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chickenstrip
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PostPosted: 07:17 - 21 Jul 2015    Post subject: Life Out There? Reply with quote

https://www.space.com/29990-stephen-hawking-intelligent-alien-life-initiative.html

That's a lot of money being spent. Does it really matter whether there is or not any other life out there? How does it affect us? I can see how we would want to increase our knowledge, but just how important is this?
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BigShow
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PostPosted: 07:20 - 21 Jul 2015    Post subject: Reply with quote

Might help prove religion wrong which can only be a good thing.
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hellkat
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PostPosted: 07:26 - 21 Jul 2015    Post subject: Reply with quote

Also :
Article link wrote:

"The second initiative announced today, Breakthrough Message, will fund an international competition to determine the content of messages sent from humanity to alien civilizations. The pool of prizes rewarding the best messages will total $1 million, and the competition is open to everybody. Although Breakthrough Message is not committed to sending messages, "it's a great way to develop a degree of awareness of what it is to be human, to be self-aware, to be alive,"


Can you imagine the quality of some of the messages people might want to send. Karen Carpenter could yet turn in her grave.
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Rogerborg
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PostPosted: 07:56 - 21 Jul 2015    Post subject: Re: Life Out There? Reply with quote

chickenstrip wrote:
Does it really matter whether there is or not any other life out there?

What matters is why the galaxy is so quiet.

Which is a followup to: why aren't we bug eyed freaks?

Even on impulse drive at sublight speeds it would only take a billion years or so for an expansive species - and we only need one, in all the galaxy - to completely colonise the Milky Way, and we're squatting on prime real estate.

Why on earth - or Kepler 62e - hasn't this happened? I find it difficult to imagine a galaxy not overrun by biological or mechanical rep-li-cay-tors. If life is common then the odds against the Klingons getting out there early enough to shove their flagpole in Gaia while we were still thinking about dabbing a flipper on the beach are literally astronomical.

We're alone, or something is silencing planets that ring the dinner bell.
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oldpink
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PostPosted: 08:11 - 21 Jul 2015    Post subject: Reply with quote

I've been part of SETI for over 12 years, I have software that processes date looking for signals
this is a ramp up of the current system with better data and a wider range of the sky to scan

personally I think there is life out there and possibly lots of it
whether we can communicate with it is a different matter
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hellkat
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PostPosted: 08:26 - 21 Jul 2015    Post subject: Re: Life Out There? Reply with quote

Rogerborg wrote:
or something is silencing planets that ring the dinner bell.


I've never thought of it like that before Shocked
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dydey90
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PostPosted: 08:36 - 21 Jul 2015    Post subject: Reply with quote

I remember reading a theory by Stephen Hawking that basically said we need to stay still and quiet, because we're in trouble if something comes to us. Throughout human history, the less advanced civilisation has always been dominated upon discovery. If another species has the ability to travel to our planet, that defines them as more advanced.
Let's just hope for more Vulcan and less Borg.
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Sabs
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PostPosted: 08:39 - 21 Jul 2015    Post subject: Reply with quote

I think it's fascinating.

There are suns out there a billion years older than our sun so why not? There's billions of planets like Earth in our galaxy and there's over a hundred billion galaxies out there.

And that's just the known expanse of space.

Did you know you can fit over 1 million Earth's in the Sun? WOW!!

How can you not be interested in this stuff!
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Islander
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PostPosted: 08:53 - 21 Jul 2015    Post subject: Re: Life Out There? Reply with quote

Rogerborg wrote:

What matters is why the galaxy is so quiet.

Which is a followup to: why aren't we bug eyed freaks?

Even on impulse drive at sublight speeds it would only take a billion years or so for an expansive species - and we only need one, in all the galaxy - to completely colonise the Milky Way, and we're squatting on prime real estate.

Why on earth - or Kepler 62e - hasn't this happened? I find it difficult to imagine a galaxy not overrun by biological or mechanical rep-li-cay-tors. If life is common then the odds against the Klingons getting out there early enough to shove their flagpole in Gaia while we were still thinking about dabbing a flipper on the beach are literally astronomical.

We're alone, or something is silencing planets that ring the dinner bell.


Our planet was only noisy for a relatively short period. With the advent of narrow beam communication, fibre optics, etc. The amount of radio noise we produce is diminishing. Now look at the timescales. Humankind has been around for around 200,000 years and it took us over 3 billion years to get there. The average survival time for a single species from speciation to extinction is around 2 million years - around 0.044% of the total time that evolution has been underway. We've been making radio noise for around 100 years - around 0.006% of the time our species has existed. We're going to have to be fairly lucky to detect life that way. We're more likely to detect life signature in spectrographic atmospheric analysis as a planet transits it's star and even that requires that the alien solar system has it's planetary disk edge on to us - many won't.

As for colonisation, our closest star is proxima centauri, some 4.2 light years away. Using an ion drive or something similar, it would take around 80,000 years with a peak velocity of 15.5km/s. At that speed, any kind of micrometeorite strike would be devastating. Assuming we used something with higher acceleration for longer, it would still take over 100 years and a prodigious quantity of mass to consume to get there and at the peak velocities reached a small grain of sand impacting would probably destroy the craft. In any event, a ship would have to continue working reliably for in excess of 100 years at a minimum in a very hostile, high radiation environment and more importantly protect and keep it's occupants alive. Highly unlikely.

As for life itself, it's statistically likely that it exists elsewhere. Whether it's intelligent or not is another matter. To quote Eric Idle though, let's pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space, 'cause there's bugger all down here on Earth. Razz
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Rogerborg
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PostPosted: 09:13 - 21 Jul 2015    Post subject: Reply with quote

Oh, it's unlikely that any particular planet will produce an expansive starfaring species, but it. Only. Takes. One. Ever.

A billion years is nothing cosmologically: there are multiple generations of stars already out there.

Why Earth hasn't been colonised by the bug-eyes is a fairly cuckoo-bananas thing to be concerned about, but on the other hand it's literally a bet-the-species issue.

Based on our current sample-set it looks we should expect the most aggressive, selfish and destructive species to dominate.

That leads to couple of suppositions. One, that any species that's both aggressive and technological enough to expand and colonise will nuke or consume itself out of existence while all of its eggs are in one basket.

The other is that sooner or later every species make self replicating machines and they do an even better job of it. Crush, kill, destroy.

But in either case you're still left with that issue that you only needed one exception, ever, and BAM, it's bug-eyed monoculture.

However if one lot of bug-eyes (again: ever) make self replicating machines capable of space travel then you get Berserkers (only without the dramatically convenient weaknesses). And that really is all she wrote for us ugly-bags-of-mostly-water, anywhere in the galaxy.

When I'm emperor of the world, I'll broadcast one more signal "LOL, JK, YOLO" then hush up the earth. Shhh!
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Last edited by Rogerborg on 10:17 - 21 Jul 2015; edited 1 time in total
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smegballs
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PostPosted: 09:15 - 21 Jul 2015    Post subject: Reply with quote

^^^Ion Drive Laughing Laughing

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The Wobbly Orange
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PostPosted: 09:17 - 21 Jul 2015    Post subject: Reply with quote

As regards intelligent life. We live very early in the stelliferous era so it's not unreasonable to assume that we are one of the first sentient species to evolve. Perhaps we are the ones that will over run the galaxy.
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Polarbear
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PostPosted: 09:18 - 21 Jul 2015    Post subject: Reply with quote

dydey90 wrote:
I remember reading a theory by Stephen Hawking that basically said we need to stay still and quiet, because we're in trouble if something comes to us. Throughout human history, the less advanced civilisation has always been dominated upon discovery. If another species has the ability to travel to our planet, that defines them as more advanced.
Let's just hope for more Vulcan and less Borg.


I agree. You can see the mindset of some far advanced civilisation - A race of vicious bugs on a nice planet, squash it before it gets to the threat stage.
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BigShow
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PostPosted: 09:37 - 21 Jul 2015    Post subject: Reply with quote

This is one of those subjects the more I contemplate it the more my mind bends. I can't imagine infinite space being empty apart from us.

If space is infinite then couldn't there be planets/beings out there that are infinitely larger and smaller then us? Our entire observable galaxy could be miniscule in relation to other things out there, and yet to us the planets and stars around us are enormous.
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hellkat
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PostPosted: 10:07 - 21 Jul 2015    Post subject: Reply with quote

dydey90 wrote:
I remember reading a theory by Stephen Hawking that basically said we need to stay still and quiet, because we're in trouble if something comes to us.


Well he would say that, wouldn't he.
Cos he's a raspberry stuck in a wheelchair with no discernible laser beams to take out the aliens when they come after him.

Somebody call Q and get him out to Dr Hawking for installation of some huff-activated light sabres on that contraption he's driving.

/Han "007" Solo
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oldpink
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PostPosted: 10:15 - 21 Jul 2015    Post subject: Reply with quote

BigShow wrote:
This is one of those subjects the more I contemplate it the more my mind bends. I can't imagine infinite space being empty apart from us.


it gets even more mind bending when you use a telescope and you see thousand of stars you can't see with the naked eye
in some images I have star counts run into the thousands and thats in a tiny part of the sky
and even then thats just a fraction of the "Real" star count Thumbs Up
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oldpink
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PostPosted: 10:22 - 21 Jul 2015    Post subject: Reply with quote

Earth, this picture was taken from 1,000,000 miles away

https://www.astronomy.com/-/media/Images/News%20and%20Observing/News/2015/07/Earth.jpg?mw=1000&mh=800
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Fisty
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PostPosted: 10:23 - 21 Jul 2015    Post subject: Reply with quote

Bodyguard is proof aliens exist, they are not intelligent.
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ScaredyCat
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PostPosted: 10:26 - 21 Jul 2015    Post subject: Re: Life Out There? Reply with quote

Rogerborg wrote:
What matters is why the galaxy is so quiet.


The rest of the galaxy wrote:
Sshh if we keep quiet maybe they'll think we're out

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Rogerborg
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PostPosted: 10:27 - 21 Jul 2015    Post subject: Reply with quote

The Wobbly Orange wrote:
As regards intelligent life. We live very early in the stelliferous era so it's not unreasonable to assume that we are one of the first sentient species to evolve. Perhaps we are the ones that will over run the galaxy.

I'd call that astronomically, theatrically unreasonable.

There's nothing special about Sol. It's a smallish common-or-garden G type main sequence squib. What we've got going for us is that it's Population 1 so we've got mad bling to play with, and that our damp rusty iron ball is in the Goldilocks zone.

But to assume that sentience has been waiting for those conditions, wow such hubris very anthropic.
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oldpink
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PostPosted: 10:40 - 21 Jul 2015    Post subject: Reply with quote

one of the issues is distance
even IF we receive a message from another civilisation the chances are by the time we get it that civilisation has fallen / become extinct Thumbs Up
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trevor saxe-coburg-gotha
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PostPosted: 10:46 - 21 Jul 2015    Post subject: Reply with quote

Other sentient lifeforms are basically hiding behind the settee 'til we go away. And as soon as we do they'll go upstairs to their bedroom and start playing with that really ace scalextric of theirs. Typical. Summer. Holiday. Alien. Behaviour.
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nowhere.elysium
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PostPosted: 11:03 - 21 Jul 2015    Post subject: Reply with quote

We quite possibly can't pick up on the communications methods used by any sufficiently advanced species out there; a hundred years ago we wouldn't have been able to tap into our own current communication systems, after all. There is also the fact that the means by which we examine the stars are still excruciatingly low-res in the grand scheme of things.

Rogerborg's fatalism is one that I typically agree with on this subject, but to assume that we can't see them because they're hiding, and not because we're under-equipped to see them is just tiny a bit self-aggrandising. We're really not that awesome a species if planetary and stellar engineering is the scale that we're using as a comparison basis.

An interstellar predator species is not even remotely outlandish a concept: it's the same model that we've observed in terrestrial species, so what's to say that the idea can't be scaled up?
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Rogerborg
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PostPosted: 12:34 - 21 Jul 2015    Post subject: Reply with quote

Correction: Royal Astronomical Society reckons just 2 million years to colonise the galaxy at 0.1c with a 1:1 prep/travel ratio (100 year trip Arrow 100 years to prepare the next one Arrow hundred year trip...).

nowhere.elysium wrote:
sufficiently advanced species

https://chooseomatic.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/spacewizard.jpg


nowhere.elysium wrote:
to assume that we can't see them because they're hiding

Could be hiding, could be that the noisy ones have been eaten. Their faces first.

Actually, based on us living on a blue and green planet that hasn't been colonised by the Zorblaxian Empire, I'd bet on the Silencers being of the shiny "Crush. Kill. Destroy." variety, cleaning up carbon unit infestations.

This might sound like science fiction, and it is, but it's also a totes srs answer to the Fermi paradox.

The fluffiest explanation is that we've been zoned as a nature reserve. The Voyager probes should be passing the "DO NOT ENTER! PRIMITIVE LIFEFORMS EVOLVING!" signs right about now.
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hellkat
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PostPosted: 12:55 - 21 Jul 2015    Post subject: Reply with quote

Rogerborg wrote:
The fluffiest explanation is that we've been zoned as a nature reserve.




We're not doing a very good job at that, are we ?
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