Are we alone.... The answer is ''Yes''

Curly Judge

Dotsie~tmp wrote: »

I think our fossil record might be a good clue. Extinction events are regular (on geological timescales) and sometimes massive. The universe mght just be incedibly hostile to complex intelligent life at this point and in the past. We may be the first iteration intelligent life on earth but that doesnt mean we will be the last. Maybe we are the first traunch of cvilisation doomed not to make it.

Maybe every soloar system has 10,000 10km rocks to throw at planets, maybe a few 50km ones to reset life back to square one. Its depressing to think in these terms. Looks like we will need a very major leap to avoid these things.

I remember reading somewhere once that the inhabitants of any planet within a 50 light year radius of a gamma ray burst would be fried into a fine dust.
Perhaps gamma ray bursts are the Domestos of the universe and keep vermin like us humans under control?:D

Tzetze

An interesting recent paper on the Drake equation and Fermi paradox...
http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.6411

In summary, it appears that although radio-communications constitute a natural means for SETI for civilizations younger than a few millennia, older civilizations should rather develop extensive programs of interstellar colonization, because this is the only way to achieve undisputable evidence (either for or against the existence of ETI) within their lifetime L. In those conditions, the Fermi paradox appears all the more paradoxical: if, as the SETI proponents claim, there are literary thousands of such advanced civilizations wishing to establish contact, “where are they?”
Today the “Plurality of worlds”, as the field was known in the Antiquity, is more controversial than ever. Arguments on both sides (``It is unlikely that we are alone, in view of the Copernican principle and of such a large number of stars in the Galaxy'' and ``If there are so many of them, where are they?'') are of statistical kind. They are consequently of little import, for statistics cannot be based on the single case provided by life on Earth. Detection of life signatures on another planet would be a powerful reason to undertake interstellar travel, at first by sending unmanned probes. Detection of some extraterrestrial civilization would undoubtedly be one of the major landmarks in the history of mankind. On the other hand, non-detection of ETI signals, even after millennia of research, would never prove that there were no extraterrestrial civilizations. But it would be reason to prepare ourselves for a life of cosmic solitude.

dorkacle

Roger_007 wrote: »

If we are alone, what is the rest of the universe for? Is it Gods ghost estate?

I think it was Stephen Hawking that said, "if we are alone in the universe, then it is a pretty big waste of space."

I'd like to think we are not alone, but whether or not we can or will ever communicate with other 'beings' is a different question.

We are looking at things from our perspective and our limitations, which may or may not be applicable to ET

ThatDrGuy

Another way of thinking about it:

What is out in space? Very little of anything at all. Light speed barrier makes space travel a near impossibility. Instead of exploring outer space it makes much more sense for advanced civilisations to spend their time in inner space: virtual reality and simulations instead. Their imprint on the universe might substantially decline as their gratification could come from virtual goods and services instead of actual ones. This conservation of resources would also prevent the catastrophic effect of over population. Could have all the AI aliens you want and all the interesting worlds etc without the messy business of trying to cross stars.

Roger_007

Suppose we think about it this way: The universe on one gigantic organism...a living thing. We are like almost insignificant micro-organisms living in a remote part of the being that is the universe. It's a bit like fleas on a dogs bollix wondering if their dog is the only one in the universe that supports life.

mickmackey1

ThatDrGuy wrote: »

Instead of exploring outer space it makes much more sense for advanced civilisations to spend their time in inner space: virtual reality and simulations instead.

Except that this leaves them wide open to the possibility of an attack from an aggressive species which doesn't obey these rules. At the end of the day, the most logical form of self-defence is to control other planets before they can control you...

ThatDrGuy

mickmackey1 wrote: »

Except that this leaves them wide open to the possibility of an attack from an aggressive species which doesn't obey these rules. At the end of the day, the most logical form of self-defence is to control other planets before they can control you...

Not really. Light speed barrier means moving anything from one star to another takes forever and has to be very small. Conducting an attack would be logistically insane - it would require hundreds of generations and would likely be easily destroyed by anti metiorite defences the other crew would probably have. Space is so big to utterly preclude agression, also agressive species (like ours) would not survive long enough without destroying themselves to be any danger.

Nerro

Interesting thread and interesting points made over here.
I would actually rephrase the OP question.Are we alone in our galaxy and are we alone in the universe.
Our galaxy contains roughly 200 billion stars.lets say there is only 0.1% of stars that have planets which can support life that would give us 200 million stars...and another 0.1% of those stars tha actually would have intelligent life forms on those planets, so it would be 200000 intelligent civilizacions....numbers are big no???And thats only 0.1 percent of 0.1 percent...
Now lets have a look at the bigger picture.There is 100 billion galaxies in observable universe.each of them containing hundreds of million stars.Now you do the maths for probability of life....but dont forget we are talking about observable universe...
Now if the numbers are so big why they didnt contacted us?Maybe they did?Someone mentioned that we are transmiting radio signals into space for hundred years so other civilizacions should do that aswell.Well yes, but the distances are so vast that the signal gets lost in the background noise.Another thing to look at at our own civilizacion.Lets say you would travel 10 years back, and would pull out iphone 5 out of your pocket...i can bet the witch hunting would be resurrected again.And thats only in past 10 years in our Civilizacion.The possibilities are endless.

Zubeneschamali

Nerro wrote: »

numbers are big no???And thats only 0.1 percent of 0.1 percent...

You can't just pick 0.1% and say that's kind of small so it must be a reasonable lower limit. Real numbers get much smaller than that, maybe so small that we would not expect to find another intelligent species in the whole observable Universe.

We don't know. The only term in Drakes original equation we know more about now than in 1961 is the fraction of other stars that have planets, since no such planets were known back then.

Curly Judge

Perhaps instead of trying to detect radio signals we should be looking out for one of these? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
Now that we can not only detect proto-planets but are starting to analyse their
atmospheres, these - if they exist - should be coming within range of our technology.

ps200306

Dotsie~tmp wrote: »

I think our fossil record might be a good clue. Extinction events are regular (on geological timescales) and sometimes massive. The universe mght just be incedibly hostile to complex intelligent life at this point and in the past. We may be the first iteration intelligent life on earth but that doesnt mean we will be the last. Maybe we are the first traunch of cvilisation doomed not to make it.

Maybe every soloar system has 10,000 10km rocks to throw at planets, maybe a few 50km ones to reset life back to square one. Its depressing to think in these terms. Looks like we will need a very major leap to avoid these things.

That's an interesting one. The asteroid belt exists because of gravitational resonances involving Jupiter, which prevents a planet forming in the gap between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. It wouldn't necessarily be a feature of all planetary systems. On the other hand, the one or two million asteroids pale into insignificance compared to the possible one hundred trillion comets in the Oort cloud. While their excursions into the inner solar system are rare, those that get perturbed into shorter period orbits quickly get cleaned out by Jupiter, which is a major bonus to us. So the fate of more evolved life forms in other planetary systems might hinge on the particular configuration of the system, and whether they have "good" or "bad" Jupiters.

Nerro

Zubeneschamali wrote: »

You can't just pick 0.1% and say that's kind of small so it must be a reasonable lower limit. Real numbers get much smaller than that, maybe so small that we would not expect to find another intelligent species in the whole observable Universe.

We don't know. The only term in Drakes original equation we know more about now than in 1961 is the fraction of other stars that have planets, since no such planets were known back then.

Well you are right to ask these questions.BUT i am picking 0.1% as a comparison.They are actually bigger.Thanks to Kepler telescope the number of habitable planets have risen to 5%.If you will blindly believe in data collected so far it found 1500 canditate planets, 50 of which are in goldilocs zone.They are canditate as they are not yet confirmed.The number can go up or down but i recon by not much.
I am not a big fan of Drakes equation.its been presented in 1961 and ALOT have changed since then.We changed our understanding about habitable zone for starts.
And it doesnt take into equation two rather important things,cosmological developmental phases and time.It still takes into account that universe is uniform and never changing,when we know it isnt.

Zubeneschamali

Nerro wrote: »

I am not a big fan of Drakes equation.its been presented in 1961 and ALOT have changed since then.

The only thing that has changed since then is that he guessed 0.2 to 0.5 for the number of stars with planets, but we had no actual data. Now we do.

But other terms, like the fraction of suitable planets which will develop life and then intelligent life, we just don't know. 0.1 % is just a number, there is no reason why it is a better number than 10E -57.

Nerro

Zubeneschamali wrote: »

But other terms, like the fraction of suitable planets which will develop life and then intelligent life, we just don't know.

Well thats the whole argument isnt it?Like i mentioned before there is some factors missing.And i am going to quote here :
"The Drake Equation does not take into consideration such factors as the age of the Galaxy, when intelligence first emerged, or the presence of physio-chemical variables such as the presence of metals necessary for the presence of life and the formation of planets.
It does not tell us where advanced ETI’s may be dwelling or what they’re up to (are they outside the Galaxy? Do they live inside Jupiter Brains? Do they phase shift outside of what we regard as habitable space?"
In other words more factors....
From where i stand all signs point that there should be life.We are carbon based life forms made mostly from water.All of those elements are abundant in the universe.And giving the amount of chances (planets in habitable zone) i do not believe that mother nature will screw it up so many times with the most active element in the periodic table.Hence the 0.1%.
Plus all the factors are more of in what the persons believe in rather then real scientific data, as we do not have such,and probably never will to make it work, as you said its just a number.Even if we will find ET,s on one ocasion, there are so many variables that you will never get a number out of it whats really going on in the universe.

ps200306

Nerro wrote: »

From where i stand all signs point that there should be life.We are carbon based life forms made mostly from water.All of those elements are abundant in the universe.And giving the amount of chances (planets in habitable zone) i do not believe that mother nature will screw it up so many times with the most active element in the periodic table.Hence the 0.1%.

Why did it apparently only happen once on earth, then?

ThatDrGuy

Nerro wrote: »

Well thats the whole argument isnt it?Like i mentioned before there is some factors missing.And i am going to quote here :
"The Drake Equation does not take into consideration such factors as the age of the Galaxy, when intelligence first emerged, or the presence of physio-chemical variables such as the presence of metals necessary for the presence of life and the formation of planets.
It does not tell us where advanced ETI’s may be dwelling or what they’re up to (are they outside the Galaxy? Do they live inside Jupiter Brains? Do they phase shift outside of what we regard as habitable space?"
In other words more factors....
From where i stand all signs point that there should be life.We are carbon based life forms made mostly from water.All of those elements are abundant in the universe.And giving the amount of chances (planets in habitable zone) i do not believe that mother nature will screw it up so many times with the most active element in the periodic table.Hence the 0.1%.
Plus all the factors are more of in what the persons believe in rather then real scientific data, as we do not have such,and probably never will to make it work, as you said its just a number.Even if we will find ET,s on one ocasion, there are so many variables that you will never get a number out of it whats really going on in the universe.

There are huge numbers of things not included in the Drake "equation".
Just to spout a few:

Needs to be away from sterilising radiation
Needs to be on a galactic orbit that keeps it away from sterlisiing radiation
Has to be a second generation star forming post super nova to have heavy elements
Has to have some sort of shield against meteorities ( as pointed out earlier)
Has to have an orbit stabliser ( our giant moon)
Has to be a rocky world in goldilocks zone ( most rocky worlds are on outer parts of solar system and gas giants inner from what i have read but that could be observer bias)
Has to have magnetic shield ( molten roting core ) to shield simple organic compunds from ionising radiaition
Needs to be geologically active but not too geologically active

You could argue these points all day but without them your chances of advanced life are negligible. Data from keppler does not tell you diddly about habitable worlds, at most it tells you that if water existed on a body and that body had enough gravity to keep it and it wasn't super geologically active and it wasn't overally huge, there might be liquid water, possibly. Thats a million miles away from habitable. On the plus side, of all the planets we have detailed information on there is 12.5% habitality rate!

Maximus Alexander

ThatDrGuy wrote: »

There are huge numbers of things not included in the Drake "equation".
Just to spout a few:

Needs to be away from sterilising radiation
Needs to be on a galactic orbit that keeps it away from sterlisiing radiation
Has to be a second generation star forming post super nova to have heavy elements
Has to have some sort of shield against meteorities ( as pointed out earlier)
Has to have an orbit stabliser ( our giant moon)
Has to be a rocky world in goldilocks zone ( most rocky worlds are on outer parts of solar system and gas giants inner from what i have read but that could be observer bias)
Has to have magnetic shield ( molten roting core ) to shield simple organic compunds from ionising radiaition
Needs to be geologically active but not too geologically active

All of these are covered by the Drake Equation under the following two terms:

ne = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
fℓ = the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop life at some point

Zubeneschamali

ps200306 wrote: »

Why did it apparently only happen once on earth, then?

Firstly, we don't know that it only happened once - maybe it happened several times and the current instance of life ate all previous life.

Secondly, maybe it can only happen once: maybe the current instance of life on earth changed the conditions by gobbling up all the precursor chemicals in the primordial soup.

ThatDrGuy

Maximus Alexander wrote: »

All of these are covered by the Drake Equation under the following two terms:

ne = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
fℓ = the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop life at some point

If you approach it from a kind of inflatio ad absurdum pov, yes. You could also use the equation n= ( amount of intelligent life in our vicinity actively trying to communicate with us at this time) * 1 but it wouldnt be very helpful. What I was getting at is the issue of what conditions are required to support life have layers and layers of probabilistic multipliers themselves and as such could very well be miniscule numbers. Drake equation is quite useless all things considered.

the_syco

flanna01 wrote: »

So..... If there was any more advanced civilisation out there, they should / could / would be far more advanced than us.... They would have spotted our atmosphere before we were even out of the ponds...

We nuked each other, bomb each other, kill each other over the most stupid of differences, kill anything new so we can put it under a microscope, and are proud if we catch something.


So no, I would avoid earth if I was an alien, as over the last 70 years we've become good at killing each other with the simple weapons we have now. No need to give us better weapons and space travel so that we could bring our wars to other worlds.

ThatDrGuy

the_syco wrote: »

We nuked each other, bomb each other, kill each other over the most stupid of differences, kill anything new so we can put it under a microscope, and are proud if we catch something.


So no, I would avoid earth if I was an alien, as over the last 70 years we've become good at killing each other with the simple weapons we have now. No need to give us better weapons and space travel so that we could bring our wars to other worlds.

"We poison our air and water to weed out the weak! We set off fission bombs in our only biosphere! We nailed our God to a stick! Don't **** with the human race!" — A forum post

Maximus Alexander

ThatDrGuy wrote: »

If you approach it from a kind of inflatio ad absurdum pov, yes. You could also use the equation n= ( amount of intelligent life in our vicinity actively trying to communicate with us at this time) * 1 but it wouldnt be very helpful. What I was getting at is the issue of what conditions are required to support life have layers and layers of probabilistic multipliers themselves and as such could very well be miniscule numbers. Drake equation is quite useless all things considered.

I think that you are missing the point of the Drake equation.

ThatDrGuy

Maximus Alexander wrote: »

I think that you are missing the point of the Drake equation.

Maybe I am. I see it as a fermi problem for which estimates are un-computable and therefore ludicrous.

dorkacle

Why does everyone assume that intelligent aliens from another planet wouldn't have a 'colourful' history of violence etc. etc. just like ourselves??

After all aren't we the best possible example of "intelligent" life that we have yet???

the_syco

dorkacle wrote: »

Why does everyone assume that intelligent aliens from another planet wouldn't have a 'colourful' history of violence etc. etc. just like ourselves??

After all aren't we the best possible example of "intelligent" life that we have yet???

If we used nuclear power to travel beyond the stars, would you give nuclear power to anyone we found, so that they to could travel. And if not, why not?

Also, current superpowers occupy other countries to either help democracy, to prove a point, or to deny another superpower the country. Maybe our planet isn't important in the general scheme of things, in the larger picture of interstellar warfare?

dorkacle

the_syco wrote: »

If we used nuclear power to travel beyond the stars, would you give nuclear power to anyone we found, so that they to could travel. And if not, why not?

Also, current superpowers occupy other countries to either help democracy, to prove a point, or to deny another superpower the country. Maybe our planet isn't important in the general scheme of things, in the larger picture of interstellar warfare?

I don't get where your going here?

What I meant was, a couple of comments have suggested that aliens would be shocked at the human race's history, treatment of our planet/each other and so on.

Why would you assume intelligent aliens would have a utopian civilisation and history? Surely we ourselves are the best example of what such a civilisation would be like.

Although I'm just thinking, looking at Star Wars, Star Trek, and so on, aliens are regularly depicted as being as bad or worse than humans, so I guess I'm talking crap :pac:

Aquarius34

The biggest joke has been the question to find life out there. Life is all over the galaxy and universe,

bullpost

Yeah and we haven't even begun to explore the multiverse yet!

Aquarius34 wrote: »

The biggest joke has been the question to find life out there. Life is all over the galaxy and universe,

Aquarius34

This thread is shocking.

Curly Judge

Aquarius34 wrote: »

The biggest joke has been the question to find life out there. Life is all over the galaxy and universe,

Perhaps you'd like to share your reasoning or evidence with us lesser mortals?