Comments on: Are We Alone? charticle

By: Desmond Thomas

Desmond Thomas — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 22:49:00 +0000

I hate to say this but they universe doesn’t normally fall in line with our mathematical calculations. Sure it possible could be true but more then likely not

By: GregS

GregS — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 21:39:00 +0000

To my mind, the two biggest problems with these calculations of how common or rare intelligent life may be in the universe or in our galaxy are that (1) we don’t actually know what are the conditions needed for life to arise, and (2) we don’t know how common it is for planets to maintain an environment stable enough over the long term for complex life to evolve. It is not possible scientifically to answer these questions from a sample size of 1, which is all we’ve got. In other words, the Drake equation might be missing some key variables that we can’t even conceive about because our single example of life isn’t enough to make them apparent to us.

By: Ryan Lenethen

Ryan Lenethen — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 18:49:00 +0000

I don’t think the question of is there other life out there. I can answer that one:

Yes.

The questions is A) how far away is that life, and B) will any life ever be able to possess a technology to overcome that ridiclous distance.

As many Science Fiction authors have written about, unless you have FTL, and time relativity does not exist, there are going to be issues. Like the life being extinct by the time you get there, or your race being extinct, or either evolved to something you would not reconginse, etc…

As unless you get unbelievably luck (or not depending on how things pan out), on literally an astronomically scale have have a planet super close by that you can reach using sub-luminal speeds, over a reasonable period of time, it looks pretty improbable that communication, let alone travel would every be possible.

This is of course assuming no magical technology being developed into the future.

By: liquidstar

liquidstar — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 15:52:00 +0000

How can we be so sure we don’t already have evidence? The Fermi paradox says nothing about civilizations that refuse to believe in alien life.

By: Bob Churchill

Bob Churchill — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 13:46:00 +0000

Due to some idiotic licensing restriction this is what UK viewers see when trying to visit the linked page:
https://twitter.com/bobchurchill/status/241161109854359552
If the wholly owned BBC subsidiary “BBC Worldwide” can commercialise content abroad, then why the heck can’t a “Worldwide” organisation show its content on the “worldwide” web without shoving licensing restrictions in the face of the very license fee payers who funded them in the first place?

By: peterkvt80

peterkvt80 — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 10:27:00 +0000

So you think that we are not alone because of probability? The Drake equation is not actually evidence.

By: peterkvt80

peterkvt80 — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 10:17:00 +0000

A TV transmitter that covers a big city might be a megawatt. How much power would you want in a beacon?

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 09:13:00 +0000

Had space probes presented themselves to us at any time other than the last couple of hundred years, we would have burned them and written a chapter of some holy scripture about them.

By: greggman

greggman — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 09:08:00 +0000

I’m more of a believer in the Fermi Paradox

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

Basically it says either we are the first intelligent life or otherwise we should have met them already. Reasons, technology advances exponentially. If there are millions of other civilizations some of them should have developed before us, by millions of years. Being so far advanced they’d likely have long ago made self replicating space probes (think Curiosity Mars Rover + MakerBot) and that those probes, given so much time ahead of us, should have easily covered the known universe.

There’s only a few explanations then why we haven’t seen these probes

1) We’re the first intelligent life
2) They all killed themselves (nukes, gray goo, bio-warfare, …)
3) They all lost the will to explore (addicted to vr)
4) It’s impossible to travel fast

1 seems highly unlikely and the rest basically say we’ll likely never meet aliens even if they exist.

By: Beanolini

Beanolini — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 08:20:00 +0000

I remember him when he used to review Amiga games for Zero magazine…

I remember him from my GCSE German class. Do I get a prize?

By: retepslluerb

retepslluerb — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 07:48:00 +0000

I think that’s the GEMA-principle.

By: cdh1971

cdh1971 — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 05:58:00 +0000

I hear “They” have been here for years, as seen by the attached pic from the Mars Rover that has been suppressed by NASA, in which they are messing with the Rover, or rather, Mission Control.

Forgot to say — I think that given what we have to go on – what usually happens when even a well-meaning technologically superior civilization encounters a less advanced one, the less advanced civilization almost always doesn’t benefit.

So, Ser xaulted1, I appreciate your choice of paraphrase.

By: Ǥɍǡḩḁᶆ Ӻᴙᴇᴇᴍᴀᴎ

Ǥɍǡḩḁᶆ Ӻᴙᴇᴇᴍᴀᴎ — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 04:01:00 +0000

Thing is, even if there are 3-4 other civilisations in this galaxy right at this moment (relatively speaking), they’re likely to be so far away (as in maybe 10,000 light years away) that they’re not going to even care.
It also seems likely that, if we manage to get out of this particular solar system the logistics of which are themselves mindboggling – sending a robot to Mars, OK, we’ve done that several times; keeping our home planet habitable over the next century, that’s going to be enough of a challenge to do so while keeping some semblance of the world as we know it now, let alone trying to make another planet meatbag-friendly.
Things like Star Trek and Star Wars are fun but they’ve tended to mess with people’s minds about how empty the galaxy is.
I’d say that it’s almost certain that there is other life out there. I’d also say it’s pretty likely that they’re not going to be relevant to our own lives for a long time to come. And I suspect that if we want to satisfy that expansionist urge that seems to lie within some of us, we may have to leave our bodies behind (or at least radically re-engineer them so we can live longer, withstand harsher conditions, and of course become less prone to stupidity), which of course raises the question as to we’d likewise have to re-examine what it means to be human and what our goals mean to us, and whether it’s worth bothering continuing to exist.
Who knows, in a hundred thousand years, some /thing/ that’s emerged from this solar system may become the thing that other extrastellar civilisations FEAR.

By: Daneel

Daneel — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 01:04:00 +0000

David McCandless! I remember him when he used to review Amiga games for Zero magazine…

By: David Weintraub

David Weintraub — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 00:11:00 +0000

The big question is whether or not they’ll be made of meat: http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/TheyMade.shtml

By: Robert Baruch

Robert Baruch — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 00:07:00 +0000

http://i1.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/003/619/Untitled-1.jpg

By: Bevatron Repairman

Bevatron Repairman — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 23:36:00 +0000

I have never understood this particular strand of criticism of the Drake Equation. As far as I can tell, Frank Drake never thought — doesn’t think — we’d get anything close to a definitive product to his equation. Rather, he was — in 1960 — trying to set the stage for the sorts of questions we would have to answer in order to get any sort of approximation of the product of his equation.

I recall that when I first heard of the Drake Equation — watching Cosmos when I was 9 years old — Carl Sagan suggested that the answer for N-sub-p, number of stars with planets, might be just 1 in 10. With no blame to Dr. Sagan in the late 1970s, we now know that number is probably quite a bit off and closer to 1 in 2 or better. It’s a far cry from solving for N in the Drake Equation, we’re looking at the right things that we need to address the question at all.

Questions about how readily life might occur and evolve will start to get a lot better answers as we explore Mars further and hopefully probe Europa and Enceladus in the years ahead. But, at least, by looking at the factors Drake identified, we can begin to frame the question. I think that’s all he was trying to do. And I think he did it pretty well.

By: Noctilucent Studios

Noctilucent Studios — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 23:07:00 +0000

Here’s a photo with 200,000 GALAXIES in one shot. This is one teeny tiny section of the night sky. Not only are we not alone, we live in a Multi-Verse teeming with life. The only problem we have here on Earth is blindness and arrogance to the glaringly obvious.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/03/23/an-ultradeep-image-thats-full-galaxies/

By: Florian Braun

Florian Braun — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 22:29:00 +0000

An ant colony is not really an aggregate of different individuals though, the colony only has one single genetic future, and colonies are more like cells in a body than societies.

By: ptrourke

ptrourke — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 21:49:00 +0000

That’s all included in the “can they communicate” and “how long will they try to communicate” parameters of the equation. I put a probability of 0.05 for “can an intelligence communication” and a window of opportunity for “how long will they try to communicate” of 500 years. The optimists would find those very, very low.

The thing is, when talking about SETI, one is usually thinking about deliberate contact beacons, and deliberate searches, not leakage of everyday RF (or laser, etc.) traffic. The odds of finding transmissions that are NOT intended as beacons are pretty low, because who would put that kind of power into e.g. a news broadcast?

By: ptrourke

ptrourke — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 21:46:00 +0000

Those variables – e.g., “percentage of planets with a tide-producing moon” – are all covered by the catchalls like “probability life will evolve on the average habitable planet.” Breaking the equation down like that is useful, but you’d also have to add a factor for “probability that presence of a tide-producing moon is necessary for the development of life”…

By: chenille

chenille — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 21:45:00 +0000

Without changing your main point, it always struck me as just as dubious to suppose alien life would need very particular things like tides, instead of simply developing a different way without them.

By: ptrourke

ptrourke — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 21:42:00 +0000

Physical travel, extremely (probably prohibitively) expensive. Sending data? Not so bad.

By: ptrourke

ptrourke — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 21:41:00 +0000

The equation isn’t really trying to calculate how many “civilizations” there are in the galaxy, but how many civilizations capable of communicating with US there MIGHT BE in the galaxy. Once you accept that, you can see the value of the equation: as we get a better handle on many of those numbers, we’ll have some sense of the scope of the task of contact.

By: chenille

chenille — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 21:40:00 +0000

Even with farming, ant colonies are more like family villages than true cities. But if you wanted to call them “non-intelligent civilizations”, I’m sure nobody would mind.

By: Stjohn

Stjohn — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 21:35:00 +0000

DRM quips aside, any digital radio transmission we receive from an alien civilization, given degradation and interference, would most likely resemble background noise. If you want to talk about probabilities, out of those 2bn Goldilocks planets, how many of them would have civilizations reaching the analog-radio phase, like for us between 1900 and now? And how many of those transmissions just happen to float by us as we’re tuned into whatever frequencies they happen to be on? That seems like a pretty narrow sweet spot to me. A less-than-educated guess would be, uh, not many.

By: AnthonyC

AnthonyC — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 20:48:00 +0000

I find your last sentence very unlikely. There is plenty of energy in the universe, in the solar system, and reaching our planet (solar, fusion, fission), we’re just not quite there yet in terms of accessing it effectively. This is a problem that our civilization should be able to crack in a century or two at most- it took less than 300 years to go from the wood powered steam engine to nuclear fission, after all. Once you’ve got cost-effective solar you’re good to go for the next 5 billion years or so.

By: xaulted1

xaulted1 — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 20:47:00 +0000

As Hawking has stated, We’re likely not alone, but the day another civilization stumbles across us will be the last day humans see the sun rise. Pray that day never comes.

By: ldobe

ldobe — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 20:42:00 +0000

I suppose it’s similar. But ant colonies are family groups that are direct progeny of the queen.

I’m not a sociologist, so I honestly don’t know what I’m talking about any better than the next one down the line

By: Digilante

Digilante — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 20:37:00 +0000

Never felt part of the human race, and never will. Each night I wish that something would land and take me away; go on, dissect me – at least I won’t have to go to work the next day. It’s so incredibly boring here, and it’s all so childish with religions, petty wars, and acts of aggression.