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alien life possibility is pathetic

I just wanted to stop by, give a wink, click my heels footloose and fancy free, breathe the fresh air, and say what a lovely thread this has become!

:chores001:
 
JoeTheJuggler said:
I confess, I have no idea what I'm talking about! :)

I'm pretty sure the standard model has some provision for something from nothing. As I said, the only way I've ever understood it is that everything sums up to nothing somehow, so there's nothing to prevent nothing from sort of exploding into everything.

Still--I don't have much existential anxiety. The universe certainly exists, and I accept that it does. If it didn't exist, there would be nothing I could do about that anyway.

The Big Bang seems like the inevitable result of whatever the initial conditions were. Before that (or rather before a time shortly after that), causality as we know it didn't exist, so it's not very meaningful to ask what happened "before" that, I suppose.
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We're probably some tucked away corner of a 4-d Mandelbrot set.
 
Mitchell314 said:
We're probably some tucked away corner of a 4-d Mandelbrot set.
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Or something like this:

Pratchett said:
People believe in all sorts of other things, though. For example, there are some people who have a legend that the whole universe is carried in a leather bag by an old man.

Other people say: hold on, if he's carrying the entire universe in a sack, right, that means he's carrying himself and the sack inside the sack, because the universe contains everything.
Including him. And the sack, of course. Which contains him and the sack already. As it were.

To which the reply is: well?

All tribal myths are true, for a given value of 'true'.
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Z said:
Not to give too much away, but there is a pretty darned good indicator that there's no Bigfoot in North America. It's called (something like) satellite geographic thermal imaging, and can be used to accurately determine the population of a land mass, is currently being used by the military, is pretty darned successful in spotting human-sized and larger creatures, and is able to differentiate between human and non-human.

It, unfortunately, doesn't work well in caves or underground, but is beautiful in wooded environments like Korea, Germany, or... gee... North America.

It would have spotted Bigfoot at least ten years ago.
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Don't say that! i've wanted to catch bigfoot since i was 8 years old!!

:stone003:
 
JoeTheJuggler said:
Oh--I think I see. Galaxies that were right on an edge should be the same to us seen from either way. That is, if we imagine the universe is 2-D disk (for simplicity's sake), and there's something right there on the Eastern edge, I should see the same galaxy on the Western edge. The distances to the center of the universe (my eye) are the same.
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Exactly.

However, wouldn't we be seeing it from the other side? So if there were any assymetry, it would be flipped?
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Yes. However, you have to remember what can actually see. When you're trying to see things so far away, you really can't see very much at all. Some images may be no more than a couple of pixels on the CCD, and even the best images won't give much more information than redshift and a spectrum. We would have no way of knowing if the image was flipped or not.

Or if one side were occluded by dust, the other side would look different?
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The different paths the light would have traveled is more of a problem. Absorption and scattering by other objects, gravitational lensing and various other things could mean that two views of exactly the same object could look very different, or simply not be visible at all. Unfortunately, there's really no way around this. All we can do is look for things that appear to be identical, there are so many things our there that aren't identical that there's no way of sorting through them to see if some of them might actually be the same objects.

However, since other evidence strongly suggests that the universe is far too big for this kind of duplicate image to be seen, searches for them aren't really a high priority, although they do happen from time to time.

Bell said:
I still find it very hard to imagine either a finite universe (what is outside it, and is that finite also etc.?)
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Nothing is outside it, that's the whole point.

or infinite universe (I can't convert the ball-surface analogy to 3D, can't imagine how the universe would wrap around itself).
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The problem with all these things is simply the limits of human perception. We're evolved to deal with things on the human scale of millimeters to metres and seconds to years. When we start dealing with things measured in light years and billions of years, we just have no basis with which to deal with them. In the end, all we can really have is mathematical descriptions and analogies. Even people, like me, who think they are able to visualise these things have to face the fact that we're probably just thinking up horribly inaccurate mental analogies. In the end, all we can do is accept that the observations and maths say certain things about the shape and size of the universe. Whether we like it or not, whether we really understand it or not, that's probably the best we'll ever be able to do.

Another question that comes to mind when I think about this... why is there ANYTHING in the first place?
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This simply isn't a question we can answer. We can say what happened, and we might be able to say how something came about, but we can never answer why. No matter how you look at it, it always comes down to a choice between an uncaused first cause and high-rise turtles. Either you have an unexplained beginning (although whether that is because it genuinely didn't have a cause or simply that we can see past it to determine what came before) or you simply go on forever explaining the firstest cause you can find, only to expose a new first cause which bring the whole problem right back to where you started.

In the end, all we can do is find out as much as we can and hope that it ends up being at least consistent, even if it doesn't seem to make sense. The questions we have to ask are not "Why is this here?" but "How does this work?". When, or if, we find out, we move on to the next thing. If that happens to answer the odd "why" here and there, that's great, but if you start off asking the "why" you'll always stay confused and vaguely disappointed, and probably end up getting religion or philosophy.

Mitchell314 said:
That's because space is a false vacuum. If what you're talking about is virtual particles, there is something there to begin with.
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"False vacuum" isn't really a very good phrase. Space is an entirely real vacuum, it's just that what we refer to as a vacuum happens to contain various fields, virtual particles and such rather than being completely empty. The term "false" implies that somewhere there is a real one, but space (bits of it at least) is, with all its quantums, as real as vacuum can ever get.

JoeTheJuggler said:
I'm pretty sure the standard model has some provision for something from nothing. As I said, the only way I've ever understood it is that everything sums up to nothing somehow, so there's nothing to prevent nothing from sort of exploding into everything.

Still--I don't have much existential anxiety. The universe certainly exists, and I accept that it does. If it didn't exist, there would be nothing I could do about that anyway.

The Big Bang seems like the inevitable result of whatever the initial conditions were. Before that (or rather before a time shortly after that), causality as we know it didn't exist, so it's not very meaningful to ask what happened "before" that, I suppose.
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The answers to all of these sorts of questions can be summed up quite simply as "We don't know.". That's really all we can say for sure. We think that asking what came before the big bang doesn't make any more sense than asking what's north of the north pole, but at the same time there are other theories in which those questions make perfect sense and we just have no idea what the answer is. Then there are the theories that say whether the questions make sense or not it will be impossible to answer them anyway. Throw in the fact that no matter what all these theories say, our observations are nowhere near being able to test them effectively yet and you start to wonder if maybe there are better ways of spending our time than speculating about things that we don't know, probably can't know and wouldn't affect us even if we did know. On the other hand, wouldn't life be boring if we all thought that.:)
 
Nope, sorry.

sorry i havent posted since a couple weeks ago. My 96 year old grandma just celebrated her birthday, and she has alzheimers. I would like to visit her before she passes on.
 
Sorry that I feel somewhat skeptical about your post, Makaya.

But if you're genuine, I wish you and your grandmother all the best.
 
Bell said:
Sorry that I feel somewhat skeptical about your post, Makaya.

But if you're genuine, I wish you and your grandmother all the best.
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I just saw an album of her on facebook of her celebrating her 96th birthday, at the nursing home. My mother cried when she saw it
 
96 years is a very long time to live. Many could only hope to live that long. Hopefully her life was full.

Now on to the subject of the thread, hopefully with your return you will be more amenable to the wisdom of those far wiser and more educated than you this time around. Hopefully you won't use the forum as a chat board but this may be too much to ask.
 
Gangularis said:
Don't say that! i've wanted to catch bigfoot since i was 8 years old!!

:stone003:
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So did I - until my fourth year in the Army, when I spent some time working with those systems, picking out humans versus animals in the Northwest and North Central USA.
 
skeptigirl said:
Actually the point is no one can know what is outside the Universe, nothing or something.
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What do you mean?

There's no spacetime outside the universe. (That's where some of this came from--someone not understanding how expansion happens without some surrounding space to expand into.)
 
kitakaze said:
96 years is a very long time to live. Many could only hope to live that long. Hopefully her life was full.

Now on to the subject of the thread, hopefully with your return you will be more amenable to the wisdom of those far wiser and more educated than you this time around. Hopefully you won't use the forum as a chat board but this may be too much to ask.
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Yep. Many of your responses have impacted my views about life out there. So far, in mans timeline, we have been looking out there, or at the very least, waiting for a sign. We have found nothing. Does anyone have a feeling seti has the wrong preconception about what aliens would use to communicate with earth? What if they are like those aliens on "Alien Planet", intelligent, but not technologically wielding civilizations?
 
makaya325 said:
Yep. Many of your responses have impacted my views about life out there. So far, in mans timeline, we have been looking out there, or at the very least, waiting for a sign. We have found nothing. Does anyone have a feeling seti has the wrong preconception about what aliens would use to communicate with earth? What if they are like those aliens on "Alien Planet", intelligent, but not technologically wielding civilizations?
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See, everyone? There is always hope.

Makaya, I applaud you for opening your mind to the possibility that you may have been wrong. So many people are not willing to admit that, but the ability to do so is the first step toward gaining new knowledge.

I have no doubt that, should aliens be out there, it is quite possible that radio waves are not their preferred means of communication. However, as our one data point of intelligent life tends to use it almost exclusively when communicating over long distances, it's only natural that radio is the form we are looking for.

Who knows? Maybe we've totally misunderstood the origins of pulsars. Maybe they are stars that an alien race fiddled with so as to emit very precise beams of energy at regular intervals, hoping that someone out there might recognize it as a signal. In fact, when pulsars were first discovered, many thought that they were communications from another life form.
 
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makaya325 said:
Yep. Many of your responses have impacted my views about life out there. So far, in mans timeline, we have been looking out there, or at the very least, waiting for a sign. We have found nothing. Does anyone have a feeling seti has the wrong preconception about what aliens would use to communicate with earth? What if they are like those aliens on "Alien Planet", intelligent, but not technologically wielding civilizations?
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The best model we have of other possible civilizations is ourselves. So it isn't an unreasonable guess to say that they will use radio/micro waves for some form of communication if they are a post industrial society. If they are technologically before that, well, then all we have to go by is looking though really big telescopes (the OWL may do the trick. Maybe) and try to find life-sustaining planets where there could likely be intelligent life. But keep in mind, we could have a doppler society as advanced as we are, live ~100 LY away from us, and we wouldn't hear a peep from them because it takes radio waves so long to get from there to here. And that huge distance pales in comparison to the sheer size of our galaxy, which is a humble 50,000 light years in radius, or around roughly 290,000,000,000,000,000 miles. Give it a couple of decades, and we would find them (although I doubt we have a sister as close as 100 LY).

As ugly and imperfect as it is, the Drake's equation can be manipulated to take a very rough guess at the average distance between civilizations.
 
NobbyNobbs said:
Makaya, I applaud you for opening your mind to the possibility that you may have been wrong. So many people are not willing to admit that, but the ability to do so is the first step toward gaining new knowledge.
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Ditto.

As for SETI, yeah it would be great if we could use a subspace tachyon communicator to contact Starfleet. Trouble is, as far as we know, the subspace tachyon communicator doesn't actually exist.

The main caution I have wrt to the SETI results to date is not to extrapolate to grand a conclusion from them. We've only been listening a very very short time, and we can only "hear" a narrow beam transmission (or something really powerful like a pulsar). We can't yet detect a civilization just like us unless they've focussed a signal right at us (or rather right where we'll be when the signal has had time to travel that distance) that was sent out at the right time to reach us when we were listening.

It's still a very small needle in a humongous, gigantic haystack.
 
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