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alien life possibility is pathetic

JohnG said:
I'm an American. Douglas Adams was English.

My point is that in the original radio series, book, TV series, etc. the relevant part of the quote is "I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space".

They don't call me a Pedantic Bore for nothing, you know.
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Mea culpa. I should have checked an original source instead of trusting the damn internet.


Next thing you know, you'll tell me YouTube isn't a reliable source either.
 
Since life developed on earth its extremely probable that it developed elsewhere what with the trllions of stars with planets out there. Who can say but that conditions for the developement of life somewhere other than earth made the developement of life easier there than it was here. There are many scientists out there who believe that the Universe is teeming with life of all kinds including intelligent life. We may never know for sure but statistically they are out there.
 
Personally, I think that, if it's possible to go faster than the speed of light, such technology is so extremely rare and hard to accomplish (requiring LOTS of energy, at the least), it's practically non-existent. This would solve Fermi's Paradox very quickly.

Of course, there are ways to supplant such ideas, but they're very very hard. Unless you rely on robotics to seed other worlds, you'd need to be put into a deep sleep to save on resources as you stay on a ship for, at the VERY least, years on end. (Think about it; to go the speed of light, alone, you'd be talking about 4 years to the nearest planet, and the speed of light is theoretically impossible to accomplish).

I'm not sure what the maximum delta-v we can accomplish is; I'm sure we will develop more and more efficient engines (even if they only emit a little bit of thrust, as an ion engine does), but we have a long ways to go to achieve a sufficient delta-v to really go anywhere.

Of course, one can seed a world through information. For instance, send out a ship with our DNA stored, and some basic materials, and have them "build" life on a new world. But then, terraforming would be required, and if you were to launch yourself into a world where life already exists, you're more likely to die than live there (it would be like the Native Americans meeting the Europeans, only with no immune system for ALL the germs, even assuming that they weren't incompatible in other ways, such as one being ammonia-based life form...)

Furthermore, this is assuming ability to space travel in the first place, which may not be possible form lack of resources. And yet, even furthermore, perhaps a species doesn't WANT to leave. On Earth, we have debates that we should "fix the world" before we bother with space... seeming to say that we need to eliminate disease, poverty, hunger, etc., which are very unlikely to be solved anytime soon. And even then, an alien race might just desire to download itself into a very large synthetic computer, and live in simulation. (Or, as in Greg Egan's Diaspora, they may try to colonize as digital beings, which seems to be the greatest hope anyone has... but even then, spreading would be very difficult, as you would need to set up the satellites to receive the data, translate it, and "construct" you, and even then there's the chance the download might "corrupt" you).

Or, perhaps their world didn't survive their equivalent of our Cold War. Maybe some alien civilizations destroyed themselves, through warfare or pollution.

The "They should overtake the universe!" people really are extreme optimists. Space is a cold, harsh mistress.
 
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The Man said:
If you doubt the existence of such predators, their pets sense those doubts and feed upon the brains of such skeptics. Better to be certain and not doubt anything regardless of the evidence, lest your brain be eaten.

“By the pricking of my thumbs something wicked this way comes”


ETA:
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Of course, the existence of the predators is as valid a reason as any other for Fermi's Paradox until we get more data, in the meantime space travelers should always carry a cat to get rid of those pesky dragons.

Most people do not have much imagination when it comes to aliens and seem to think they would have to resemble us in some way.

Some of us will miss our brains more than others.

"Most effective, your Majesty! We'll destroy this...Earth"
 
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I've never understood why people think it's significant that nothing in the universe has done any better at getting to distant galaxies than we have. Our very existence is proof that intelligent life can exist and flourish without ever getting past its own neighborhood. Earth has been cranking out life for millions of years, and we've just barely managed to get an unmanned lander on Mars. The technology of interstellar travel is a science fiction pipe dream. Why should it be evidence of anything that we have not been visited by beings we can only surmise with technology we can barely imagine?
 
bruto said:
I've never understood why people think it's significant that nothing in the universe has done any better at getting to distant galaxies than we have. Our very existence is proof that intelligent life can exist and flourish without ever getting past its own neighborhood. Earth has been cranking out life for millions of years, and we've just barely managed to get an unmanned lander on Mars. The technology of interstellar travel is a science fiction pipe dream. Why should it be evidence of anything that we have not been visited by beings we can only surmise with technology we can barely imagine?
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It could be that the lifetimes of organic beings are inherently limited therefore rendering traveling interstellar distances impossible in a lifetime.
 
JoeTheJuggler said:
Your point is spot on, but I think your time scale here is a bit off. It would be archaebacteria, not dinos, that erased (or possibly continue to erase) newer examples of abiogenesis.
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Nope, the time scale is perfect. I`ll try to be more clear now.

The Hadean ranges from 4.57Ga (Earth`s formation) to 3.8 Ga ago (first known register of sedimentary rocks deposited in oceans). By 4.4Ga ago Earth had already cooled enough to allow for the fist time liquid water at its surface. So, lakes, seas and rivers became possible (this does not mean they actually existed back then). So, the environment was probably favorable for the appearence of life sometime after 4.4 Ga - very early in Earth`s history.

Between 4.0 to 3.9 Ga there was an intense meteor bombardment which obliterated (and thus sterilized) Earth`s early crust - we know no preserved direct records of it. The K/T boundary impact (the one responsible by the dinosaurs extinction 0.065Ga ago) was a puny event in comparisson. If life appeared before 4.0Ga (and it may have), this intense meteor bombardment finished it.

The earliest known fossils are from 3.2Ga and isotopic evidence for life goes back to 3.5Ga. Even if we settle with these ages, two things must be kept in our minds:
1. Archean Earth would still be considered quite hostile to life; not as hostile as Venus or Mars, but still a harsh place. But lifeforms managed to survive and evolve since then. Pretty resistent IMHO.
2. 3.5 Ga is still early in the geologic time.

All the above may be seen as indications that the appearence of life may not be so unlikely as some think; it may even have happened more than once along the history of our own planet. Thus it may also have happened at other planets and moons and at harsh conditions.

Now, exactly where, for how many times, for how long it survived and what were its evolutionary paths, we currently don`t know. To date, we have a single point in our dataset.

Just in case someone does not know, Ga stands for giga annum, a billion years.
 
bruto said:
Nonsense. All they need to do is turn on their hyperdrives. If they're aliens, they must have hyperdrives!:rolleyes:
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One of the unfortunate characteristics of the hyper drive is that it requires a sun's worth of energy to propel it so you only get one per civilization.

Just another reason they have not come yet.
 
makaya325 said:
Extremophiles may live in extreme conditions, but what are the chances life could form in such deadly conditions? Life on earth formed in a nice safe deep ocean, which no other planets seem to have. Even a water world would be a problem, since you need land to kick start complex life.

Yes, im aware "look at all those stars", and as you plug in many factors for life, it gets smaller. I argue that some planets may have very simple life, but in no way complex life
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Now THIS is an order of magnitude more reasonable. Up until post 215 you gave the impression you weren't allowing for simple life either. I don't think not having a moon would be a major obstacle to the development of complex ocean-going life, but I can see how not having tides could slow the development of land-based life on an otherwise hospitable planet. If it started bearing life around the time ours did, perhaps by now the largest land animals would be analogous to arthropods, or, more optimistically, amphibians. Double planets being rare is certainly an argument that we may be the first technological civilization in the universe (someone has to be) or the only one in the nearest million galaxies...I'm just pulling the number out of thin air, I don't think it's possible to know yet just how rare double planets capable of supporting life are.
 
Any aliens farther from earth than 100 light years (which is not very far away at all in galactic terms) would have no way of knowing there is life in this solar system, let alone intelligent life. If they have better telescopes and technology than we do they could, at best, see that there are planets here and get a good idea of what chemicals are plentiful in our solar system. That's it. They would have no reason to choose our solar system to travel to out of all the other ones out there.
 
godless dave said:
Any aliens farther from earth than 100 light years (which is not very far away at all in galactic terms) would have no way of knowing there is life in this solar system, let alone intelligent life. If they have better telescopes and technology than we do they could, at best, see that there are planets here and get a good idea of what chemicals are plentiful in our solar system. That's it. They would have no reason to choose our solar system to travel to out of all the other ones out there.
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What if they noticed that flag on the moon through their telescopes? Wouldn't that make them wonder?
 
Lonewulf said:
A tip for any beginners in the art of logic, reading this thread.

When we go from a claim such as this:

makaya325 said:
Just because our ocean is 100% explored
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To this, after the claim is challenged:

makaya325 said:
Lone, all large animals have been found in the ocean
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This is known as "changing the goalposts", and is generally the work of someone that is being disingenuous.

I highly recommend for any beginners in philosophy, logic, or anything similar to take note of this, and to note that you should stay away from such tactics.

Class dismissed!
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A tip for any beginners in the art of logic, reading this thread.

When we go from a claim such as this:


makaya325 said:
Isnt it so ignorant and wooish to suggest that we arent the only life in the universe? Come on, does anyone see the incredibly complex events on earth that made it even POSSIBLE for the simplest of life to form?
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To this, after the claim is challenged:
makaya325 said:
Back to the topic... Any reasonable reason to dismiss the rare earth theory? Im talking about complex life
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This is known as "changing the goalposts", and is generally the work of someone that is being disingenuous.

I highly recommend for any beginners in philosophy, logic, or anything similar to take note of this, and to note that you should stay away from such tactics.

Class dismissed!
 
bruto said:
Nonsense. All they need to do is turn on their hyperdrives. If they're aliens, they must have hyperdrives!:rolleyes:
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Aliens almost made it here once, but they forgot to angle the deflector shields while they made the calculations for the jump to light speed and got blasted out of space by an Imperial Star Destroyer. :)
 
Aliens, assuming they exist, had more then enough time to evolve and develop technology, but it seems that earth is all alone in the galaxy. What a waste of space
 
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