Latest Search For Alien Civilizations Looked At 60 Million Stars, Detects No Signals (iflscience.com) 154
schwit1 writes: Are there aliens out there? Breakthrough Listen, a privately-funded project searching for evidence of alien life, has released the first results from its survey of 60 million stars in an area looking towards the galactic center, noting that it found no evidence of any technological transmissions signaling an alien civilization from any of those stars. The kind of signals they were looking for were not beacons sent out intentionally by alien civilizations, such as television or radio broadcasts, but unintentional transmissions, such as radar transmissions meant for other purposes but still beamed into space. They found none. The paper can be downloaded here (PDF).
Search for Aliens Shows Nothing! News at 11. (Score:2)
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Tweezers.
That's basically zero. (Score:3, Informative)
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The odds of winning a recent Powerball drawing in Tennessee was 1 in 292.2 million
We're more certain of the impossibility of winning the Powerball jackpot than we are of intelligent life in the galaxy.
Re: That's basically zero. (Score:3)
Re: That's basically zero. (Score:5, Informative)
Quite a few zeros you've placed there for no reason. The researchers aimed their search at our galactic center. The Milky Way has somewhere between 100 to 400 billion stars. The reason they aimed at the GC was because there is the highest density of stars to observe. But Howard Tayler of Schlock Mercenary https://www.schlockmercenary.c... [schlockmercenary.com] has a nicely pithy thing to say about stars near the GC.
"The evolutionary program of organic life doesn't iterate effectively when the sky mashes the reset button every five to ten thousand years."
The authors do take into consideration some of the issues with instability near the GC, but there's quite a bit of handwaving involved.
Re: That's basically zero. (Score:5, Funny)
"The evolutionary program of organic life doesn't iterate effectively when the sky mashes the reset button every five to ten thousand years."
They just need to invent a god that made their planet in 4000 years. problem solved.
Re:That's basically zero. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's worse than that. Considering that any signal of normal power would lose coherency over a few dozen to maybe a few hundred light years, unless an alien civilization is pointing a highly directional and very powerful signal right at us, we're not likely to ever see it. As a technique for catching bits of some nearby civilization's version of "I Love Lucy", these projects are an utter waste of time, since such signals will be of relatively low power, will dissipate over any significant distance, if not outright swamped by other sources of radiation.
I suspect when we seriously starting looking for life (intelligent or otherwise) in other stellar systems, it will be through future generations of telescopes which will be able to image alien worlds sufficiently to detect continents, oceans, and makeup of atmospheres. Looking for radio signals is a fool's errand.
Re:That's basically zero. (Score:5, Insightful)
They're not looking for 'I Love Lucy', they're looking for the DEW Line. The much-lamented Arecibo telescope dish would have been able to detect its twin sending from the Andromeda Galaxy. That they haven't found it yet is not surprising, if other technological civilizations follow our trajectory (a dubious assumption, but we only have a sample size of one). A hundred and fifty years ago we would have been undetectable by radio signals. As we move away from powerful broadcasts to weak directed signals it looks like in another fifty years we will probably again be undetectable. That's less than two percent of the length of our civilization so far, and we barely have space flight.
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They did not search for life.
They searched for transmissions.
Even if all those stars (erm a planet around those stars) would send out transmission:
* how likely is it that one can be detected from our position?
* how old would be the transmission?
* how can you even be sure it is from that star/plant which was a few thousand years ago at a different position?
* why would they - and how would they - aim a transmission at us, as we also were a few thousand years ago at an totally d
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Well, not so "totally different position in the galaxy" as all that. We've moved maybe 25 light years in the last 30000 years.
Of course, we haven't been capable of doing anything detectable for much longer than a century, so it'll be 60K years (39K years before they detect us, another 30K years before they can signal get a signal back to us) before someone down near the core of the Milky Way could possibly respond to us.
Re:That's basically zero (Score:3)
As always, a random positive result would have been interesting, but a negative results shows nothing.
Re:That's basically zero (Score:4, Informative)
If you can't find life in any random 10cm^3 bit of the surface of the earth, you really aren't looking that hard. Life is stupidly pervasive on earth, and if you're looking at unicellular things and spores you'd probably have a hard time finding a cubic decemeter of air devoid of life.
However, you're completely right about the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence... Your metaphors could use a bit of work though ;)
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It would be very exciting to find microbial life on Mars, for instance, but somehow I doubt it'd return our calls if we tried sending radio broadcasts at it.
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You're totally right, and random is just that; it is possible to find a null patch of earth, but they are excruciatingly rare, and you wouldn't want to be there anyway. They're so exceedingly rare, it's effectively certain that unless you set out to find nothing, you'd find something living in your sample; it's the scientific version of being willfully obtuse about edge cases.
I dunno, maybe that's the right way to think about it though, since despite our best efforts and models, we seem to be an inexplicab
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You know, the reason why they call it then Anthropocene is because there isn't anything left on this rock we haven't marked with signs of intelligent life.
What are the chances? (Score:5, Insightful)
In the last two hundred years we have gone from radio to the Internet. In another two hundred who knows what we will be using. Sure, we have to look. You don't generally get to find things if you don't but it's a little hopeful to imagine that not only is there intelligent life but that it is at the same level as us.
I imagine that when we do find evidence of another civilization they will be either way ahead of us or way behind. Probably the former. And we will say, "Of course, how could we have missed it!"
Re:What are the chances? (Score:5, Insightful)
Further more, there's no saying "way ahead" is actually any harder to see than we are now.
The truth of the matter is that our ability to observe such signals is very, very poor.
This study was looking for signals with a minimum EIRP of 10^14W/Hz.
This means they're looking for things stronger than Arecibo blasting its radar full power. Directly at us.
Since we ourselves weren't even ever sweeping the skies with Arecibo firing at full blast, it seems bizarre to be surprised by aliens not also doing that.
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And even if we were doing so, an alien civilisation looking for us located further than 120 ly away wouldn't detect us either.
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And if their version of Arecibo was pointed in a different direction at the time we were monitoring their system we would still have missed it.
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And if they've got a spherical reflector visible from orbit pointed directly at us, transmitting with enough power for us to catch it with ours, for long enough for us to tell what's coming out of it, I'm really not sure if I feel good about that.
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Well, since they would have had to send that signal two and a half million years ago I wouldn't worry overly. We had barely come down out of the trees by that time.
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Re: What are the chances? (Score:2)
Wish I had mod points. The broadcast power question is what I was wondering about as well. There are lots of questionable pieces to this, including only looking at the galactic center, how much radio power can they really see, and how small of a fraction of the sky/stars this really was.
OTOH, this seems like a swing-for-the-stands approach. If they HAD found something, they could have said "even in an inhospitable environment, only a small fraction of stars is teeming with civilizations that are absolutely
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Broadcast power is one thing, but consider that the rest of the universe doesn't have to follow our evolution, and the signals we use today. It's almost narcissistic to believe that others would follow the same path we have, and therefore, we listen to signals from ourselves, rather than a broader context-- if within the constraints of physics.
We flatter ourselves that we might see modulations and signal propagation behaviors of Faraday, Maxwell, etc. These are not the only ones, just the ones of inventors
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How many entirely separated human civilizations developed bows, clubs, and swords?
Sure, they're all human, you may say. But those things weren't built into our DNA.
It's also quite possible (and I'd argue likely) that science evolves, in general, along the progressive path we have taken, more or less.
We flatter ourselves that we might see modulations and signal propagation behaviors of Faraday, Maxwell, etc.
This is a great example.
Maxwell's equations modeled
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I certainly don't believe aliens can defy physics, although humans do on a daily, even hourly basis, demonstrated by the morning traffic reports on the radio.
Transmitters in the 1920s used hundreds of thousands of watts because little was known of the layers of the ionosphere, the effects of sunspots on radio propagation, and we need only look at how WiFi evolved from data rates of a signal flagger to something that we call gigabits/sec.
As discoveries march on, we learn more and more. I maintain that it's h
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I certainly don't believe aliens can defy physics, although humans do on a daily, even hourly basis, demonstrated by the morning traffic reports on the radio.
Wut?
Transmitters in the 1920s used hundreds of thousands of watts because little was known of the layers of the ionosphere, the effects of sunspots on radio propagation, and we need only look at how WiFi evolved from data rates of a signal flagger to something that we call gigabits/sec.
Even more wut?
As discoveries march on, we learn more and more. I maintain that it's hubris to believe that our way, our evolution, is the only way, and that radio is the sniff-test for alien civilization. Just because we can think and outwit and dominate THIS planet means nothing. Although we're at the top of our food chain, there may be an entirely, not understandable or completely different civilizations based on values beyond the limits of human comprehension.
Ok, this just diverted into a discussion of aliens that have different values than us.
I have no problem with that.
That's not what we're discussing though.
Crap, we can't even get people to get vaccines in a pandemic, and credulity for science battles with power and greed. What makes us think we're even looking for the right waveforms, the interesting modulations, or that another civilization even cares if we here it, twenty thousand years later?
Absolutely nothing.
We're looking for any modulation.
Unless they're using some kind of secret squirrel noise emulating modulation, we're going to see the modulation carrier because... well, as you may have guessed, it looks quite different from noise. We need not understand the modulation.
Again, I appreciate the point you're trying t
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I'm not insulting the intelligence of every human alive, rather, just because we're at the top of one food chain doesn't mean we're either overly-intelligent, or at the top of far more sophisticated food chains that we could not have imagined.
I cite the near-megawatt transmitter of yore because we can do the same thing with a microwatt today. The data density/sec of WiFi fifteen years ago was laughable by today's standards, and we've not pushed the boundaries of physics.
These are examples, but also examples
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Let's look at modulation, phase delay, timing/periodicity, isochronicity, duration, and more. Zero of these were understood in 1895. Our understanding of physics has changed breathtakingly, too.
Someone else in the universe will come to understand these in *their* order, and more.
Here on Earth: We listen for a little while and go, "nothing there, let's move on" and I giggle.
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I take your point, but I think other posters' points are that we can only observe with the technology we have and are aware of.
Let's say the aliens are chitchatting via controlled neutrino oscillation (totally making that up). We don't have a way to easily detect that, so we can't search for E.T. that way. So we miss them. But if an alien civilization is using it for communication there's a good bet they're doing it because they already have used "old-fashioned" radio waves, and neutrino oscillations are
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That we might find an echo of us somewhere is enticing, but likely to be fruitless for a number of reasons.
Do plentiful resources not based on iron, carbon, and silicon permit life as we know it? Will X-Ray band and beyond be more fruitful to listen on, as they hold more information? Do we use beat frequencies of hydrogen because it's so basic, or something like modulated gravity waves, funky rhythms based on what we know as music? This goes down to basic information communications science. Fish and birds n
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+1 Insightful, with high SNR
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I maintain that it's hubris to believe that our way, our evolution, is the only way, and that radio is the sniff-test for alien civilization.
So you're proposing we do magic to find them?
Care to explain what else we could possibly observe from hundreds of light years (and much further!) away?
Are we listening for audible noise from them? Smelling for them?
The reason we're listening for radio signals is because that's the only observational tool we have. On top of that, it's the only thing that we know of that can be made on a sub-planetary scale which could reach out into the cosmos. Yes, maybe some day we'll discover quantum faster than light sub
Re: What are the chances? (Score:4)
Unless the entire premise of evolution doesnÃ(TM)t exist in other planets, itÃ(TM)s unlikely aliens wouldnÃ(TM)t use similar technologies than our
We can actually take this one step farther. There is no reason that a civilization needs to develop in to a technological advanced civilization. For around 20K years the height of our civilization was Rome, and China. We have only been a "advanced" civilization for the past 300 years. Even today there are still societies living in jungles and on islands with nothing but stone age tools all fat and happy.
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Even today there are still societies living in jungles and on islands with nothing but stone age tools all fat and happy.
Very insightful.
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Society HAS to develop the more advanced tools, if you stay at the quality of life, you would overpopulate the world and burn all resources in short order.
Not really. It's only through technology that we are able to exploit many natural resources. An its only through technology and the exploitation of these natural resources that allow 10B of us to live on this rock. But this is only a development in the last 300 years. Without the technology there would be limits on how much of a population could be supported.
Rome existed at the same basic technological level for over a 1,000 years. Ancient China even longer. Sure there where some developments but n
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Perhaps you imagine aliens with big steam punk victorian power supplies driving crude lasers on space ships with spikes on them or something?
You forgot that those ships are crewed by vampires and weres!
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Also people often forget a very important thing, time scales. It took all of human history up to this point for us to develop enough technologies and knowledge to be able to "listen" in on the universe. These 200 thousand years, or even millions, are still a mere fraction of the universe's time lapse.
There could have been millions of space-faring civilizations before, and there will maybe be millions more after that, but all of them would come and go at different times and just miss each other by mere secon
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The filter does not even need to press the reset. It might be that interstellar travel is more or less simply beyond our reach.
As it stands today physics says chemical energy just won't take us many of the places we want to go. Atomic energy might but only if we are willing to go slow. The energy required to go anyway fast in terms of human life times juxtaposed against stellar distances rapidly moves beyond anything we have the ability to generate or manage if we could.
Even going Alfa Centuri is probably a
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Most Apes are in the stone age. If mankind would disappear one or more of them would likely evolve and take our place. There is no scientific reason why they would not.
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No scientific reason other than the fact that intelligent life has only arisen once in 4 billion years on earth. I mean, dinosaurs might evolve again too, but I wouldn't bet on it.
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I imagine that when we do find evidence of another civilization they will be either way ahead of us or way behind. Probably the former. And we will say, "Of course, how could we have missed it!"
Today, we still speak in terms of light years when it comes to searching for other life forms. And yet, we still don't hold technology that comes anywhere close to getting us anywhere near that.
To put that into perspective, it takes us humans months to travel less than three light minutes between here and Mars.) It's taken half a human lifetime for Voyager 1 to travel a whopping twenty one light hours. THAT is how far we humans have sent anything from this planet.
We could discover 1,000 life forms that a
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Not just that, but the period where high power transmitters were the norm was quite brief. Around here in eastern Ontario the TV stations on both sides of the border moved from to digital broadcasts and dropped their transmission power. The radio I listen to comes from directed satellite beams and internet connectivity comes from optical fibre or short range cell broadcasts. Anyone observing our broadcasts would need to catch that brief window when it was all being blasted in all directions.
Space is really
This (Score:2)
Exactly this point is important to remember. We dont know what to look for. We have no clue what kind of signal we should expect. This time they looked for very large radar bursts.
And not only that. Even if we could assume that someone was at the "radar" level of technology, how long would they be that ? Would they still keep firing their radar at us ? And if they did so for... Say 1000 years, and the signal travels at the speed of light, would the civilization still be there when the signal arrived ? Would
If they're that much more advanced than us... (Score:2)
Then they're hiding. Kinda the way we'd stay away from a water source known to harbor huge colonies of deadly bacteria.
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Kill them all and let Xenu sort them out!
=)
Maybe (Score:4, Insightful)
Smart civilizations hide their presence from aggressive species. Maybe only dumb naive species make their presence known.
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You mean power sources that any species we'd ever have to worry about would recognize as such?
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Smart civilizations hide their presence from aggressive species. Maybe only dumb naive species make their presence known.
What makes you think that other civilisations are any smarter than our own?
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What makes you think that other civilisations are any smarter than our own?
Right, but you have to admit we set the bar quite low...
Re:Maybe (Score:4, Insightful)
Compared to what.
I do get what you're saying. Humans are the worst. But I actually believe that any civilisation of a reasonable size that remains free thinking will fall into the same pattern. Humans are not a singular entity, not a mind hive. We've developed across the world in a tribal way, each isolated and one thing we have proven: All free thinking tribes formed religion, all free thinking tribes started fighting, and all people in the entire world in some way look out for number one to the detriment of all others and possibly the complete destruction of our own environment.
Humans suck, but we may be the best the universe has to offer. Now with that sobering thought it's time to open a beer.
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Smart civilizations hide their presence from aggressive species. Maybe only dumb naive species make their presence known.
Which is stronger:
A) An alien life forms sense of smell to be able to sniff out aggression from light years away.
B) Their ability to ass-u-me.
C) Yours.
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You must have read Dark Forest. Very cool how it solves the Fermi paradox.
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You mean, advanced civilizations might not believe Diversity Is Our Strength? Heresy!
They might even have only one or two bathroom types. Clearly too primitive for us to detect.
Evolution means we'll never hear them ... (Score:5, Funny)
It's inevitable that an alien life-form will eventually evolve an Elon Musk. A century later, they disappear behind a wall of space debris.
I would be hiding from us too. (Score:4, Funny)
Have you seen what we are wearing?
What about us ... (Score:2)
..We only started broadcasting ~80 years ago, now most of our communications are changing to point to point, compressed and encrypted
If we looked for similar from other civilizations we would expect to miss most of it, and the odd signal we happened to intercept would look like white noise
Re: What about us ... (Score:3)
That's a fair point. I'm curious how Earth's total human-made radio power has changed over the decades. We're probably not broadcasting radio or TV the way we used to, but we have a lot of cellular and wifi communications.
I guess in general it's logical that we continue to use radio for data transfer for awhile - we've built a large infrastructure around it. But if we start trying to power things wirelessly, our planetary RF power could increase many fold.
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Seems silly, but OK (Score:2)
We weren't expecting life to survive there and we weren't expecting to be able to hear leakage at any significant distance. They confirmed these expectations with variable confusion at significant cost, but somebody got paid, so OK.
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Alien civilizations? (Score:2)
So we have miniscule chance of finding it that way (Score:3)
Re: So we have miniscule chance of finding it that (Score:2)
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>I honestly dont think we will find anyone untill we stumble across them face to face out there. So stop wasting money on detecting them here and put it on efforts to go out there looking instead.
I think you haven't considered how incredibly difficult it is to travel across interstellar space.
Now, I also think the people looking for radio emissions are unreasonably optimistic given the inverse square law, and our own experience with simply not wasting energy bleeding signals into space once we figured ou
Cliche time? (Score:3)
An absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. This is the expected result, the chances of finding anything given the numbers and L from the Drake equation [wikipedia.org], the actually remarkable result would be finding some evidence.
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The remarkable result would be finding anything that was indistinguishable from noise.
The period for which a civilisation is putting out large, powerful, unencrypted communication that leaks to the galaxy is extremely, extremely tiny.
And encrypted secure comms are patternless and indistinguishable from noise, and modern civilisations would be doing it with the minimum amount of power unless they wanted to send out a beacon (which is generally agreed to be a bad idea for any sufficiently advanced civilisatio
I, for one (Score:2)
I, for one, welcome our new undetectable stealth overlords.
Anyone wanna bet... (Score:2)
Did they look at Kansas? (Score:2)
One of them must be right and so there must be aliens somewhere around here.
Expected (Score:2)
Failure to see a signal is to be expected. They don't want us to detect them until we are ready to handle an alien civilization. For starters, they were waiting to see if Facebook would reinstate Trump.
Hmm (Score:2)
Well what did we expect? Pretty sure aliens have been aware of us ever since episodes of "I Love Lucy" started reaching them and then they must have immediately banned any sort of communication in this direction.
Not suprising. But keep looking. (Score:2)
Unlikely to hear anything because lets consider if little grey men are operating a Alien 103.5 FM station at 100,000 watts on their home world. The signal strength fades into the background very quickly, its hard to pickup if you are 100 miles away, impossible at the distance of another solar system. The signal most liley to travel interstellar distance is a tight beam like signal such as a microwave dish operating at high power, and then you have to be in the path of the beam to receive it. When you here o
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Alien 103.5 FM station at 100,000 watts
And that might only exist for a hundred years or so. Consider how we are moving away from large, single transmitters to grids of low power cellular sites over which we can stream video and audio.
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Interesting. Do you know if a say, 2 million watt omnidirectional antenna at say, 500 khz - 1 ghz (a typical but powerful broadcast transmitter you could expect ) on earth could be detected from Proxima Centauri, with a feasible antenna (lets consider maybe that even 1 km across is feasible for an antenna size). There is much less likely to be intentionally broadcasted dignals sent by an ET for other worlds to hear, but its more likely ET is going to have broadcast transmitters for their own use.
I think it's the most likely outcome (Score:2)
Think of it like this: since the start of the universe, we started emitting radio signals and visibly changing our planet in the last 100 or so years. If we assume that we're not exceptional and a somewhat average civilization, most others (if they exists) are at a similar level of development (there could be outliers).
So, unless they're really close to us, the chances we'll detect anything are close to zero, unless we luck out and find an outlier.
Why am I not surprised? (Score:2)
First, our radio signals have been dropping, as we do to cable, fibre, and directed links.
Second... they're really going to be using radio and radar a thousand years from now?
Third: they're looking towards galactic center... where the radiation level gets higher, and unless there are life forms that use radiation, is far less friendly, and it gets worse as you look towards the Milky Way's black hole.(Sagittarius A).
ref Dark Forest Thoery (Score:2)
Remembrance of Earth's Past is an excellent 3-book series (The Three-Body Problem is book one), and the end of Book Two is an excellent warning of the consequences of loudly declaring our location. It may be that we don't detect any transmissions because either a) the ones that used to transmit are destroyed, or b) smart civilizations are keeping their existence low-key.
I see great benefit in space travel and exploration, and becoming a multi-planet species. As a kid, meeting alien life seemed extremely co
And? (Score:2)
Re: My opinion (Score:2)
Re:My opinion (Score:5, Interesting)
My take: the Fermi Paradox strongly argues that the notion that life tends to rapidly form anywhere that liquid water can be found (in contract with rock) is bunk. That special, rare conditions are needed. Because if "water + rock = abiogenesis within a couple hundred million years" (what's been alleged to be the recipe for Earth), life should be all over the bloody place. But all signs thusfar say it's not.
We have no clue what the earliest hypercycle on Earth was like, but I don't think it's controversial to say that it was radically different from life today.
When one builds an arch, they don't just try to make the blocks hover in the air while they're building it. They first make an easier-to-build scaffolding, then place the blocks around it, then remove the scaffolding. Evolution has used such a "scaffolding" approach constantly throughout its entire history to create new functionality - repurposing existing structures / chemical paths for new purposes - and it certainly stands to reason that this would happen in abiogenesis as well, many times over.
You start with some terribly nonselective process that makes a lot of useless junk, but happens to make enough of its reagents that it continues at some level. It might not even be organic - might be based on clays, or silica gels, or crystallization/dissolution processes, or countless other things. But if the incorporation of organic chemistry - and increasingly complex chemistry - allows it to become more selective, more stable, and in general more "fit" - then these reactions will become heavily utilized. Indeed, if they become highly successful, the original "scaffolding" chemistry may be entirely lost.
What did the first life look like? Again, I have no clue. But I feel confident that it's not just "water + common rocks found all over the universe = complex life". There must have been something peculiar on the early Earth (which little resembled the present Earth), at some stage, to get things going or to reach the next critical step.
Re:My opinion (Score:5, Insightful)
Water + rock + amino acids, those 3 are quite common. The first two will be present in some form on every planet since every element iron and down will be represented. Amino acids should be statistically common, they've been detected in comets in our solar system.
The issue with the search for extra terrestrial life is that it relies on technologically advanced life. There are 2 major problems with that.
1) We have no way of knowing what percentage of planets with life ultimately see a rise of human (or better) like intelligence. Every solar system could have planets with life and still not have signal generating intelligent life.
2) The window in which a planet is radio noisy is probably fairly brief. Earth is getting quieter over time not louder. We're getting better and better at either transmitting via fiber or using highly directed signals. By the end of this century we could be nearly radio quiet. On a side note it's in any species' best interest to be undetectable. The potential benefit of contact to an already established stable species is near zero compared to the risk.
Couple those with the fact that this survey pointed at the galactic center which is like searching for lithium based life forms in lave (yes there's probably more lithium, but it's a fairly inhospitable environment) and all this survey can really say is theory checks out. We didn't expect to see a damn thing and low and behold we were right.
(btw not disagreeing with your post, just commenting)
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You seem to be assuming that life inevitably leads to complex life which inevitably leads to intelligence which inevitably leads to civilization which inevitably lead to signals detectable across interstellar distances. Keep in mind that for the first three billion years of life on Earth the most complex organisms were cyanobacteria. Then sex was somehow invented and for the next billion years the most complex organisms were fish. Finally animals emerged on land and until 60 million years ago the most in
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Actually, we're unique in a lot of ways. We have an unusually large moon, we have a mix of terrestrial planets and gas giants, which appears to be unusual for solar systems, and we have Jupiter acting as a debris collector.
So far, the most earth-like planet we've discovered is Venus. And even Venus isn't very friendly to life. At least not the kind of life we're familiar with.
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we have a mix of terrestrial planets and gas giants, which appears to be unusual for solar systems
It's only unusual because the systems we've looked at tend to be the easiest to find - nearby stars with hot jupiters orbiting very closely to them.
we have Jupiter acting as a debris collector.
We also have Jupiter acting as a debris attractor, and debris flinger. It certainly keeps the asteroid belt alive and ready to send chunks our way, instead of forming a dwarf planet that won't cross our orbit.
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We're not just looking for "life" though, are we? We are looking for life that has developed along the same technological paths as our own. There could be life on every one of these planets, but would a creature that lives under ground be more interested in outer space or the core of their planet? Would their analog to our radio communications be more concerned with propagation through air or through rock?
The problem to me isn't that life hasn't developed everywhere, I like to think that it has. The problem
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All of these hypothetical emergence-of-life scenarios will soon be tested as we explore the rest of the solar system. It has so many places where we might find your rock-plus-water, clays, silica gels and other less likely places for an origin of life, be they the ethane lakes of Titan or the cloud layers above Venus. If we find life in any of these places, talk of Fermi filters will then shift to the evolution of technology.
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As some have said, to find that there is extra-terrestrial life would be equally mind blowing as to find out that there is no extra-terrestrial life. If believing in extra-terrestrial life is no different to religion, then so
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If believing in extra-terrestrial life is no different to religion, then so does believing there is no extra-terrestrial life.
This is exactly correct.
Science does not make conclusions on anything, for or against, without evidence.
Science speculates only when speculation can lead to evidence. Philosophy (and the subset known as religion), in contrast, can conclude based on speculation.
Saying that "there is no extra-terrestrial life" is an unscientific conclusion. It is merely a belief, and is firmly in the realm of philosophy.