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gmax137
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Angels, not Angles.
Which comes back to the Fermi Paradox - if ‘angels’ ever evolved somewhere in the galaxy and developed the tech and willingness for interstellar travel - even with drones at say 0.1C - then where are they? Galaxy is old enough to have been completely colonized by self-replicating von Neumann probessbrothy said:It comes back to Arthur C. Clarke's argument about Apes or Angles..
I will also add, Do all these exoplanets have the similar geologic history as the earth with minerals on the surface ready and available for exploitation by the intelligent.BWV said:early 18th century metallurgy.
By chance maybe some very few of them could be friendly, especially if they feel so inclined as to stop for food at a place called, Eats. He may even offer one of his cigarettes.sophiecentaur said:Consider the probability of peace on Earth And we're all pretty similar and with the same aims.
Little green men are very unlikely and friendly ones even less so.
Any organism which has managed to set itself up as the apex predator of it's planet is bound to be a nasty piece of work. There is, after all, only so many ways to be a shark (or in this extended metaphor: an Orca Whale).sophiecentaur said:Consider the probability of peace on Earth And we're all pretty similar and with the same aims.
Little green men are very unlikely and friendly ones even less so.
Or a human. Lots of us have good intentions but we as a species didn't get to the top of the food chain by being nice and we today are the descendants of those of our forebears who got to the top of OUR food chain in addition to that of all other species. It would be nice to think we have overcome that but ... not all of us have.sbrothy said:There is, after all, only so many ways to be a shark (or in this extended metaphor: an Orca Whale).
Also, I don't think we should. Being peaceful and in harmony and having beaten our weapons into plowshares may well be admirable. Until we're visited by the Evil Empire of Rigel who demands or water and women.phinds said:Or a human. Lots of us have good intentions but we as a species didn't get to the top of the food chain by being nice and we today are the descendants of those of our forebears who got to the top of OUR food chain in addition to that of all other species. It would be nice to think we have overcome that but ... not all of us have.
And our booze. Don't forget our booze. I'm not putting up with any race that tries to take our booze, by gum !sbrothy said:Until we're visited by the Evil Empire of Rigel who demands or water and women.
There was an 80's TV show with this premise - reptilian aliens wanting to steal our water. It starred a young Jane Badler in a tight top, which kind of spoiled the premise: she is unquestionably a mammal. Unquestionably.sbrothy said:Until we're visited by the Evil Empire of Rigel who demands or water
Vanadium 50 said:I am not sure it makes any sense at all to talk about alien intentions in human form,
...other than to say that anything you want to steal or conquer at the end of a quadrillion mile supply chain is not worth the trouble.
I'd have to disagree there. AM is such an inefficient mode that any species that had only got that far would be of no interest to us and wouldn't be capable of useful comms. We would need to be looking for a signal with very much noise-like characteristics which would carry (amongst other signals) a low data rate 'signature' signal. This signature could be dragged out of a very noisy signal - barely managing to squeeze itself down the antenna feed - and contain information (in comms speak) about how and when to find the meat of their message.Vanadium 50 said:AM Radio is more likely
You're talking about The 1984 V series I presume.Vanadium 50 said:There was an 80's TV show with this premise - reptilian aliens wanting to steal our water. It starred a young Jane Badler in a tight top, which kind of spoiled the premise: she is unquestionably a mammal. Unquestionably.
Vanadium 50 said:I am not sure it makes any sense at all to talk about alien intentions in human form, [...]
Lol. Two very common elements which react well together. tumteetum.sbrothy said:water is a very very limited resource in our universe *cough*.
Interstellar travel being technologically more practical than manufacturing water, of course!Vanadium 50 said:There was an 80's TV show with this premise - reptilian aliens wanting to steal our water. It starred a young Jane Badler in a tight top, which kind of spoiled the premise: she is unquestionably a mammal. Unquestionably.
or even interplanetary,PeroK said:more practical than manufacturing water
Yes. Let's not talk about hydrogen. One of the rarest elements since the dawn of the universe. :)sophiecentaur said:Lol. Two very common elements which react well together. tumteetum.
There's a lot of it in the Oort cloud and the aliens would pass through it on their way to Earth. Oh, and yes - they would have their own Oort cloud around their own star.
BWV said:Outliving your home star appears to me the only economic argument for interstellar travel. A technological civilization capable of expanding to another star system would possess a strong incentive to ensure the survival of their species (assuming they placed a value on that). However, that leads back to the Fermi
Paradox - so where are they?
did you read my post? The point was IF a civilization developed the capability of interstellar travel and IF they placed a value on the survival of their species THEN an incentive would exist to expand outside their solar systemsophiecentaur said:'Outliving your home star' involves timescales of many hundreds of millions of years. What Earth organisms have had that sort of lifetime and also had high tech? Humans, after just a few hundred years of tech, have been on the brink of self destruction for some while. We'll be hell and gone long before the dear old Sun undergoes any significant changes.
Where would the 'strong incentive' come from? How desperate would the situation need to be before the 'strong incentive' for personal gain and survival would be replaced by an altruistic incentive to propagate the species elsewhere? You assume that tech ability correlates with social maturity. Do you have any evidence to justify this assumption?
The SciFi model is based on a totally Earth based situation of 'go west young man'; take Zane Grey themes and put them in space ships. In the days of colonisation, places that were colonised by westerners had already been occupied by other earlier peoples. Sci Fi is no more real than Fantasy Fiction as so many posts on PF demonstrate. That's fine as long as we avoid planning a future that's based on SciFi.
.. . . . . . . .BWV said:The point was IF a civilization
My 94 old grandmother had a saying for these situations:sophiecentaur said:.. . . . . . . .
A chain of 'IF's can soon have limited validity. IF I won the lottery and IF a unicorn landed and IF I were awarded a Nobel prize is hardly a good start to a conversation unless we are discussing a fantasy fiction plot.
PF has a forum dedicated to this stuff for good reason.
Not at all. But the more 'different' the aliens are, the less likely that they would be interested or capable of passing useful information. That's all on top of the unchanged factors of time and distance scales.ShadowKraz said:Human hubris at work... we're assuming, with some valid reasons, that extra terrestrial life will be very similar to Earth's.
I fail to see the reasoning behind this statement; it seems to be based upon thin air assumptions. Could you expand on this, please?sophiecentaur said:But the more 'different' the aliens are, the less likely that they would be interested or capable of passing useful information.
Nope, it’s really simple. We know that human-like intelligence can evolve on a planet under the right conditions because we exist. If we evolved due to some unknown probability of some unspecified chain of events occurring then the Universe is big enough that the odds that something similar has never occurred are zero. The (unanswerable) question is then are those odds high enough that it is likely another civilization with which we could potentially communicate exists close enough in our galaxy at a compatible point in time to make this possibleShadowKraz said:Human hubris at work... we're assuming, with some valid reasons, that extra terrestrial life will be very similar to Earth's. Most are assuming that it will be similar enough to be able to communicate with. As someone pointed out (Vanadium50?), we're working with exactly one data point. This is ONLY enough to find other data points that more or less match ours and is almost useless to find anything that doesn't.
We assume that the development of life must occur within the time frame we know it did here... but, as was pointed out earlier, some of the steps evolved then were wiped out and had to re-evolve before the next step(s) could evolve. Further, it is assumed that they must develop a human-style intelligence, a style which has yet to prove itself to be of a long-term evolutionary advantage (and we may be demonstrating that it isn't even as I type this). N.B., we are a very recent, in both evolutionary and geological terms, species.
It is also assumed that the likelihood of non-carbon-based life is so low as to be near zero. I'll grant that this is probably true, but it might not be.
There may be 100s of intelligent species out there in the Milky Way but with different enough biochemistry, psychology, environmental conditions, or a combination of those factors that prompt them NOT to develop the kinds of technologies we have but others instead that make sense in their environment.
In short, we have no clue what to look for if an intelligent species is sufficiently different from ours. Heck, we have trouble understanding each other here on Earth and we're all the same species. We have even less understanding of other intelligent species on our own planet. How can we assume with any confidence whatsoever that we'll either be able to detect an intelligent extra-terrestrial species or understand it?
Yes, but what are the odds that we run into one of these "similars" rather than one of the "dissimilars" that has come down through any one of the thousands or millions of alternative evolutions that produce something akin to intelligence?BWV said:something similar
It's life Jim, but not as we know it!ShadowKraz said:There may be 100s of intelligent species out there in the Milky Way but with different enough biochemistry, psychology, environmental conditions, or a combination of those factors that prompt them NOT to develop the kinds of technologies we have but others instead that make sense in their environment.
In short, we have no clue what to look for if an intelligent species is sufficiently different from ours.
It's NOT a constant, it's an equation, but yes it holds throughout the universe.Hyku said:Begging the questions: Is E=MC-squared a universal constant?
Not it the way I'm sure you are thinking of (worm hole, Alcubierrie Drive, etc.)Hyku said:Can Space Time be folded?
Since the former doesn't hold, neither does the latter.Hyku said:If the former is true - could an advanced species possess the intellect to achieve the latter?
NoHyku said:Also, could the advanced study of the "instantaneous" exchange of information between entangled particles eventually lead to faster than light communication?
Since such messages are impossible, your question is moot.Hyku said:Raising the question - are humans currently capable of receiving, recognizing, and understanding such messages?