Why I hope we never find signs of alien life

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8-ball
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Why I hope we never find signs of alien life

Post by 8-ball »

http://www.nickbostrom.com/extraterrestrial.pdf

An interesting article that I recommend everyone read. Shall we discuss?
What do you think the Great(est) Filter most likely is?
Is it the perfect and extremely unlikely conditions that emergence of life requires?
Is it at some extremely unlikely but vital turn of events after abiogenesis but before a life form gains sentience?
Or worst case - a very likely catastrophic event somewhere in the future but before any expansion past the home planet is done?
Or perhaps we just happen to be the first in our observable galactic neighbourhood to reach such a stage in evolution in which case any or more than one of the above could be possible?
Any other possibilities?
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Re: Why I hope we never find signs of alien life

Post by gimp »

I disagree with a lot of things this guy says. He keeps exaggerating on the fact that we haven't found any aliens yet in our observable universe, and this is kind of "duh" to me because what we can observe is (like he even points out) just the gravitational shift the planets create. Meaning we aren't seeing shit just know there are planets there. If we think there might be life in the planet right next to us wouldn't it be pretty likely there may be one in the 100 billion galaxies with all the 100 trillions of stars and some endless number of planets? I dont think any of our minds can even understand how large of numbers we are talking about here. Given how long the universe has been around it doesn't seem as improbable as this guy makes it out to be that intelligent life exists. Also, I haven't seen a lick of math in any of his arguments. One equation comes to mind called the Drake equation written a very long time ago.

N= R* x fp x ne x fl x fi x fc x L

N = the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which radio-communication might be possible (i.e. which are on our current past light cone);
and

R* = the average rate of star formation in our galaxy
fp = the fraction of those stars that have planets
ne = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
fl = the fraction of planets that could support life that actually develop life at some point
fi = the fraction of planets with life that actually go on to develop intelligent life (civilizations)
fc = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space
L = the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space

Obviously all of these variables are extremely delicate in figuring out how to put a value on them, when he did he got some very large number of civilizations that seems really quite hard to believe, but this is the best idea ive seen anybody come up with given how impossible it is to truly prove or disprove the existence of aliens.

SETI not finding anything for 50 years is a completely insignificant argument, SETI hasn't even reached out to a smidgeon of a fraction of the observable universe. This guy seems to base a lot of his arguments on the fact that we haven't found anything yet as well as the improbability of how well we have evolved. Both which although may seem like improbable things when he rambles on about all the variables needed to produce intelligent life, are not improbable again when you try to fathom how large the universe really is. It happened here, here on our earth, there is water on a planet of Jupiter even here in our own solar system! It seems highly improbable that there is not intelligent life in this universe of ours other than our own, and keep in mind maybe no civilization exists yet that is intelligent to have the technology to reach any other life forms, maybe they destroy themselves before they ever get that far.

In the end it is useless arguing about these things, we cant prove anything but just speculate on probabilities with variables of unknown values.
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Re: Why I hope we never find signs of alien life

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why should out there be anyone else
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Re: Why I hope we never find signs of alien life

Post by culinko »

do you really think we're the only one in the vast universe? life is ez, it's just carbon and other fak. i think there is plenty of life out there, even advanced life forms. space is so immense i can't even imagine teh.
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Re: Why I hope we never find signs of alien life

Post by badyl »

Of course there might be life somewhere in the universe but 95% sure we will never find out because space travel is virtually impsy.
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Re: Why I hope we never find signs of alien life

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Re: Why I hope we never find signs of alien life

Post by Madness »

I believe there are lots of intelligent civilisations in the universe. And we are probably just a worthless bunch of semi-retarded apes for them, that's why they can't be bothered contacting us.
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Re: Why I hope we never find signs of alien life

Post by Tigro »

Madness wrote:I believe there are lots of intelligent civilisations in the universe. And we are probably just a worthless bunch of semi-retarded apes for them, that's why they can't be bothered contacting us.
If there were any other civilisations, why should they be more civilised, more intelligent, more technically equipped etc.?
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Re: Why I hope we never find signs of alien life

Post by Madness »

Why not? Our civilisation is still in the cradle, other civilisations could easily be millions of years ahead of us.
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Re: Why I hope we never find signs of alien life

Post by pawq »

Madness wrote:Why not? Our civilisation is still in the cradle, other civilisations could easily be millions of years ahead of us.
That's true. But I don't think anyone is "not bothering to contact us", it doesn't make much sense to me... I think it's more likely that all of those potential civilisations are simply so freaking far away that they're not aware of the existence of any other civilisations as well, and are probably asking the same question we are...
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Re: Why I hope we never find signs of alien life

Post by Tigro »

Pawq wrote:
Madness wrote:Why not? Our civilisation is still in the cradle, other civilisations could easily be millions of years ahead of us.
That's true. But I don't think anyone is "not bothering to contact us", it doesn't make much sense to me... I think it's more likely that all of those potential civilisations are simply so freaking far away that they're not aware of the existence of any other civilisations as well, and are probably asking the same question we are...
but, we ARE actually trying to contact them, aren't we?
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Re: Why I hope we never find signs of alien life

Post by 8-ball »

I think the argument many are missing is that if an alien civilization emerged and prospered with only lets say a 1 million years (a blink of an eye in cosmic time scale) of a head start before us, we should be seeing their impact and spread on a galactic scale, at least. Meaning massive energy harvesting structures encompassing whole stars etc. This article dwells on the implications of the lack of such an observation so far. Maybe the light and/or radio waves from their area of influence just hasn't reached us yet because 1 million light years wouldn't even be much of a distance in galactic scale and they could be further away. Maybe. But we can use logic and current observations to make reasonable calculations of the likelihood that certain probabilities are true.

One reasonable derivation from this in particular makes me a bit sad tho. That speed of light might actually be a hard limit in reality.
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Re: Why I hope we never find signs of alien life

Post by Markku »

Tigro wrote:but, we ARE actually trying to contact them, aren't we?
Yes, but we have been sending radio signals out to space for only about a 100 years (and deliberate contact attempts for much less than that). Civilizations outside this tiny "radio bubble" with a diameter of 200 light years wouldn't know anything about these attempts.

To give some more perspective, the radio bubble is the blue dot here. Just a tiny speck on the fringes of our own galaxy, one among hundreds of billions of galaxies.
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Re: Why I hope we never find signs of alien life

Post by Lousku »

Self-destruction could be a big filter. We humans have more than enough weapons to wipe out all of our civilization, and I'd imagine this will stay the same; we won't get out of our own weapons' reach. If a civilization lives long enough to fare space (and its weapons keep up) there should also be time for a fuckup starting a domino effect that wipes the civilization out completely. We've been close, haven't we? I assume weapons are universal as evolution is based on competition. Then again...
then again i don't know anything
maybe easier not to think abouut alöl things thought than not things thought ... or something..=?
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Re: Why I hope we never find signs of alien life

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Lousku wrote:Self-destruction could be a big filter. We humans have more than enough weapons to wipe out all of our civilization, and I'd imagine this will stay the same; we won't get out of our own weapons' reach. If a civilization lives long enough to fare space (and its weapons keep up) there should also be time for a fuckup starting a domino effect that wipes the civilization out completely. We've been close, haven't we? I assume weapons are universal as evolution is based on competition. Then again...
nice one;) true
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