Life on other Planets (Or: "Is there a Taco Bell on Kepler452b?")

[mammador]

actually, life on Europa would be cool. Life on Mars, no. It's our right as a species to harvest every piece of Mars and the asteroids for gold. For centuries...MILLENNIA to come, no more fuels harvested on Earth and we're in paradise.

 

[Harabec]

I doubt Mars had enough time to evolve real life, it turned itself off quite a long time ago.

The thing about finding life in other solar systems is time. We currently live NOW, which is a small, insignificant point on a large billion-year scale. Aliens could have come here millions of years ago, or could come millions or billions of years in the future. It all might be like 2 ships in the dark, unknowingly sailing next to each other but never meeting.

 

[Ventanni]

Mars likely had the building blocks for life the same way we did, but never developed it on the surface. Venus most likely did too. I fact, I would imagine that Venus, earth, and Mars all had very similar upbringings, but are the product of their environment and position from the sun. If life does exist on Mars, it's likely found in deep caves where heat can be stored. Neither Venus nor Mars have a powerful protective magnetosphere like we do, which doesn't help either.

Poor Mercury never had the chance!

 

[nixium]

I had a thought that's somewhat depressing. The universe is already 4.3 billion years old, giving plenty of opportunity for an advanced civilization to form somewhere within its confines by now. The fact that such a civilization hasn't come into contact with us implies (1) Either it never formed (2) It formed, but vastness of space makes it impossible to achieve contact.

Which means if we ever become an advanced civilization, we will likely never be able to answer this question definitively.

 

[flexy]

(1) is extremely unlikely for me.
All I need is look over some pictures of galaxies and realize numbers, vastness and distances and I realize that the idea life would NOT formed anywhere else is just entirely absurd. The only thing which could hold me to the theory that Earth is the only inhabited planet would be a BELIEF, but this belief would be entirely against common sense/logic, IMHO.

(2) is possible but then I explain the absence also with the (un-imaginable) vastness of space, rather with "mathematically, statistically unlikely" than "impossible". It's "not impossible" that microbes living on grains of sand on a Beach in California could "meet" its brothers on a grain of sand on a beach in Spain However it's of course unlikely to happen in reality.

There are some more scenarios:

(3) A civilization who is capable of interstellar travel would maybe have reason to hide its existence and would not necessarily go all out to advertise its existence. I am one of those who thinks that meeting "aliens" would not necessarily be pretty. There is a "law" here on Earth that everything that is different is also dangerous. You don't go into a jungle at night, unarmed, for example. Heck our planet is living proof for violence JUST because differences in race, religion, etc.
What could be more different than aliens? The idea that different races from other planets would meet in peace and then keep peace is naive. As naive as if I were to go into a jungle and believe "No worries, the lions/tigers whatever won't harm me". The funny thing: The lion/scorpion/snake etc. might harm you, not because of evil intentions but because it's just how nature is or that one species sees the other as indifferent, like when we eat chickens or cows or smash a mosquito.

(4) A civilization that is capable of interstellar travel (in reasonable time!) would be so beyond of what we know we might not recognize it. I am always envisioning a civilization that is millions (!) of years more advanced, life-forms who actually don't live in "physicality" any more, who mastered to shed all their dependency on "physicality" to exist somehow, well, let's say in "another dimension", in realms which are not accessible to our normal, waking brains. Such aliens would appear to us as, well, "Ghosts" or some sort of paranormal beings. (For them, having made the jump to exist as some form of energy in "another dimension" (really hate that term tho) would also mean they're not dependent on the laws of physics. They could, for example, travel whatever interstellar distances instantly and they could also "pop in and pop out" of other forms of reality, such as ours. I know it sounds "esoteric", but if we imagine a civilization just 1000s of years more advanced we get to that point sooner or later that they must seem "esoteric" to us.

 

[Oric]

Probability of other intelligent life forms in the universe = 1 (because of nearly infinite number of stars)

Probability of humankind to meet another intelligent life form during its existence in the universe = (almost) 0 (because of vast distances)

 

[sm625]

I had a thought that's somewhat depressing. The universe is already 4.3 billion years old, giving plenty of opportunity for an advanced civilization to form somewhere within its confines by now. The fact that such a civilization hasn't come into contact with us implies (1) Either it never formed (2) It formed, but vastness of space makes it impossible to achieve contact.

or (3) They have made contact, just not with you, or maybe they have, but you are not capable of comprehending it.

Most people have a very narrow view of what life is, especially when it comes to intelligent life. Just imagine what life would be like if you didnt have eyes or ears. Well, that is how we are to advanced forms of life. How exactly does an advanced form of life interface with us when when from their point of view we do not have eyes or ears? The answer is simply: very carefully. Again, imagine trying to communicate with someone who is deaf and blind. You may both be very intelligent, but you are extremely limited in your methods of communication. They would have to be built up over time, and by time I mean possibly several generations or even millenia.

You have to imagine what it would be like to live on what we would think of as a different plane or spectrum of existence. Imagine if you were an advanced form of life and all your "eyes" could see is neurons. You have traveled the galaxy searching for neural activity, and you come across a planet that contains several trillion isolated pockets of neural activity, some larger, some smaller. That is all your senses tell you. You dont see the world the way we see it, with herds of animals migrating or herds of humans gathered in cities. All you are capable of sensing and interfacing with is the neural activity. How would you communicate? Well, you might find the most advanced cluster of neurons, say an Albert Einstein, and you might begin tapping out the prime number sequence inside their neural net. What effect would this have on Albert Einstein? Who knows. You might conduct all sorts of different experiments and then wait hundreds of our years for any results. Eventually, a blind and deaf person could create a mental construct of our visual reality, but it would take a long time and a good deal of intelligence. The point is that you have to have that mental construct in order to communicate.

 

[BarkingGhostar]

Let's assume there are 1 Million identical Earths out there. Size, construct, age and life. Either we (all life forms on all 1 Million Earths) must all so far from intelligence and technological advancement to all be in the same situation (unable to be unaware of each other), or most of them have succeeded far better than us and watching us in a Truman like show for entertainment.

But we must question whether such discussions like this one have merit on the basis as it is meaningless if we do not develop the tools needed to overcome the most basic of obstacles like distance. We are still the new born babies not yet able to turn ourselves over. Wah!

 

[SMOGZINN]

or (3) They have made contact, just not with you, or maybe they have, but you are not capable of comprehending it.

Most people have a very narrow view of what life is, especially when it comes to intelligent life. Just imagine what life would be like if you didnt have eyes or ears. Well, that is how we are to advanced forms of life. How exactly does an advanced form of life interface with us when when from their point of view we do not have eyes or ears? The answer is simply: very carefully. Again, imagine trying to communicate with someone who is deaf and blind. You may both be very intelligent, but you are extremely limited in your methods of communication. They would have to be built up over time, and by time I mean possibly several generations or even millenia.

You have to imagine what it would be like to live on what we would think of as a different plane or spectrum of existence. Imagine if you were an advanced form of life and all your "eyes" could see is neurons. You have traveled the galaxy searching for neural activity, and you come across a planet that contains several trillion isolated pockets of neural activity, some larger, some smaller. That is all your senses tell you. You dont see the world the way we see it, with herds of animals migrating or herds of humans gathered in cities. All you are capable of sensing and interfacing with is the neural activity. How would you communicate? Well, you might find the most advanced cluster of neurons, say an Albert Einstein, and you might begin tapping out the prime number sequence inside their neural net. What effect would this have on Albert Einstein? Who knows. You might conduct all sorts of different experiments and then wait hundreds of our years for any results. Eventually, a blind and deaf person could create a mental construct of our visual reality, but it would take a long time and a good deal of intelligence. The point is that you have to have that mental construct in order to communicate.

I think any life form that is capable of finding us would have a strong enough understanding of the workings of our universe to be able to quickly figure out our modal of communication.
I can't naturally detect x-rays but it would not take long to figure out that a creature was using them to communicate.

A more interesting question is the one of time. How patient could a creature that lives millions of years be? It could be possible that such a creature would, on finding us and seeing how rapidly to it's perspective we are advancing, just decide to lay down and take a nap for a few hundred years to see if we advance enough to be worth communicating with.

 

[ringtail]

Reiterating previous post(s)…

Just about EVERYBODY who attends college gets at least SOME exposure to STATISTICS,
And
Law of Large numbers…literally a few BILLION STARS (a percentage having their planets) just in our LOCAL Milky Way galaxy,

And literally uncounted BILLIONS of galaxies…

Clearly, absent DATA, one has to GUESS.
The sane guess is, we are somewhere near the MEAN of a DISTRIBUTION of intelligent, self-aware life in this physical cosmos.

We have no basis for assessing what kind of distribution it is. Absent DATA, the rule of thumb is that it’s a standard normal distribution, although we already know this is ONLY A GUESS and probably inaccurate. There’s NO FACTUAL BASIS for guessing intelligent, self-aware life is distributed on a Z curve. It’s merely the best available GUESS – absent DATA. In all likelihood, many thousands of years in the future it’ll be known that intelligent, self-aware life is distributed throughout the physical cosmos according to SOME OTHER distribution…could be T, F, Poisson, or some new one we haven’t yet defined.

It'd be most reasonable to guesstimate that we're near the mean, and it'd be just simply nuts to insist that what we are is 1,000,000 standard deviations away fro the mean, i.e,, we must be unique and alone in the physical cosmos. To conclude that is unresonable. Anyway, as to intelligent self-aware life in the PHYSICAL cosmos, someday we’ll go visit our brothers on other planets. It Will come, maybe thousands of years in future (maybe 100 future incarnations for YOU).

As for life generally, well, every particle of God's being out here in this cold physical cosmos is alive, suspended between the outflowing energy of TREMENDOUSLY FORCEFUL CREATIVITY wanting to GENERATE outwardly [MALE], and the contrary inwardly attractive LOVE pulling, calling, everything back toward God [FEMALE].

All is alive but all is not self-conscious.

 

[sm625]

I think any life form that is capable of finding us would have a strong enough understanding of the workings of our universe to be able to quickly figure out our modal of communication.
I can't naturally detect x-rays but it would not take long to figure out that a creature was using them to communicate.

Crop circles could be an attempt at communication. And for all we know that attempt has succeeded. We already know that the British govt has been caught actually paying people to make crop circles. There are only two reasons for a government to hire people to do this. Either they are being paid to send messages, or they are being paid to cover up the notion that crop circles are actually being used for one or even two-way communication.