into account the number of possible pairings, it doesn't have to be modulo anything. If you have a thousand planets with life with a one in a million chance to be close, what's the total probabiliy of two planets being close? 1000/1000000? Bzzzzzzt wrong answer, because there's 1000*999/2 = ~500000 possible pairs. So the actual chance is more like 50%, instead of 0,1%. Not that it has any practical application, because it's the odds of two alien planets being close. Earth's chances would still be one in a million per planet, just like the odds of any person having my birthday is roughly 1/365.
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So let me see if I got this straight. Less than 300 years ago the fastest method of transportation was horse and buggey and sail ships on the Ocean.
In 300 years we now can put ships in space that can travel at 87,000 mph (143kph), and your best reasoning borrowed from Astrophysicists no less, is that aliens can't be here or make it here because the distances are just too vast ?!?!?
This lacks basic reasoning at minimum and surely imagination.
Imagine if you can how fast we'll be able to travel in space anothe
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Re:Paradoxes Be Damned (Score:5, Insightful)
...or it wouldn't, and it's not.
Who knows.
The idea that we've got it all figured out and we've reached the limits of what the physical world will allow is pretty narrow thinking.
If humanity survives for another thousand years (let alone a million), think where we'll be. In the last hundred years we did more than the thousand before it. [*With thanks to the thousand before it.] What happens next?
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the aliens went away to wait for us to evolve into something interesting.
All of them?
Every faction from every alien civilisation in the entire galaxy all unanimously decided to go away for thousands of years, even though their own rules (according to your scenario) allow them to interfere.
There are 200 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. If intelligent life can appear on just 1 in a million, that's still 200,000 civilisations right now. And that doesn't include the civilisations that rose and fell over the last 8-10 billion years since metallicity became high enough in the ga
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To a geologist, it's negligible.
We've probably had control of fire for about a megayear. OK, we've gone through several species names in the time, but so what? In the first megayear after getting STL transport that averages 0.1c, we could fill the galaxy.
We've got gigayears in front of us. Tens of them, before starting to need more exotic technologies.
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"it's reasonable to assume that the speed of light barrier will be overcome."
How is it in any way "reasonable"? We don't travel anywhere even near below the speed of light, and as a matter of fact we used to travel faster than sound but now we don't even have Concorde anymore.
Our entire civilization is running on fumes and we're scrambling to get the last dregs of fossil fuels out of the Earth. Where does your naive, almost child-like naive optimism come from?
" we have no way to know"
But we do know NOW. And
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Why do you assume anyone has to come back, a beam of light with the gathered data can come back. If a habitable planet, with single cell organisms, is on the order of ten to a hundred light years away (and we might win the jackpot with Alpha Centari A or B at four light years), then in less than some decades useful information for the human race can be known
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the distances are so vast that it would take decades to get anywhere good
That is all assuming a human-like lifespan.
What if an alien creature could live 1000 years, possibly using some kind of suspended animation? 10,000 years? 100,000 years?
100,000 years at 0.5c is 50,000 lightyears which will take you anywhere in the Milky Way galaxy.
Re:Paradoxes Be Damned (Score:4, Insightful)
And then there's the whole problem of, as your speed increases, impacts from dust and micrometeorites become a serious problem. It'll do a lot more than just scraping the paint off the hull.
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Obviously, that wouldn't work. You would have to carry your local region of space with you.
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The speed limit is c. It's the law.
Absolutely. I too feel this is a pretty well-established fixed upper limit on a body's physical speed through spacetime.
Of course, I live in hope that Humanity will eventually develop methods to 'skip around' the pesky limitations of physics in the universe as we currently know it. That said, no evidence is available to assist me. Even if such a thing is possible we might be talking about a technology tens of thousands of years ahead of our current tech level.
Perhaps in time we'll learn to employ gravity wi
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It is "the law" with some known exceptions (moving a region of space not a violation of GR) according to theories that are less than 150 years old,
Already solutions to impact hazard of going 12 percent of C are known, and we already know how to get a craft to 0.1 C Decades to nearest star, most of a century to ten light years.....might be tried someday
Re:Paradoxes Be Damned (Score:4, Interesting)
Perhaps we could also work on a spaceship that instead of propelling itself through the universe, remained stationary and moved the universe around it.
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So let me see if I got this straight. Less than 300 years ago the fastest method of transportation was horse and buggey and sail ships on the Ocean.
In 300 years we now can put ships in space that can travel at 87,000 mph (143kph), and your best reasoning borrowed from Astrophysicists no less, is that aliens can't be here or make it here because the distances are just too vast ?!?!?
This lacks basic reasoning at minimum and surely imagination.
Imagine if you can how fast we'll be able to travel in space another 300 years from now. Now imagine how fast an alien race could travel if they were 5,000 years more advanced than we are. What about 100,000 years? 1 Million? 10 Million? Pretty sure after even a few thousand years the problem of going across these vast distances will be solved.
Hey, kids, if you extrapolate Moore's "Law" out 25 years, we'll soon be able to make transistors out of 1/40th of an atom! And if you extrapolate the population growth at the start of the 20th century to the current date, all of us are dead of starvation right now (and we didn't even know it)!
It's amazing how the people who have the most faith in science know the least about the actual science.
(Don't bring up wormholes or Alcubierre; both are basically "if we had some materials that violate a whole bunch
Welcome to the Actual Universe (Score:5, Insightful)
Slow down there, buckwheat. [xkcd.com]
The speed of light is a universal constant, and it doesn't actually make much sense to talk about exceeding it. You break causality and travel backwards in time. If you are sure that these problems can be overcome you have no idea what the problem is. Relativity is a description of the geometry of the universe, and explicitly covers what happens if you try to go really fast. It has been verified to a ridiculous number of decimal places. What you're talking about is equivalent to talking about exceeding the Planck constant or the fine structure constant.
Science fiction is easier and more fun to read than science, but you should probably spend some time reading about this universe, because you're gonna be here for a while.
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Talking out of your ass, are you? GR not verified to "ridiculous number of decimal places", try about 0.3% or so.
We already know GR is incomplete at best, if not totally bad model. We have no model of quantum mechanics that reconciles with GR
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Citation needed for .3% [universetoday.com]
You'll note that "a ridiculous number of decimal places" is extremely non-specific and could as easily describe .3% as 3 * 10^-17%. However, I was intentionally vague because there's a variety of effects described by Relativity which have been measured in different ways at different times with differing accuracy. A simple number (like 0.3%) is simply wrong without further context. QED probably takes the prize [scienceblogs.com] for the most precisely-tested theory ever, but Relativity still qualifies as
Re:Welcome to the Actual Universe (Score:5, Insightful)
The speed of light is a universal constant, and it doesn't actually make much sense to talk about exceeding it.
That may be. In fact, sadly, it's probably true.
You break causality and travel backwards in time.
Yes and no, respectively. Causality is the evidence that time is fixed. But you still wouldn't travel backwards in time. Going faster than light would only permit you to get to someplace before a distant observer saw the results, and change what happened. That breaks causality (as you say) because the distant observer who was watching you arrive would have always have had to have seen that, but you could have discussed what they saw with them before you left, before you got there, and before they saw what happened. But regardless of how fast you travel, you still can't go back in time. What happened on some other planet right now will still have happened, no matter how rapidly you get there. Even if you got there instantaneously, you would still be there right now, and never before now.
Of course, that itself doesn't mean time travel is impossible, either! Causality may not be as fixed as we believe it to be! From our standpoint, we would never have experienced it in the way that we would have if history played out the same way every time. I don't actually believe this, I think that things happen just once, but it's still worth mentioning that if causality is self-repairing, then our memories would be congruent with the updated form of reality. Time travel by going really fast, however, that is impossible. The light that we see is not the event itself, it's simply how we perceive it. If you sped up light itself so that it went faster than light, you wouldn't perceive stuff that hadn't happened yet! You'd only perceive stuff closer to the time of the actual event than you would if light had been moving at the same old speed as usual.
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Intelligent life in a radically different environment, might be radially different:
Maybe at 100K it is based on reactions we known nothing about, on a time scale so slow we cannot communicate with it, because they consider two bits per decade data rate to be a speeding offence.
Maybe th
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Fine, Kirk, not Spock.
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the FOR PROFIT makes even more sense to me considering how technology people act in groups and make corporations. Weyland Industries not Kirk
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Re:Life Everywhere out there? (Score:4, Informative)
> 1. There needs to be a planet at an exact distance away from a star so things don't vaporize nor freeze
Which presumes life is based on this temperature range, and not silica or some other process.
> 2. There needs to be water
Again, not mandatory for life. Water-based life, sure. But we have no way of knowing if most life is based on water.
> 3. Atmosphere Oxygen-rich
Again, not mandatory for life. For all we know, oxygen is regarded as a poison by most life.
> 3.5. Atmosphere that isn't toxic
What's toxic for you may not be toxic for most life. Life on gas giants may be quite different, or life in the moons of a gas giant. Oxygen is a fairly toxic gas.
> 4.The Star needs to emit the right amount of energy so not to fry everything.
True. But different life may have different energy ranges. Water has a limited range.
> 5. Planet can't be too close to other stars.
This is most likely the biggest one. Being too close to more than one star means higher range of fluctuation.
> 6. Planet needs to have a core preferably iron to deflect electromagnetic radiation.
Or life exists in gas giants which have thick atmospheres, or beneath the crust.
> 7. Core also keeps ground warm which helps with supporting plant life.
For all we know, perhaps most intelligent life are avian in nature. Birdlike aliens who regard us as crippled freaks.
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Planets can't be too close to other stars
This is most likely the biggest one. Being too close to more than one star means higher range of fluctuation.
As a point of reference, a significant number of solar systems are binary systems, making them subsequently less likely to support life.
6. Planet needs to have a core preferably iron to deflect electromagnetic radiation.
Or life exists in gas giants which have thick atmospheres, or beneath the crust.
Although it's tough to consider the possibility of structured life existing at 10,000 atmospheres and 2,000 degrees F, I would imagine it being possible. But, such a life form is *far* less likely to be reaching out into space than we would, as the problem of keeping a "livable environment" in a space ship is at least 10,000 times more difficult. Are there even solid elemen
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You're right, but all those lifeforms you describe, if they are intelligent; I don't want to meet them.
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For all we know, perhaps most intelligent life are avian in nature. Birdlike aliens who regard us as crippled freaks.
Oh, now you actually made me feel like a crippled freak.
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Um, not actually. Some of the volcanic vents in the pacific have life that doesn't operate the way you describe.
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What kind of reprobate uses bing?
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Best laugh I've had on slashdot in a while. Good job
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