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Do You Think We Are Alone In The Milky Way?


alfa015

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So.. recent estimations for the Drake Equation (Maccone, 2012) suggest that there could be around 4,600 civilizations in our galaxy that are able to release detectable signals.

 

I find this number a little bit excessive, so I plugged some of the values of our Solar System into the equation and I obtained a smaller yet more realistic result, in my opinion: 50 civilizations.

 

Just in case someone is interested, I made a video showing the values I used: youtu.be/j2AIWIcn7Ig

 

Do you think 50 is a more realistic number?

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While it would be nice to detect stray electromagnetic signals from life elsewhere in our galaxy, the possibility of eventually communicating with that life within a human lifetime is still impossible.  Whether there are 4600 or 50 sources seems to be a moot point.

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  • 4 weeks later...

"False detections have been made before. The most recent signal was found to be caused by a kitchen microwave being opened while it was still running. In the 1960s, the first pulsar was mistaken for an extra-terrestrial beacon, and even named Little Green Men 1, before being recognised as a rapidly rotating core of a dead star."   :alien_dance: 

 

http://theconversation.com/were-no-strangers-to-alien-false-alarms-one-was-caused-by-a-microwave-oven-64716

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With all the planets now being discovered that could potentially support life in about the same orbit from their suns as we are, the chances of their not being life is probably a better question. I think that answer would be 0% chance of not being life somewhere else in the universe, giving a 100% probability of there being life on at least one other planet out there. But it might not be life as we know it :)

 

Agreed.  It is almost a certainty that some form of life exists elsewhere in the universe.  I do disagree with the UFO folks that we have been visited, since most likely no one has heard our broadcasts yet, and if they have then they certainly have not sent an expedition. 

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I think we've had this talk around here a few times before, and I know there was some great info that I'm sad I can't rattle off at the top of my head.

The most interesting thing I have thought about is weather alien life would be possible for us to recognize. There's a few Out Of Band issues that easily crop up; What if they never discovered radio and are a purely chemical or mechanical technology civilization. eg they never evolved eyes and are unaware of the EM spectrum, to them being "cooked to death" by sunlight or whatnot could be a mysterious "invisible unknowable force of nature" that has to be inferred by a few extra layers of abstraction.

What if we're the wrong type of matter? The missing mass and energy of the universe could be the above hitting us in reverse.

Extremophile life is more common than you think here on Earth; who's to say the Goldilocks zone isn't really the best one? There could easily be extremely low/high temperature civilizations that view us as either walking ice crystals that process things much too slowly or walking fireballs that move at unimaginable speeds.

I think Earth is alone with intelligent life, that we've passed the great filters by diceroll and if humans want another species to talk to we're going to have to look towards uplifting cephalopods or whatnot. Same time we should still ACT like we're not and prepare for a blight or similar malignancy as much as possible...

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Well, I know I was reading a article about the possible evolution of Vinyl Cyanide based life from Saturn's moon Titan which has many hydrocarbons that could someday be living with the right circumstances , they would be considered is a very young evolution of life having the right building blocks for living materials to evolve. https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/07/titan-moon-vinyl-cyanide-membranes-life-space-science/

Edited by VictorMedvil
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Of course life exists out there, "cuz the Bible tells me so".

 

In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. John 14:12 KJV

 

The end must be near when the atheist starts quoting scripture, eh?   :nahnahbooboo: 

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While it would be nice to detect stray electromagnetic signals from life elsewhere in our galaxy, the possibility of eventually communicating with that life within a human lifetime is still impossible.  Whether there are 4600 or 50 sources seems to be a moot point.

Most likely not 100% true anymore, with light_sails and if Aplha Centauri has life,  a one way trip is expected to take 20 years. So if there was life there, one could comunicate with them with one msg every 20 years :-)

 

Just was at a lecture from Avi Loeb (google him), that is where I got this info from. And check this https://breakthroughinitiatives.org/initiative/3

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Of course life exists out there, "cuz the Bible tells me so".

 

In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. John 14:12 KJV

 

The end must be near when the atheist starts quoting scripture, eh?   :nahnahbooboo: 

 

Oh crap, I just realized that Jesus was an alien.  He was conceived without a father (parthenogenesis), he walked on water (anti-gravity), he fed a multitude with a loaf of bread and a few fish (matter replication), arose from the dead after 3 days (cryogenic suspension), and went to join his father in the heavens (space travel).    :doh:

Edited by fahrquad
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Most likely not 100% true anymore, with light_sails and if Aplha Centauri has life,  a one way trip is expected to take 20 years. So if there was life there, one could comunicate with them with one msg every 20 years :-)

 

Just was at a lecture from Avi Loeb (google him), that is where I got this info from. And check this https://breakthroughinitiatives.org/initiative/3

 

It would be pointless to make a one way trip to Alpha Centauri if no one is home.  Even if such an achievement was possible then we still run afoul of some principal issues:

  1. Is there intelligent life?
  2. Does that life communicate by means of the electromagnetic spectrum?
  3. Is that intelligent life monitoring our area of space?
  4. Would that intelligent life recognize our signals as communication or confuse it with natural phenomena?

If the technology was available and there was an unlimited amount of money to spend on such a folly, who would volunteer for such a mission?  We have enough trouble sending interplanetary missions to our neighbors

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I should add that Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf, is the star that has an earth-like planet, not Alpha Centauri A or B.  The planet known as Proxima B is rocky and 1.3 times the size of Earth.

 

Astronomers announced in August 2016 that they had detected an Earth-size planet orbiting Proxima Centauri. The newfound world, known as Proxima b, is about 1.3 times more massive than Earth, which suggests that the exoplanet is a rocky world, researchers said.

The planet is also in the star's habitable zone, that just-right range of distances where liquid water can exist. Proxima b lies just 4.7 million miles (7.5 million kilometers) from its host star and completes one orbit every 11.2 Earth-days. As a result, it's likely that the exoplanet is tidally locked, meaning it always shows the same face to its host star, just as the moon shows only one face (the near side) to Earth.

 

https://www.space.com/18090-alpha-centauri-nearest-star-system.html

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Speaking of space exploration, the Japanese Hayabusa 2 satellite is scheduled to intercept the Ryugu Asteroid right about now.  It is obviously unmanned as shown in the attached photo.

 

suzuki-hayabusa-glass-sparkle-black-1517

 

https://www.space.com/hayabusa2-made-crater-on-asteroid-ryugu.html

https://www.bikewale.com/suzuki-bikes/hayabusa/images/

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NASA test fired a rocket engine yesterday that should be used for the planned 2024 manned mission to the moon.  Video in link.

 

The agency fired up its RS-25 engine at 3:35 p.m. EDT (2:25 p.m. local time CDT or 1935 GMT) today (Thursday) at NASA's John C. Stennis Space Center, near the Mississippi-Louisiana border.

 

The test is part of a larger effort to get the massive Space Launch System (SLS) megarocket ready to bring astronauts to the moon in the 2020s for the Lunar Gateway space station, culminating in a possible landing on the moon in 2024 if the Trump administration's wishes are carried out in time.

 

https://www.space.com/nasa-sls-megarocket-engine-test-video.html

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Simple life arose early on earth after it cooled, some 3.8 billion to 4 billion years ago. However, it took some three billion years for prokaryotes to evolve to eukaryotes, the basis for all complex life, including us, of course. This strongly suggests (though of course does not prove) that it will be staggeringly unlikely for life on any planet to be much more than very simple. Eukaryote evolution may have been an astounding fluke accident.

 

To put it into further perspective, even after eukaryotes evolved, it took further hundreds of millions of years for proto-humans to evolve. Had a meteor not wiped out the dinosaurs, there would be no humans. It is unknown whether some species of dinosaur could have evolved to human-style intelligence, but I think it highly unlikely. After all, we’re the only species that ever lived that evolved the capacity to send radio signals into outer space.

 

More perspective: if you compressed the entire history of the earth into a single calendar year, with earth forming on Jan. 1, then modern humans made their first appearance at about one-tenth of one second to midnight on the last day of the year, Dec. 31. 

 

Just considering human history by itself, the vast majority of our time was spent as hunter-gatherers, without even a concept of settled communities or agriculture. This notwithstanding the fact that humans of 200,000 years ago were just as intelligent as we are.

 

Radio only first appeared less than 150 years ago! 

 

This strikes me as good evidence for the extreme unlikelihood, in the Milky Way, of other radio-signal-sending, spacefaring aliens apart from us. The odds against such entities seem far too great, judging by the evidence we have here on earth. There is also the issue of time. Maybe such beings existed 200 million years ago and then perished; maybe we will perish and some other species somewhere will achieve what we did 200 million years from now. Any civilizations, if they exist at all, must be separated not just by vast gulfs of space but of time as well.

 

There is also the problem of mutual intelligibility. Even if somewhere in the Milky Way there is a species with comparable cognitive abilities to our own, they may well be so different from us, and we from them, that we would not even recognize each other. It is often said that math would be a universal language, a Rosetta’s stone that would facilitate mutual communication even among radically different species, but there are good reasons to think this is false.

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