The Fermi Paradox - Why we haven't been contacted by aliens
 

Interesting read. What's your opinion?


http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html

Are you sure you want to know what this place things of this....?

Brain orgasm

Even if they were "close" by our galaxy's standards, travel between the two places would take too long. The cultures would be too isolated to make contact with each other.

you should read the article cooter

or don't

You dumb**** ! This nation is made up of Aliens !

This was a great read. Wish you would've posted it in the Science is Cool page to be immortalized there.

so instead of you and me reading it, absolutely knowone reads it? lol

"In my official status, I cannot comment on ET contact. However, personally, I can assure you we are not alone" - Charles J. Camarda, NASA astronaut.

"Of course the flying saucers are real, and they are interplanetary" - Air Chief Marshall Lord Dowding, head of Royal Air Force during WWII

"We must insist on full access to discs recovered. For instance, in the La case the Army grabbed it and would not let us have it for cursory examination" - J. Edgar Hoover

It's a mind****.

True.

At our current level of understanding.

the part where the article was talking about how other intelligent lifeforms don't broadcast throughout the universe cus a possible predator species could hear and come and rape them was mind blowing


yea we should probably stop doing that

A bit like saying the pony express or telegrams could never allow us to have instant-contact with people in China. Life the last few centuries has changed at an unbelievable if not unsustainable rates.

I'm not sure why they need to find planets Humans could have survived on. Life finds a way under bizarre circumstances. Even Humans as they exist are only around due to ancestors surviving hard to imagine catastrophes.

Yeah. After reading that and the stuff before it I thought, if we're the first, we would definitely claim everything for ourselves. We would be the predators. That's how it is now on Earth.

Then I basically surmised that if we were to be the big bully, if there was someone before us, they would almost certainly be the same bully.

are we ahead or behind the filter?

that was a fun read

the native american Christopher Columbus analogy

I think it's possible that it's both. Maybe not "The Great Filter," but I don't see why there can't be multiple filters that kill 99.9% of life each time they are approached.

I always think that is weird too. Life could develop anywhere. Why does it have to have water and moderate temperatures?

It would be cool to make a poll of every single scenario including God Put Us Here and see how CP would vote.

Its a trap. We lure them here, beat them up, and take their stuff. :thumb:

It is impossible to know everything there is to know. If you wanted to store all the information on all the galaxies out there-it would take a super computer-so big and so heavy-it would actually sink down into the fabric of space and create a black hole. This black hole would be so huge it would suck everything into it and stretch it into particles. Thus making it impossible to harness all the knowledge out there.

Well shit.

Sorry, but that's just dumb !

Tell that to Stephen Hawking.

And really it is not. Some of the computers trying to do Quantum Physics calculations could fill a mall. Look how big the computers use to be a few decades ago- and that was just to balance your checkbook. When you are talking about problems involving numbers that will circle the earth 100,000 times-you are talking about giant computers- now times that by the entire knowledge in All universes. Impossible.

A point made by Cosmos in a recent episode is that we're not only dealing with a challenge of space, but also of time. In other words, the math says that there should be a ton of other planets with life on them, but what's to say that life hasn't already come and gone on most of them? If it turns out that there just isn't a way to go faster than the speed of light, it's entirely plausible that we just won't have anyone else close enough and at the right point in time to find anything out there.

Even if we did-the signals we sent are still going. We will probably blow ourselves up before it reaches another species that would want to come investigate the origin.

Wormholes? These would actually bend the fabric of the universe-thus suspending time would it not?

I wish we (as a species) would put as much effort into exploring beyond Earth as we do trying to be as rich and powerful as possible.

We should save earth first. Plus something like 70% of this planet has not been explored and mapped.

You have to start with the known and expand from there.

We don't need to travel the speed of light. Near relativistic travel substantially slows the aging process for the traveler/pedant :)

A lot of it really comes down to water. Everything we know about life suggests that H2O is necessary for it to work (reacting with carbon), so at a minimum you need a planet that is somewhere between 32F and 212F.

It's theoretically possible for life to be built in a very different way (silicon is a possibility in place of carbon), but we don't even know what we'd be looking for to try and find something like that.

Great read. Something else for me to trip on while i toke this bowl.

Hydrogen bonding is the key to life. It's why water is liquid at RT whereas other heavier compounds are not.

Silicon is unlikely. It's an interesting concept, but its weight is such that the London forces of compounds would significantly alter their makeup, and the size of the silicon atom makes it far more difficult for it to create double bonds (pi bonds), and thus, no carbonyl-type molecules, whereas carbon can form an infinite number of molecules.

I think we're before the filter....humans will invent some life changing energy source, fight over it and kill the earth or a scientist won't know what he's actually created and blow a hole in the ozone or something

If you want some whack shit, consider this: all naturally occurring amino acids on Earth are left-handed, even though there is no real functional advantage for an AA to be right or left-handed. It's just an evolutionary quirk. Meteorites with trace amino acids have been found to have a 50-50 split of right and left handed AA's.

Whoa, that's whack!

****ers ran Chris off and let this shit stand?

That was a great read. I'm about to give the "Putting Time In Perspective" article when I get more of it.

Explain...

Am I the only one that thinks he's pretty damn smart until he reads a few posts of Hamas?

Certain molecules possess a trait called chirality, or handedness. The chemical formula is the same, but one branch is a mirror image that you can't superimpose on the other molecule (think about your right and left hands). This usually doesn't affect much chemistry, except with other chiral molecules.

For example, you cannot have a peptide chain unless all of the amino acids are of the same handedness, because an S-amino acid won't be able to form a chain of bonds with two D-amino acids (S, sinister, means left and D, dextro, means right). Without those chains, you don't have proteins, thus, no life.

No one knows why this happened. More than likely, it was just a quirk of genetic randomness.

Come on, SR, there are a lot more important problems than Sri Lanka to worry about.

I bet that intelligent life outside of earth is too busy laughing at the Oakland Raiders from afar. Nothing would defer me from a trip to earth like having to visit the home of the Raiders.

And maybe it doesn't need to be said, Virus, but the fact that we see those amino acids unlike the ones from Earth implies that life (or at least the building blocks of it) may have existed wherever that meteor originated from.

Whack indeed.

The laws of physics and light apply to all.
I think that there has be be life out there somewhere.

It would take 100,000 light years to cross our galaxy.
We do not have the capability to travel at the speed of light.
Others may not have either.

Even at the speed of light, space travel is a bitch. How does a species get enough resources to
last even 5 light years? (which is a heck of a lot longer in our travel time)

I just don't think we will ever see life from another place.

Why?

As a species, we're pretty ****ing horrible anyway.

Yes, I think that everyone considers you pretty ****ing stupid.

NASA gets a pretty nice share of the US budget. At least it used to.
Very possible.

Very cool article. I now have something to think about in the shower every day for the rest of my life.

Isn't it sort of like the question of time travel? One argument that time travel may not be possible is the absence of tourists from other times.

this thread feels a little chris616ish now

Love this article. Great read.

This is me right now.

http://image.shutterstock.com/displa...-102594356.jpg

Very cool read. Thanks.

Yeah, but the idea of time travel is much more abstract than the tangible possibilities that this article lays out. Time travel either is or is not possible. You can't do basic math and lay odds on it like you can with the development of intelligent life.

We don't exactly go around talking about it.

I'm with Hawking on this issue. It won't be ET aliens visiting us, it will be MIB aliens. Who is going to try to educate or be friends with such a backward society? On the other hand, we are intergalatic low hanging fruit.

But we used to, until that problem arose in 2019.

I've thought about this a few times before.

I do not believe in the theory that there's a lot of civilizations out there who choose not to talk to us and who we can't notice. I also think the theory that civilizations naturally destroy themselves is dumb. Even if you think humans are assholes, some portion of intelligent species out there would be enlightened enough not to kill themselves.

I believe there is a great filter, and that the filter is ahead of us. I think that filter is simply "unable to travel near the speed of light, and unable to warp space".

If you can't travel near or faster than the speed of light, then the mind-boggling vastness of space really puts a damper on any civilization's ability to survive the death of their star, much less colonize other planets.

If we're still alive when our star gets perilously close to cooking our planet during its red giant phase, I imagine we'll try sending out generation ships out of desperation, and they'll probably fail. The End.

Yep, that's my take as well.

Yeah, whenever 2019 rolls around I usually fast forward to 2022 to when all the dust has settled.

I agree with your take. But I think this article alludes to the same thing with the "Great Filter". Doesn't mean we are wiped out, but our intellectual capacity could simply peak and the concepts needed to rise farther are beyond us. Or it might actually just be physically impossible, no matter how smart we are or how much we learn.

I can't imagine the QA testing involved in developing a Type III civilization.

I disagree. We have not even began to tap our brains potential. Studies have shown that we could possibly be using as low as 10% of our brains potential.

I'm not equating the great filter with us dying (though that could be it, if you think the great filter is natural disasters, for example), the great filter (the answer to "where is everybody") is that no one can really get to any other star because space is too damned vast.

I just morbidly continued on from where we get stuck in our advancement to our likely demise.

I think we continue to climb, but evolution-wise, you don't have to be very smart to produce offspring who produce other offspring, and so on. No reason to think our brains are on some course for superpowered intelligence.

This seems most likely to me as well. The "colonization" approach that the article covers gave me pause, though. Kind of breaks that down over a long enough timeline. Fascinating stuff.

No, there is no reason to think we will evolve into a "super powered intelligence" species. However, I think we will be able to master warp speed or travel at the speed of light. That will ensure our survival as a species.

I do think there's a chance that we may detect a faint signal someday. We'd know roughly where it came from, but probably wouldn't be able to make sense of it other than its unnatural.

But then what? We'd be detecting the trace of what a civilization was sending out at least millennia ago, if not millions or billions of years ago, we'd never be able to have a conversation or see each other, and they would probably be dead by the time we got the signal. It would just be stuff for poets and philosophers to talk about.

A variant on the Great Filter could be that there are non-zero odds of getting wiped out by some flyby object, so maybe if a civilization is around long enough the odds are high that it'll get wiped out before it can settle other planets.

Yeah, but wow. Wow! Somehow the concept would knock me off my feet for a few minutes.

This is a myth. Over the course of a day you eventually use every part of your brain. There's no reason to think we have a savant lurking inside each of us.

Rogue planets are cool to think about.

After a lot of study and simulations, we are now pretty sure that our solar system probably had about 20 or so planets, but during the early chaotic phase where things were colliding and sharing orbits, most of them got flung off into the cold depths of space. The 8 that are left were the survivors who cleared their orbits, behaved nicely with one another, and achieved stability with the sun.

There could be just as many rogue, cold, rocky planets out there with no sun as there are planets orbiting suns. Who knows, we may have taken our revenge on whichever planet crashed into us and formed our moon by flinging it away into darkness.