"Are We Alone?" The Great Debate

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Profile Julie
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Message 1033652 - Posted: 17 Sep 2010, 19:20:23 UTC

Welcome Hairball :)
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Message 1033672 - Posted: 17 Sep 2010, 20:32:17 UTC - in response to Message 1033652.  

Greetings. I'm a newbie but I have a brawny computer and a lot to learn.

In in/on Newfoundland, a rock in the North Atlantic and the next best thing to heaven. More later, I have many questions.

Cheers, Aaron.
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Message 1033688 - Posted: 17 Sep 2010, 21:18:28 UTC - in response to Message 1033672.  

Hi Newfie.... I mean Hairball. Welcome to SETI. I guess the first thing to learn is this is not a section we normally chat in. Number Crunching is for most of your questions and Cafe SETI is where we just hang out and play. Come on over to either one and visit for awhile.


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Message 1034040 - Posted: 18 Sep 2010, 14:57:58 UTC - in response to Message 1033688.  

Oops! OK, I'll have a look for the Cafe. But my previous post vis-a-vis alien contact was in the right spot? OK :-) I'm a Newf, I'll get the hang.

Re number crunching I have a good machine and am pleased to be involved.

Cheers guys, galls and aliens. Hairball.
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Message 1040328 - Posted: 9 Oct 2010, 19:27:31 UTC - in response to Message 979038.  

Hi,

Is SETI turning its ear to Gliese d, tusn out to be in the habitable zone around Gliese, however that planet having a permanent day and nite side, that might make it too hot for life to develop in the day side and the oposite holds true for the night side too. Nevertheless, if Gliese d turns out to have a dense atmosphere like Earth or Venus, then the greenhouse affect along with aerosols, along with water, might make life possible. Astronomers might want to look for chemical signatures such as mathane, and high levels of oxygen, nitrogen in the atmosphere of Gliese d. Gliese is a dwarf star, its fusion process of burning hydrongen into nitrogen is much slower than a Sun type star, a G star; and Gliese like the Sun seems to be stable star also, which is good news for life, since any high leves of radiation is not good for any life. Any thoughs on my comment, thank you.


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Message 1046318 - Posted: 5 Nov 2010, 20:42:38 UTC

If we didn't exist, I would say, yes, we are alone.
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Message 1046325 - Posted: 5 Nov 2010, 21:21:08 UTC

if you did not exist you could not say we are alone. some thing is there to find. Our knowleage of earth seem to be affected by things that can not be exsplaned, pictures all over earth in cave all showing simularitys of air borne craft, these drawings by people that had no way of contacting each other to tell what they should draw. Flying was just for birds and the gods the shape of the craft were all very a like across the world. i dont think we are the first life but if we are hope the rest are better than we are we are distroying our home the only one we have
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Message 1046946 - Posted: 7 Nov 2010, 22:29:53 UTC

If we didn't exist, we couldn't say we're alone...we couldn't say anything (?)
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Message 1046964 - Posted: 7 Nov 2010, 23:33:12 UTC

50 years of SETI - no signs of life out there. What a waste of time.

Actually SETI is looking for Intelligence, "life" has already been proven to exist in the form of bacteria.

If we didn't exist, I would say, yes, we are alone.

If we didn't exist, we couldn't say we're alone...we couldn't say anything (?)

It depends by what mean existence and intelligence. What we imagine to be existence and intelligence is not mandatory to be truth.
It's admirable that we trying the impossible.
Mens sana in corpore ETI & Maze
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Message 1046967 - Posted: 7 Nov 2010, 23:46:13 UTC

we are still finding new life on earth thats a small planet in one solar system
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Message 1046982 - Posted: 8 Nov 2010, 2:36:43 UTC

My 2c
We exist in our galaxy, possibly all alone, preferably not :)
If there is only one life bearing planet in each galaxy,
considering the vast number of galaxies in the universe then their is a lot life out there somewhere,
The distances involved are so great we may never comunicate with them or meet them
Nobody will ever convince me that they don`t exist somewhere out there.
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Message 1046996 - Posted: 8 Nov 2010, 4:28:46 UTC - in response to Message 1027704.  

The recent BBC article and interview with Seth Shostak is interesting because, among other things, it questions whether we're looking for the right kind of signal. Any civilisation following a similar technological path to our own will only be detectable by our radio telescopes for a limited period whilst they're using high-power omnidirectional radio to communicate around their planet. If they follow our path, then within 100 years they will switch to using lower-energy more efficient point-to-point communications, or they'll use fibre-optic. If true, that greatly lowers the odds of finding them by using a radio telescope.

Ham Radio Operators, CB'ers, and Broadcasters all depend on something other than point-to-point communications and I don't see any of these radiators of RF not being used in the foreseeable future.
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Message 1047025 - Posted: 8 Nov 2010, 10:31:21 UTC

contacting space craft like the shutle would be hard to do with optic fiber, i think radio transmision will stay even microwave ovens radiate but the distants for other planets that have life, is in 100's of years at light speed so thats the time in will take for the signal to reach us and the life form will have developed in that time.
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Message 1047050 - Posted: 8 Nov 2010, 14:34:57 UTC - in response to Message 1047025.  

Anyone remember the original "Battlestar Galactica" TV program? The one episode where Starbuck had discovered the old, no longer used observation bubble? Just as they were leaving, a message came in on the radio. " One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind"..... Too bad they had already left and no one was listening.


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Message 1047404 - Posted: 10 Nov 2010, 14:20:20 UTC - in response to Message 1047050.  

Anyone remember the original "Battlestar Galactica" TV program? The one episode where Starbuck had discovered the old, no longer used observation bubble? Just as they were leaving, a message came in on the radio. " One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind"..... Too bad they had already left and no one was listening.


Some people compare it with a christmas tree decoration:
On every branch there is a lightbulb hanging and each and everyone is connected to the net but whenever one lightbulb gets to shine, the others have just turn off or will turn on later, but you will never see the tree with all the lightbulbs shining at the same time.
Life is so rare and distances are so vast that it makes it very unlikely to ever see a christmas tree. But this is a point of view based on what we know today and we know that what we know today is different of what we will know tomorrow.
So far nothing is discarded.
Maybe let´s have a look to who is in charge of the fuse box...!

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Message 1048251 - Posted: 13 Nov 2010, 23:36:52 UTC - in response to Message 1046996.  

mabye seti can turn its hears to signals given off by a craft, probes, setalites launched by an intelligent civilization. An advanced civilization might be able to capture signals given off by the Voyagers probes and Galileo probe. What about scaning for signals given off by probes that might be orbiting a star similar to the sun, (Sol), any thoughts on that.
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Message 1048301 - Posted: 14 Nov 2010, 3:16:12 UTC - in response to Message 1048251.  
Last modified: 14 Nov 2010, 3:17:03 UTC



Maybe they could give off signals, but I guess it would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

That's why they turn their arrays to galaxy's and clusters.

I believe SETI would be using some sort of sky mapping software.
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Message 1048651 - Posted: 15 Nov 2010, 19:25:32 UTC

I believe life is the natural progression of the universe.

The universe started out with simple hydrogen, and it became more complex in stars, then stars went nova and created solar systems with planets, and like the sun, things became more complex on these planets and life was created, and then more complex life. Things keep getting more and more complex. This will continue to happen. It has happened.

I also believe that we are not the life, but the Earth itself is the life. I believe the Earth is alive and is conscious on a level, and is healthy. We are not individual life, we are the Earth and the Earth is us.

Is Earth alone? No. It is not alone because of the natural progression of the universe.

I believe life is the universe becoming aware of itself.

It would be a waste if there was this universe for nothing to enjoy it or to even know it is here.
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Message 1048769 - Posted: 16 Nov 2010, 1:38:30 UTC

Remember the ending in the Men in Black movie,, Who know how far it goes, every time we think we have reached our limits we find that we just did not set our limits far enough. How big is the universe or how small is it, we are just a tiny piece of something that is so much bigger than we can imagine.

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Message 1051828 - Posted: 29 Nov 2010, 8:41:22 UTC

I do hope we are not alone. Although it might prove our undoing (meeting another intelligent specie from another world) i sencirely think that such an "encounter" would really help us get our feet of this planet.

But, unfortunatly, i do believe this is not the case. Life is pretty abundant in the universe, this i am pretty sure of, as in the last decade it seems that life only needs a liquid environment and some basic components (pretty common) to get started, and a source of energy. Life can, and will evolve in the most harsh environments. We have only begun to scratch the surface as we find more and more extreme environments that life colonised and, what a surprise, it seems to even thrive (extremly hot or cold places, extreme preasure, no sunlight, highly radiation exposed places and the list can go on). Even more, there seems to be even more than just one evolution on our planet, as scientist recently uncovered colonies of simple bacteria, cut off from the rest of the world in some remote extreme environment (i believe it was a cave or something - no oxygen, no light).

The thing is that the more complex life gets, the more and more neccesities it has (pretty much like society), which is quite logical. From this point of view, it is quite improbable to have life evolve to any level of intelligence unless the environment is very, and i mean very generous.

Moreover, we are biased into thinking that life favours intelligence, which is not the case. Even if we accept whales, or cimpanzees or many more other species as having some shread of intelligence, that still leaves more than 99.999999...% of all species on this earth as non-intelligent life. Life favours fast reproduction. The faster an organism has offsprings, the better the specie will fare in changing conditions. Intelligence somewhat offsets this as an intelligent specie has the limited capability of changing the environment, instead of biologicaly adapting to it (through reproduction coupled with mutations). But, in the end, intelligence can do so much. Intelligence is simply not going to be able to cope with certain extreme conditions changes, no matter how much we'd like to think that it would.

Take some of the worst case scenarios: nuclear war, ELE, extreme climate change, gamma ray bursts and so on and so forth. Complex life will all but perish, while most simple life forms (bacteria for example, but even multicelular life forms like sertain insects) will not only survive but even thrive in the left-over environment (no longer occupied by complex life forms). Sure, most probably complex life will once again evolve, but it's existence is somewhat conditioned, pretty harshly i might say, by certain environmental conditions. Take that away and we'll have "another" complex life form reset on our hands. This is one of the strongest arguments of Mars or even other planets colonisation. Don't keep your eggs in the same basket theory - if we wish to be a lot safer as a specie, and help ensure human specie survival. And one of those days, when we'll have to face such an event, will come. Don't know when, but it will come, this is cosmic certanty. I just hope we're gonna be prepared.

Back on topic. Even if life does evolve towards complex life forms and intelligence, the environment itself might just not permit the risal of intelligence that we are able to recognise.

Everything i've said previously had one false, i do believe, assumption. Intelligence can change the environment, intelligence can do this, intelligence can do that. So i presumed that intelligence equals technology (i simply fail to see how artistic intelligence, for example, would fare good at such a test, unfortunatly). Did you even raise an eyebrow? I think not, and i'm not surprised. Humans strongly tend to associate intelligence with technological prowless.

Who was more intelligent? Einstein or Picasso? Oppenheimer or Mozart? We have a very vague definition of intelligence. We are most proficient into recognizing technological (and sometimes artistic) intelligence, but this is pretty much it.

I, for one, find it pretty amazing that some people marvel and spend more than ten seconds looking at Juan Miro (just an example, please don't get offended if you like it) paintings. I certanly do not recognize his artistic intelligence, and i am pretty sure that a debilitated earthworm (with some turbo "system" of course) could produce hundreds of those paintings each day.

That might just make me ignorant, or whatever you'd like to call me, but the thing is that i honestly do not find any sign of intelligence, by my standards, in his "work". This, in my oppinion (and maybe to justify my ignorance :sigh:) simply shows how relative, or subjective, any other type of intelligence, beside technological is to humans. Even more, many of those people simply pretend to "understand" Juan Miro paintings because otherwise they'd just be called ignorant by the some of their fellows who seem to be more capable at this.

Would we be able to recognise non technological, non-earthly intelligence? I pretty much doubt it. We have serious problems recognising it here, on earth.

Technological intelligence has one huge advantage over any other type of intelligence. It can be cunatified, it can be "broken" into simple "blocks" using a simple "tool": mathematics. And mathematics is universal. Or at least that's what I (and some other people it seems) think. We might be wrong, but so far we have yet to see any profe otherwise.

And there are even more arguments, like civilization timeline, civilization lifetime, cosmic distances and so on and so forth.

But, i'd very much like to be wrong about this. It would be sad to be alone.

As a final word and disclaimer: thank you for your patience in reading this and please excuse any mistakes - english is not my primary language.
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