We are not alone!!

[-jk]

C'mon - all the ETs see us as a petri dish - losers stuck in the slow lane of light speed...

-jk

[budwom]

^ as Stephen Hawking said, we might want to think twice before inviting them to visit.
I say this as someone cooking a giant pile of chicken wings tonight...there could be a metaphor in there someplace...

[Indoor66]

LOL, ALWAYS keep an open mind !!

http://exopolitics.org/first-man-on-...f-what-he-saw/

But you youngsters have more time than some of us...

[Olympic Fan]

I find that it's usually a minority opinion on this topic, but I agree with Udaman - the chances we'll ever encounter intelligent life outside our solar system are essentially nil. When I say "we" I do mean humans generally, and I mean on an ecological timescale, not current humans' lifetimes. In fact, I'll go farther than that. I don't think we'll ever encounter alien life at all, intelligent or not.

The reasoning behind my belief is pretty straightforward - if the speed of light is the maximum rate of travel for information (and there are no indications otherwise), it's just not plausible that we will be able to travel the distances required to make contact. It's not just a matter of the time commitment, but of the cost in energy and physical material. It is plausible that we will eventually make it to nearby star systems even without exceeding the speed of light, but there is no reason to believe that life is so common that we will find it nearby.

What's more is that if life does exist in other star systems (and I'd guess it does), we should probably expect it to already be sufficiently advanced to have cracked the problem of faster-than-light, if it can be cracked at all. The reasoning behind that is that the progression of life on Earth from a single cell to humans, while spanning an enormous time, spans just a fraction of the age of the universe. We should probably expect the eventual evolution of intelligence where there exists life at all, and so a good portion of extra-terrestrial life should not only be intelligent, but far more advanced than humans. If that alien life has figured out FTL, we'd expect them to expand across a good portion of space with that tech, and to have been doing it for long enough that we would be able to detect it (there is of course the possibility that we're just missing it, but it would be fairly reasonable to expect more direct contact rather than just long-range traces, IMO). If they haven't figured out FTL, it's probably because FTL isn't possible.

In case that got convoluted, my basic argument is:
If life exists elsewhere, a good fraction* is probably intelligent. (*by which I mean of worlds holding life, a good fraction would have at least one intelligent species)
If life elsewhere is intelligent, it has probably already encountered the FTL problem.
If life elsewhere has solved the FTL problem, we should probably know already. If it hasn't, it's most likely because it can't be done.

Which implies one of the following:
1. We're number 1! The most technologically advanced life in the galaxy, or near enough to make no difference.
OR 2. There is no intelligent life outside of Earth, and probably no life at all
OR 3. We won't ever encounter other life because we can't exceed light-speed.

My money is on #3.

You must belong to the Man Will Never Fly Society?

You can check the internet and find dozens of learned quotes from respected scientists asserting that powered, heavier than air flight was impossible. Lord Kevin, one of the most respected scientific minds of his time, stated in 1895 that such flight was a scientific impossibility. There were respected scientists insisting that powered flight was impossible even AFTER the Wright brothers had done it.

I prefer the worlds Neil Armstrong used when he spoke to a joint session of Congress in 1969:

Science has not yet mastered prophecy. We predict too much for the next year and yet far too little for the next ten.

Is Faster Than Light travel possible?

You are right that many scientists believe so -- probably at least as great a percentage as the scientists who believed powered flight was impossible in 1902.

But I don't believe it. There is already some evidence that FTL travel is not only possible, but has already been achieved:

http://www.techtimes.com/articles/49...ght-travel.htm

NASA has tried to downplay the extravagant claims for the EmDrive -- it's certainly not anywhere near a working warp drive. But even in the Star Trek Universe, Efram Cochrane does not fly the first working warp drive until 2063. That gives us 47 years to get there. It took us 45 years to go from the first powered flight to the speed of light ... and 42 years after that, we were on the moon.

I wish I could be around in 2063 to see if Efram Cochrane delivers on time ... or (more realistically) the EmDrive is pushing us to the nearest stars.

[Olympic Fan]

Whoops, I meant 45 years to go from the first powered flight to the speed of sound (not light).

[BLPOG]

You must belong to the Man Will Never Fly Society?

You can check the internet and find dozens of learned quotes from respected scientists asserting that powered, heavier than air flight was impossible. Lord Kevin, one of the most respected scientific minds of his time, stated in 1895 that such flight was a scientific impossibility. There were respected scientists insisting that powered flight was impossible even AFTER the Wright brothers had done it.

I prefer the worlds Neil Armstrong used when he spoke to a joint session of Congress in 1969:

Science has not yet mastered prophecy. We predict too much for the next year and yet far too little for the next ten.

Is Faster Than Light travel possible?

You are right that many scientists believe so -- probably at least as great a percentage as the scientists who believed powered flight was impossible in 1902.

But I don't believe it. There is already some evidence that FTL travel is not only possible, but has already been achieved:

http://www.techtimes.com/articles/49...ght-travel.htm

NASA has tried to downplay the extravagant claims for the EmDrive -- it's certainly not anywhere near a working warp drive. But even in the Star Trek Universe, Efram Cochrane does not fly the first working warp drive until 2063. That gives us 47 years to get there. It took us 45 years to go from the first powered flight to the speed of light ... and 42 years after that, we were on the moon.

I wish I could be around in 2063 to see if Efram Cochrane delivers on time ... or (more realistically) the EmDrive is pushing us to the nearest stars.

I think the comparison to flight, or other "impossibilities", like stable flight past the sound barrier, or (more recently overcome) negative index of refraction materials, is off-the-mark. The comparison makes a category error. All the evidence suggests that the speed of light in a vacuum is a physical constant, like elementary charge or the Planck constant. It's not an engineering problem. It is a limit on the flow of information that is part of the structure of the universe.

That's not really the thrust of my argument, though. My argument is that if you accept extra-terrestrial life as a premise, the chances of FTL drop to basically zero (or that if you accept FTL as a premise, the chances of extra-terrestrial life drop to basically zero).

[Olympic Fan]

I think the comparison to flight, or other "impossibilities", like stable flight past the sound barrier, or (more recently overcome) negative index of refraction materials, is off-the-mark. The comparison makes a category error. All the evidence suggests that the speed of light in a vacuum is a physical constant, like elementary charge or the Planck constant. It's not an engineering problem. It is a limit on the flow of information that is part of the structure of the universe.

I'm sure Lord Kelvin and his compatriots had sound reasons for saying that powered flight was scientifically impossible.

I also refer you to the debate about the age of the universe ... for years, skeptics of the theory of a multi-million year model of the solar system pointed to the sun. There was no known mechanism that could explain the sustained solar action over millions of years. It had to burn out its fuel eventually, thus it was a fact that the sun -- and the solar system, couldn't been more than a few thousand years old. It was a scientific fact.

Of course, in the 20th Century, physicists figured out nuclear fusion, which perfectly explains the sun's ability to burn for millions and millions of years.

There are avenues that may lead to FTL travel that we do no understand now. Actually, we know with certainty of at least one situation that violates the universe's FTL speed limit -- the presence of what Einstein described as "spooky actions at a distance" can occur in paired (or entangled} particles, which clearly exchange information at a rate that is faster than the speed of light. His inability to explain such particles was a major reason he never really accepted quantum mechanics.

In the last 100 years, we've seen the Einsteinian vision of the universe essentially replace the Newtonian vision. Not that Newton was wrong -- his understanding of the universe was incomplete. Could not the same happen to the Einsteinian universe in the next 100 years -- a new vision that would change our perception of the universe and open up possibilities that now seem impossible?

That's not really the thrust of my argument, though. My argument is that if you accept extra-terrestrial life as a premise, the chances of FTL drop to basically zero (or that if you accept FTL as a premise, the chances of extra-terrestrial life drop to basically zero).

I'm sorry, I don't understand this argument at all. Why would the existence of FTL travel drop the chances of extra-terrestrial life to zero? Because they haven't visited us? Or is there another reason I am missing?

[crimsondevil]

So, I've thought about the "why can't we find live on other planet" thing, and to me, really, it's a question of simple math. So let's use some assumptions.

In our galaxy, there are about 10 to the 12th power of suns (that's a damn big number, by the way).

Let's assume that within those stars that 1 out of 10,000 of them have a planet rotating around it that could sustain life. I actually think this number might be smaller (it's really hard to see these planets, and we've only documented a few thousand, but most astronomers believe that just about every star has some planets going around it). So that would mean about a billion planets in our solar system that could sustain life. That's a lot.

But...then you have to calculate how long life would be on that planet compared to its overall existence. Our planet will have a lifespan of about 8 billion years...but civilized life has only been around for a few thousand. It takes a while for evolution to occur, and then things happen that slow it down (asteroid impacts, ice ages, etc). So let's be conservative and say that civilized life exists for about a million years on any given life sustaining planet (and I think we will be fortunate to have that much time before we either blow ourselves up, or another asteroid hits, or a comet, or deadly gamma wave). So that means that in the lifetime of a planet, civilized life is on it for about .000125% of it's life. But that's only half of the equation...because that life has to matchup with civilized life on Earth. So if we assume the same ratio (.000125%), that means that right now in our galaxy there are approximately 16 planets where our civilized life matches up to theirs (and this is even more complicated by how far apart these are...anything exactly even with ours we wouldn't see until tens of thousands of years from now, likely...but ignore that for now).

So 16 that matchup evenly. Out of a billion planets where life is possible and 10 to the 12th of all the planets out there. So the odds of us finding one such planet by just examining all of them individually is .000000000001. Very, very, very small. Effectively zero.

Bottom line. I'm 99.999999999999% sure that life exists in our galaxy (and universe) and that it exists in spades. I'm also 99.999999999999% sure that we will never ever see it.

You are essentially re-creating the Drake Equation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

The Drake equation is:

N=R* x fp x ne x fl x fi x fc x L
where:

N = the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which communication might be possible (i.e. which are on our current past light cone);
and

R* = the average rate of star formation in our galaxy
fp = the fraction of those stars that have planets
ne = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
fl = the fraction of planets that could support life that actually develop life at some point
fi = the fraction of planets with life that actually go on to develop intelligent life (civilizations)
fc = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space
L = the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space[11][12]

We have fairly solid numbers for the first variable, are getting to where we have decent idea of the second, and perhaps will have some idea of the third (depending on how you define "potentially support") in a few years/decades. The problem is we have no idea what the last four variables are.

[crimsondevil]

I'm sorry, I don't understand this argument at all. Why would the existence of FTL travel drop the chances of extra-terrestrial life to zero? Because they haven't visited us? Or is there another reason I am missing?

The argument is that if both FTL and ET exist, we should have met the aliens/been conquered/eradicated by them by now. Therefore either FTL is not possible, or ET does not exist.

Of course, maybe we are just beneath their notice. Or they are watching us without us knowing. Or they exist but are very rare, or some combination of these possibilities.

On the FTL side, the EmDrive is highly... controversial, at the least. If you want to be optimistic, you could point to the idea of the Alcubierre drive, which requires exotic materials, etc. but is mathematically consistent with relativity as we know it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive.

[Olympic Fan]

The argument is that if both FTL and ET exist, we should have met the aliens/been conquered/eradicated by them by now. Therefore either FTL is not possible, or ET does not exist.

Of course, maybe we are just beneath their notice. Or they are watching us without us knowing. Or they exist but are very rare, or some combination of these possibilities.

On the FTL side, the EmDrive is highly... controversial, at the least. If you want to be optimistic, you could point to the idea of the Alcubierre drive, which requires exotic materials, etc. but is mathematically consistent with relativity as we know it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive.

or advanced alien civilizations could have their own version of the Federation's Prime Directive (which, admittedly, Kirk and Picard violated a few dozen times).

Seriously, I don't find the argument convincing at all. It does NOT follow that if there was an alien civilization (or even many such civilizations) with FTL drive that we would be conquered/eradicated or even visited by now.

[Wander]

I'm agnostic on the FTL travel issue. I'm sympathetic to both the historical arguments that Olympic Fan points out as well as BLPOG's idea that analogies to other technological advances may not apply.

However, regardless of FTL travel, I think the limiting factor is just whether our civilization gets destroyed by nuclear warfare, disease, or whatever. Barring that, I think it's silly to think we won't eventually reach the stars. The nearest star (and exoplanet!) is just 4 light years away, which at 20% the speed of light (a not totally insane speed to think about) would take 20 years. From there, it's just "island hopping" to the other stars. Sure, that takes a looong time to spread out... but the lifespan of stars is billions of years.

[BD80]

So, I've thought about the "why can't we find live on other planet" thing, and to me, really, it's a question of simple math. So let's use some assumptions.

In our galaxy, there are about 10 to the 12th power of suns (that's a damn big number, by the way).

Let's assume that within those stars that 1 out of 10,000 of them have a planet rotating around it that could sustain life. I actually think this number might be smaller (it's really hard to see these planets, and we've only documented a few thousand, but most astronomers believe that just about every star has some planets going around it). So that would mean about a billion planets in our solar system that could sustain life. That's a lot.

But...then you have to calculate how long life would be on that planet compared to its overall existence. Our planet will have a lifespan of about 8 billion years...but civilized life has only been around for a few thousand. It takes a while for evolution to occur, and then things happen that slow it down (asteroid impacts, ice ages, etc). So let's be conservative and say that civilized life exists for about a million years on any given life sustaining planet (and I think we will be fortunate to have that much time before we either blow ourselves up, or another asteroid hits, or a comet, or deadly gamma wave). So that means that in the lifetime of a planet, civilized life is on it for about .000125% of it's life. But that's only half of the equation...because that life has to matchup with civilized life on Earth. So if we assume the same ratio (.000125%), that means that right now in our galaxy there are approximately 16 planets where our civilized life matches up to theirs (and this is even more complicated by how far apart these are...anything exactly even with ours we wouldn't see until tens of thousands of years from now, likely...but ignore that for now).

So 16 that matchup evenly. Out of a billion planets where life is possible and 10 to the 12th of all the planets out there. So the odds of us finding one such planet by just examining all of them individually is .000000000001. Very, very, very small. Effectively zero.

Bottom line. I'm 99.999999999999% sure that life exists in our galaxy (and universe) and that it exists in spades. I'm also 99.999999999999% sure that we will never ever see it.

What about intelligent life that masters space travel and populates other worlds? Or terraforms? Or otherwise spreads life throughout the Universe?

[PackMan97]

Let's look at our own species..."they tell me" (the internet) that current humans evolved around 200,000 years ago. That we began civilizing ourselves about 6,000 years ago and have been an industrialized society for around 200 years, enjoyed the ability to fly for around 100 years and have been traveling faster than the speed of sound and into space for about 50 years. That's some pretty rapid technological progress there. If Elon Musk has his way, we'll be multi-planetary in the next decade or two.

All this on a planet that has been sustaining complex life land animals for 250 million years? and is only 4.5 billion years old in a universe estimated to be 12 billion years old?

I have a few theories about life elsewhere in the universe. I don't think it's all that rare, but I do think it is rare for them to be near each other in both time and space.

Given the rate of human consumption, we as a species need to get off this rock and start harvesting resources elsewhere, moon? mars? asteroids? Let's face it, in the next few hundred (or even thousand) years we'll hit use up the earth at our current rate. Is that what happens to life in the universe? They burn brightly for a few hundred or thousand years and then are kicked back down to the stone age?

Will we give rise to artificial intelligence and thinking machines that think we need to go? In which case at some point if we live long enough we'll likely encounter intelligent life, but they'll be articficial in nature.

Will we kill ourselves off as the ability to cause massive destruction becomes easier to attain by crazy people?

So many different choices. I do agree that unless we find a way to break the light speed barrier, Ithink it unlikely we find anyone else...let alone meet them.

[aimo]

Yes, READ, not watch. The book is wonderful... the movie is a total mess.



-Jason "in fairness, I think the book is borderline unfilmable" Evans

That movie sucked so bad I have decided to pretend that it never happened. And you're right, I don't think a movie could be done effectively.

[Olympic Fan]

That movie sucked so bad I have decided to pretend that it never happened. And you're right, I don't think a movie could be done effectively.

Did you ever see the six-episode BBC TV adaptation in 1981? I thought it was very well done and captured the absurdist vision of the book. All six episodes are available on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTNuldPhP20

[aimo]

Did you ever see the six-episode BBC TV adaptation in 1981? I thought it was very well done and captured the absurdist vision of the book. All six episodes are available on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTNuldPhP20

Heard about them. Will have to check them out.

[Nick]

^ as Stephen Hawking said, we might want to think twice before inviting them to visit.
I say this as someone cooking a giant pile of chicken wings tonight...there could be a metaphor in there someplace...

On that note, I just read this on Reddit:

36,400,000. That is the expected number of intelligent civilizations in our galaxy, according to Drake’s famous equation. For the last 78 years, we had been broadcasting everything about us – our radio, our television, our history, our greatest discoveries – to the rest of the galaxy. We had been shouting our existence at the top of our lungs to the rest of the universe, wondering if we were alone. 36 million civilizations, yet in almost a century of listening, we hadn’t heard a thing. We were alone.
That was, until about 5 minutes ago.
The transmission came on every transcendental multiple of hydrogen’s frequency that were listening to. Transcendental harmonics – things like hydrogen’s frequency times pi – don’t appear in nature, so I knew it had to be artificial. The signal pulsed on and off very quickly with incredibly uniform amplitudes; my initial reaction was that this was some sort of binary transmission. I measured 1679 pulses in the one minute that the transmission was active. After that, the silence resumed.
The numbers didn’t make any sense at first. They just seemed to be a random jumble of noise. But the pulses were so perfectly uniform, and on a frequency that was always so silent; they had to come from an artificial source. I looked over the transmission again, and my heart skipped a beat. 1679 – that was the exact length of the Arecibo message sent out 40 years ago. I excitedly started arranging the bits in the original 73x23 rectangle. I didn’t get more than halfway through before my hopes were confirmed. This was the exact same message. The numbers in binary, from 1 to 10. The atomic numbers of the elements that make up life. The formulas for our DNA nucleotides. Someone had been listening to us, and wanted us to know they were there.
Then it came to me – this original message was transmitted only 40 years ago. This means that life must be at most 20 lightyears away. A civilization within talking distance? This would revolutionize every field I have ever worked in – astrophysics, astrobiology, astro-
The signal is beeping again.
This time, it is slow. Deliberate, even. It lasts just under 5 minutes, with a new bit coming in once per second. Though the computers are of course recording it, I start writing them down. 0. 1. 0. 1. 0. 1. 0. 0... I knew immediately this wasn’t the same message as before. My mind races through the possibilities of what this could be. The transmission ends, having transmitted 248 bits. Surely this is too small for a meaningful message. What great message to another civilization can you possibly send with only 248 bits of information? On a computer, the only files that small would be limited to…
Text.
Was it possible? Were they really sending a message to us in our own language? Come to think of it, it’s not that out of the question – we had been transmitting pretty much every language on earth for the last 70 years… I begin to decipher with the first encoding scheme I could think of – ASCII. 0. 1. 0. 1. 0. 1. 0. 0. That’s B... 0. 1. 1 0. 0. 1. 0. 1. E…
As I finish piecing together the message, my stomach sinks like an anchor. The words before me answer everything.
“BE QUIET OR THEY WILL HEAR YOU”

[YmoBeThere]

I've attempted to watch the movie and that scene is visually unfamiliar to me. It was so bad, I turned it off long before that. I did receive the DVD as a gift. I don't think less of the person that gave it to me. They hadn't seen it either but did know I read and watched a bit of science fiction. And oft quoted the book.