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have they found anything?

well this board willnot allow me to post a link
but you can help search
along with 3,000,000 who already are linked to SETI

google seti at home

and learn how to join the hunt
 
amb said:
Maybe he believes he knows something we don't about any aliens. If we are not the first intelligent life to evolve in the universe, we are certainly one of the first.
The universe has not existed long enough for some other species to develop our state of intelligence. Seeing that it took 4.5 [aproxx] billion years for intelligent life to develop here, why would it be any different anywhere else in the cosmos considering it's around 13.7 billion years old and the elements that make up all life had to be made in the first and possibly second generation of stars.
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I don't think you can make that statement at all, for many reasons.

Consider only three happenstances about our natural history: the condensation of our star out of a cloud, the development of multicellular life, and the development of sentience (however you determine that, I'll just use a simplistic definition that sentience is development of a space-flight-capable race).

One: there is no reason that 4.5 billion years ago represents the first possible Stage III (I think that's the right wording for a heavy element star?) star creation date. Easily, that could be anywhere forward of our own happenstance by 2 billion years, possibly more.

Two: There is an estimated gap of 3.5 billion years from he development of monocellular life to multicellular. Granted that multicellular required that turbocharged atmosphere to be slowly created, why should it have not been 2 billion or 3 billion, rather than 4? We have no proof that life's development on our planet was optimal or early in any sense; in fact, we know that the earth snowballed (snowball earthWP) at least three times in the past, knocking back life to monocellular level living around hot deep sea vents. After the last such 50 million year episode 550 million years ago, multicellular life seemd to explode in creativity.

Three: Once multicellular life developed, we became locked into 160 million years of stagnation (one of many in the sense I'm using it here - not really stagnation, but rather that insufficient evolution occurred to develop sentient life in that period) because of the dinosaurs. Had not the dinosaur developed, then sentient life may have developed millions of years earlier.

There is, of course, no way to know if we are the first - some"one" has to be, somewhere. But there is no way to refute the possibility that there are civilizations anywhere from thousands to billions of years before us in time. Suppose only Sol and HD69830 (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/04/0421_050421_spitzer.html) had the magic stuff to develop sentience. Assuming all else is identical between us and them, except that they stared condensing out of the dust cloud a billion years before us, or there was a closeby high output star that cleared their area of dust earlier, or whatever. Consider a different scenario where all else is equal but they only had two snowballs to our three; then their sentience has several hundred million years head start. Assume all else is equal, but they didn't develop dinosaurs, or that their dinosaurs were limited in size or were only herbivorous, or perhaps developed sentience themselves; then their senience has, perhaps, a 100 million years head start. Perhaps all of these aspects were equal, but they didn't experience the collapse of their Roman's empire, or that their Archimedes was not slain and they had calculus available to them in their 2nd century BCE (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3GIhfyLXwc); they could easily be a 1000 years ahead of us developmentally. Where will we be in a thousand years, if we don't happen to off ourselves in the meantime?

Supposing only that we are the only two, and that to develop sentience exactly the way Earth has is a one in a billion (at least) possibility, then there is a 50% chance that HD has a civilization many thousands of years advanced on ours. Given there are billions of star in billions of galaxies, the chance we are out front by anything up to thousands of years is so small as to be ridiculious. Hence Fermi's paradoxWP.
 
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Fermi's paradox says, '' If there out there, why aren't they here?'' If they are in the vicinity of of our solar system, and they are 1000 years ahead of us, we would have evidence of their existence. We have sent probes out of our solar system already in the small amount of time since our first airborne flight less than 200 years ago.
 
amb said:
Fermi's paradox says, '' If there out there, why aren't they here?'' If they are in the vicinity of of our solar system, and they are 1000 years ahead of us, we would have evidence of their existence. We have sent probes out of our solar system already in the small amount of time since our first airborne flight less than 200 years ago.
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The most likely implication, though not the only one, is that space-faring civilizations are so rare, and thus so far apart on average that contact between thim is equivalently rare. Space is, after all, huge. Other possibilities are that there is no way around the Einsteinian speed limit in any way (folded space or what-not), that there is a concerted effort to keep knowledge of them from us (by them, not some human agency), and so on. It might be possible to argue that we're must be first, but the statistics for that are even worse than for star collisions (see below).

As for our probes - they were not designed to any such feat of detection. They would certainly be detectable by any space-faring party far beyond the range at which the would be able to detect any evidence, and ridiculously easy to avoid. Even if avoidance was not a desire the possibility of a random encounter that would provide us unambiguous proof of such on Earth would be minuscule. When I worked on the Viking project we used the camera system on it to take a group picture. The scan was so slow that certain members of the group were able to reposition themselves and get four images of themselves in the final picture. Any being on Mars that moved any faster than, say, a snake across the field of view would not be visible on a camera scan as more than, at best, a few pixels of averaged color.

I did a little back-of-the-envelope study for a thread about colliding galaxies a while back; there was incredulity expressed that a pair of galaxies could collide without suffering any star collisions. Reducing the 4.3 lightyear distance from sol to alpha cent to the distance from LA to NYC, the average star would be on the order of a foot across. Even in the center of the densest local star cluster we know about, the distance between stars would still be the distance of NYC to Boston, if I remember right. With things this thinly spread, and the fact that there are 200 to 400 billion stars in our galaxy alone, searching out brother civilizations is a task to boggle the mind.
 
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The universe is more than likely teeming with life. There may be life deep in the interior of Mercury for example. Life has been discorved inside a live volcano right here on earth.
Miles undersea in and around volcanic vents where there is no sunlight or no trace of oxygen.
But the chance that intelligent life has evolved on another planet in our galaxy is of the probability of a billion to one. And that's been very conservative.
It's only because of the likely trillions of star systems in the whole cosmos that may assure us that it may have happened more than once.
After all, the chance of someone winning lotto is so small that you may say it's impossible.
Yet, every week of so someone does win.
 
amb said:
The universe is more than likely teeming with life. There may be life deep in the interior of Mercury for example. Life has been discorved inside a live volcano right here on earth.
Miles undersea in and around volcanic vents where there is no sunlight or no trace of oxygen.
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Very true. I have little doubt that you are right on that, but, of course, our sample size right now is about 2.5 (we're getting close to a possible positive indication on Mars, and Europa looks promising, but the Moon hasn't panned out, as most scientists expected.)

But the chance that intelligent life has evolved on another planet in our galaxy is of the probability of a billion to one. And that's been very conservative.
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On what data do you base this claim? Not that I doubt it really, but I know of no data to base it upon, unless you count negative SETI results as indicative, which is problematic.

It's only because of the likely trillions of star systems in the whole cosmos that may assure us that it may have happened more than once.
After all, the chance of someone winning lotto is so small that you may say it's impossible.
Yet, every week of so someone does win.
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That is a false analogy. Lotto is designed such that the probability of a winning ticket being produced is in the .0000001 area, maybe an order of magnitude smaller than the inverse of the number of tickets they expect to sell. After a small number of random picks, they will hit on a ticket number that was actually sold. The chances of *you* winning are miniscule, but not the chances of someone winning - that's almost a certainty within a few week's time.

However, since you use this analogy I read you as saying that the way out of Fermi's paradox is to assume that space is too vast for the likely number of intelligent civilizations to ever be able to contact one another. That works for me.

That is not the same as your initial argument that we are the first such intelligence.
 
tofu said:
2. messages that they send to themselves - like their version of TV. This sounds like it'd be great, but in reality, we would have almost no hope of understanding them, or putting them into any kind of context.
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Well several years of the alien equivilent of 'Sesame Street' followed by the Open University could be informative.

And if instead we get their equivilent of 'East Enders', 'Big Brother' and 'Horsehead Nebula Idol' then at least we will have established that there is no intelligent life out there!
 
shadron said:
Very true. I have little doubt that you are right on that, but, of course, our sample size right now is about 2.5 (we're getting close to a possible positive indication on Mars, and Europa looks promising, but the Moon hasn't panned out, as most scientists expected.)



On what data do you base this claim? Not that I doubt it really, but I know of no data to base it upon, unless you count negative SETI results as indicative, which is problematic.



That is a false analogy. Lotto is designed such that the probability of a winning ticket being produced is in the .0000001 area, maybe an order of magnitude smaller than the inverse of the number of tickets they expect to sell. After a small number of random picks, they will hit on a ticket number that was actually sold. The chances of *you* winning are miniscule, but not the chances of someone winning - that's almost a certainty within a few week's time.

However, since you use this analogy I read you as saying that the way out of Fermi's paradox is to assume that space is too vast for the likely number of intelligent civilizations to ever be able to contact one another. That works for me.

That is not the same as your initial argument that we are the first such intelligence.
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Correction. I said either the first, or one of the first.
While primitive organisms such as microbes are very likely abundent across the galaxies, advanced life, depending as it does on a myriad of special circumstances, is altogether another kettle of fish. Multicelluar life-forms, let alone life-forms with whom we'd be able to communicate, must be exceedingly rare. Not impossible mind, but as I said, very rare.
 
amb said:
Correction. I said either the first, or one of the first.
While primitive organisms such as microbes are very likely abundent across the galaxies, advanced life, depending as it does on a myriad of special circumstances, is altogether another kettle of fish. Multicelluar life-forms, let alone life-forms with whom we'd be able to communicate, must be exceedingly rare. Not impossible mind, but as I said, very rare.
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Obviously not impossible, indeed :).

To sum up, you maintain it is rare because we are the first (or nealy the first), and presumably in some future age it will be more plentiful. I think its more likely that intelligent life itself is just plain rare. Neither of us has a knock-out argument over the other, and that's just the way it is.
 
shadron said:
Obviously not impossible, indeed :).

To sum up, you maintain it is rare because we are the first (or nealy the first), and presumably in some future age it will be more plentiful. I think its more likely that intelligent life itself is just plain rare. Neither of us has a knock-out argument over the other, and that's just the way it is.
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In a future age, in say, a million years, if we are still here and advanced beyond anyone's wildest dreams, where we reach a stage where we can actually change a planet into supporting some kind of animal life. In other words. We become the colonisers just as the Europeans colonized the Americas. But the problem of the speed limit, 186.000 mps will never solved,
Until we learn to break the laws of physics. I don't believe the human race will survive that long. I give it another 1000-3000 years at best.
We could be wiped out at anytime unless we eliminate the scourge of religion from the planet, which judging from the facts, is far than likely.
Islam is growing at an alarming rate, as is American fundamentalism which doesn't bode well for our survival.
 
amb said:
Correction. I said either the first, or one of the first.
While primitive organisms such as microbes are very likely abundent across the galaxies, advanced life, depending as it does on a myriad of special circumstances, is altogether another kettle of fish. Multicelluar life-forms, let alone life-forms with whom we'd be able to communicate, must be exceedingly rare. Not impossible mind, but as I said, very rare.
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I agree with rare, but that doesn't mean first or even one of the first.

It could be that everything is just so freakin' spread out in space and time, and life forms with whom we'd be able to communicate are so (relatively) rare that it's extremely unlikely that two will ever be in near enough proximity in time and space.
 
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Because of the vastness of the cosmos, there is bound to be other earths.
But if you study all of the accidents? that have occurred on earth to produce animal life in the time scales required. The chances of the same coincidences happening anywhere else are certainly bleak. Microbial life is more than likely spread right across the cosmos, but animal life I predict is extremely rare.
 
amb said:
but animal life I predict is extremely rare.
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And again, "extremely rare" is a relative idea.

Stuff is really spread out. Higher life forms could occur pretty regularly but still be rare enough that no two such planets would be in proximity in space and the life forms at the appropriate levels to communicate close enough in time for there ever to be communication.

In our sample size of one, we only had life at a level to communicate by radio once, and only (so far) for less than 100 years out of the 4.5 billion years life existed on Earth.
 
Earth may be unique in our part of the quadrant. May be so even in the whole galaxy. When you consider the enormous number of coincidences that occurred here to produce animal life.
And of the millions of lifeforms that developed here, only one has acquired enough intelligence to even wonder about these questions.
For example. Earth has a large moon to stabilize it's orbit. Gravity is just right. The Earth has tectonic plates, a large gas world that acts like a vacuum cleaner in attracting huge asteroids that otherwise could hit the Earth a lot more frequently, thereby destroying all animal life, we are at just the right distance from our sun to keep the water in a stable liquid condition making life possible. All this and many more reasons why the Earth may indeed be very rare, as far as our galaxy is concerned.
 
amb said:
Earth may be unique in our part of the quadrant. May be so even in the whole galaxy. When you consider the enormous number of coincidences that occurred here to produce animal life.
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The lesson of our past anthropo- and geo- centrism failures makes me reluctant to declare anything is unique.

There are a LOT of stars in the galaxy, and a LOT of galaxies in the universe. So far, whenever we've been able to detect a given type of planet, we have found them in abundance. (Since gas giants are so common, I see no reason to think smaller rocky planets are exceptionally rare either.)

But again, "rare" and "common" are relative terms. Even though there are a lot of places and events in the universe, they're very very spread out in space and time.
 
Do aliens have souls?

By this I mean, if intelligent aliens exist, would they have souls? In the same way that people have souls, I mean. If they have souls, then they would need to be saved, right?

How could you tell whether an alien has a soul or not? I mean we humans are always assumed to have souls, so I suppose that it would be best to assume that aliens have souls too, right?

Doesn't that mean that they would also be subject to the coming Armageddon - or does the end of the world not apply to the universe at large? Would aliens be subject to the Second Coming of Christ? Would they be required to worship Christ and be saved from the Beast just like humans?

In the Revelation, it is said that fornicators will be cast into the lake of fire. What if the intelligent aliens reproduce asexually? Would that count - it would not be a union between a man and a woman. Oh! What would that imply for the sanctity of marriage?

What would alien religion be like? Would they worship Christ? Wasn't Christ a man on this planet though? Would they have their own Christ or Christ-like figure? Would they have their own Bible? How is that different from terrestrial non-Christian religions?

Can any of these questions be reasonably speculated upon?
 
JoeTheJuggler said:
The lesson of our past anthropo- and geo- centrism failures makes me reluctant to declare anything is unique.

There are a LOT of stars in the galaxy, and a LOT of galaxies in the universe. So far, whenever we've been able to detect a given type of planet, we have found them in abundance. (Since gas giants are so common, I see no reason to think smaller rocky planets are exceptionally rare either.)

But again, "rare" and "common" are relative terms. Even though there are a lot of places and events in the universe, they're very very spread out in space and time.
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Gas giants have been discovered, I forget the number, is it 200? But they all seem to orbit their star at close proximity. Any rocky planets that may exist there are probably too far from their star to produce animal life. And another point to remember is that most stars in our proximity are too large or too small, or produce far too much ultra violet rays for animal life to evolve. And of course, a large number of these stars are binary systems. Not suitable for animal life of any kind.

arthwollipot said:
My questions, insofar as they were not rhetorical, were directed at theists, particularly Christians. I probably should have made that clearer.
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All your questions can be answered in a good S/F book my son.

Or better still, ask a catholic priest, or any member of the clergy for that matter. Then watch them squirm for an answer. :p
 
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