On the hunt for aliens...*UPDATED* Amazing news!!!

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Posted: Tue May 15, 2007 6:22 am

While I am absolutely convinced there is life Out There I'm not sure why we assume 'they' are so much more advanced than we are. They could be little more than pond life. And if they are capable of travelling across the universe to find us, why can they only find out about our species by abducting a few rednecks and shoving a probe up their arses? I think even our medical technology is more sophisticated than that.

Posted: Tue May 15, 2007 6:34 am

There are quite a few people who would love to be that redneck. I think that if ET came to visit they would take one look at what we watch on TV and just think 'bugger it'.

Posted: Tue May 15, 2007 6:43 am

BOINC on my linux system runs just fine. I average 134 credits/day.

Also, the BOINC app still has graphics, and they're better than the old ones. The new one is more 3D. (lemme see if I can figure out how to put a small image here...)

Baiting Guru Joined: 04 Jan 2006 Posts: 3193

Gnasher wrote:

I'm not sure why we assume 'they' are so much more advanced than we are.

There has been life on this planet for something like three billion years. The earliest hominid fossil is around two million years old. We have been using radio waves for around 100 years. The Sun is due to eat the Earth in five billion years time, during which time we may have colonised other solar systems, unless we kill ourselves before then.

Assuming our fate is tied to that of the Earth and our case is average, the chances of any radio-aware species being less advanced than us is fifty million to one against. The chances of intelligent life being less advanced than us is a few hundred to one against, and the chances of any life being less advanced than us is less than evens.

With current technology, we can only detect radio-aware ETs. It therefore stands to reason that the vast majority of them will be more advanced than us.

Posted: Tue May 15, 2007 1:51 pm

SETI@home is vital to the security of the world. We need to know where the aliens are from, so that when they invade, we know what direction to launch the nukes in. They'd only take a few million years to reach the alien's home system, and then they'd crash into the system's star, causing it to burn slightly brighter for a few milliseconds.

We'll win this intergalactic war!

Posted: Tue May 15, 2007 3:42 pm

Quote:

This email may come to you as a surprise. My father, Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz was killed in a space crash in the Sagbama Nebula. Before he died, he told me he had lodged a trunkbox containing &20,000,000 [TWENTY MILLION SPACE CREDITS] with a security company on Rigel 5.....

Posted: Tue May 15, 2007 4:14 pm

thud419 wrote:

... radio-aware ETs ...

Even that phrase sets huge prerequisites. Who says any ET uses radio for communication? Maybe some see in radio wave length, or speak in it.

What we call "visible light" is visible to *us*, i.e. it is the tiny itsy bitsy part of the light spectrum that our (human) visual senses can see. Can a bat see in "visible" light? Can ET? What part of physics does ET use and for what?

The possible fallacy of the very assuption that ET uses radio for communication, aware or not, cuts down the probabilities quoted above by a great deal.

Food for thought: with present technology, is it possible to shoot a rocket from the Earth into the Sun? Answer: no. Before we think about ET, we should think about why we can't do something as "simple" as that.

Posted: Tue May 15, 2007 4:43 pm

By some estimates at least 10 billion different species have lived on this earth.

And as far as anyone knows, only one has managed to meet our current definition of intelligent.

I don�t believe that all life �tries� to evolve to be intelligent like us. In fact, I suspect that our intelligence will likely be the root of our demise. If that is true and typical, intelligence may get routinely selected out.

If longevity defines success, the most successful species on earth to date couldn�t think their way out of a paper bag.

Posted: Tue May 15, 2007 9:35 pm

@ thud - But if we assume that the universe is constantly expanding and evolving then it follows that whatever lifeforms out there are doing likewise. The Earth wasn't always capable of sustaining life. Doubtless there are other planets that have only relatively recently been able to do likewise. Ditto much older planets than ours whose lifeforms are indeed more 'advanced' if we use human criteria to define 'intelligence' etc.

And if aliens have been visiting us for thousands of years what, exactly, do they WANT? Surely they have probed/studied us enough by now to know we're not worth bothering with. Sure, they built a few pyramids a few thousand years ago but what have they done since then eh? Very Happy

[cue the Life of Brian "what have the Romans ever done for us" scene]

I'm far more intrigued to know why mankind went all out to get men on the moon and succeeded with comparatively primitive technology compared to what's available today and yet nobody has been back for almost 40 years. I know it was partly a US/USSR pissing contest to see who could do it first, but it seems odd that the whole thing just fizzled out. Maybe there really IS something on the dark side of the moon.

Baiting Guru Joined: 04 Jan 2006 Posts: 3193

@KD, radio is too useful to be ignored. I believe that any ET species at about our level of technology would use it. On the other hand if we discover some totally different technology in a hundred years or so that makes radio obsolete, then radio use would be rare. There are other scenarios too, like luckey's, or intelligence may take such a different track that they never discover radio, or have no inclination to communicate. But we don't know that, and if we never did anything because we could imagine something that would stop us, we would never do anything.

Rocket-sun; why not? I would have thought it only required a delta-V of 18 miles per second to kill the orbital velocity. As Dick Seaton used to say, "cut the rope and let the old bucket drop." If you mean that the solar wind pushes it back, then there must be a point where the wind exactly matches gravity, and anything I can stand on is a surface. I'm not worried; I can't lick my elbow either.

@luckey, absolutely correct. Intelligence seems at the moment to be an evolutionary trump card, but we have not been around long enough to know if that will hold in the long term. Even the dinosaurs were around ten times longer than we have been so far. Woodlice and silverfish have both of us beat, and there are still cyanocites around.

But the Universe would be a boring place to be if there was nobody to talk to, and it's a damning indictment on the human condition if intelligence is not a long term survival trait.

@Gnasher, precisely my point. There are stars out there in every stage of their life cycle, and therefore we assume that there are planets of every age - old stars have old planets. Generalising in a highly unscientific manner from the Earth to all the other planets, we assume that life takes about the same length of time to evolve, give or take a billion years or two. So there would be life in every stage of its evolution.

In the first few billion years of life evolving it would not be able to communicate with us. After that until the planet is destroyed is another few billion years. So if we pick a random species that is capable of communicating with us, the chances are that it will have been capable of doing so for a considerable number of hundreds of millions of years. Since we have only been capable of communication for 100 years, any race we are likely to contact is going to be more advanced than us.

We can say that any race we could contact by radio would be almost certainly several million years more advanced than we are, simply because if they were insignificantly less advanced than us they could not communicate, and there is potential for them to be several billion years older than us.

Man went to the moon too early, it was a noble effort, but apart from that and scientific curiosity it achieved nothing. There is no point in going back to the moon before we can set up a long term base there. And that would be very, very useful.

Posted: Wed May 16, 2007 10:55 am

Forty years ago when some died in an accident, everyone just shovelled the mess up, held a memorial and got on with the job. Now minor accidents can and do cause major delays. The space agencies have gotten a lot more safety concious. Compare the Apollo accident that roasted three astronauts alive with the two shuttle tragedies. The Apollo missions just carried on, the Shuttles were grounded for some time.

Posted: Wed May 16, 2007 12:45 pm

@thud419:

Earth's angular momentum. It's actually easier to shoot something out of the solar system entirely than to shoot it into the Sun (from Earth).

Good read here: http://www.bautforum.com/showthread.php?t=54069

I'm an ignoramus on all the physics etc., but what I see (and why I mentioned the Sun bit) is that we tend to make assumptions based on our daily environment and experience, only to find out that, in real�ty, everything's totally different, even the exact opposite from what we expected.

I think our assumptions about ET are no exception.

Posted: Wed May 16, 2007 1:55 pm

^^ wrote:

we tend to make assumptions based on our daily environment and experience, only to find out that, in real�ty, everything's totally different, even the exact opposite from what we expected.

Yes. Consider that our understanding of the physical universe is essentially limited to atoms, their constructs, and their composition. Many physicists now believe that atoms only make up a measly 4% of the mass of the universe. The remaining 96% has been labeled dark energy and dark matter. Neither of which have been observed.

A good article on this can be found HERE

We don�t even know what we don�t know.

Baiting Guru Joined: 04 Jan 2006 Posts: 3193

An ion motor would get you to the Sun.

Bohr wrote:

Those who are not shocked by quantum mechanics have not understood it.

However, so far, there is no indication that something better for communication than radio exists. IMHO, it is far more likely that our cultures are so different that we have nothing to talk about, or that they don't see the point in talking to us.

We don't know how unlikely it is that we may receive a signal, so we may as well try. The only way to know is either to try, or to survey all 100,000,000,000 stars in the Galaxy in person, and that will take a while. No matter how unlikely it is that SETI returns a positive result, we may just get lucky.

Posted: Wed May 16, 2007 4:01 pm

I think it's worth a shot. But I can't help but wonder how lucky the Aztecs were to have encountered an advanced civilization.

Posted: Wed May 16, 2007 10:24 pm

AMAZING UPDATE!!!

We've still not found anything.

Posted: Wed May 16, 2007 10:35 pm

And in this time, my computer has probably just finished folding the protein which will result in a cure for cancer.... (p3042_supervillin-03)

Posted: Wed May 16, 2007 10:45 pm

Quote:

@KD, radio is too useful to be ignored. I believe that any ET species at about our level of technology would use it. On the other hand if we discover some totally different technology in a hundred years or so that makes radio obsolete, then radio use would be rare. There are other scenarios too, like luckey's, or intelligence may take such a different track that they never discover radio, or have no inclination to communicate. But we don't know that, and if we never did anything because we could imagine something that would stop us, we would never do anything.

Which belies the presumption that another life form, even if it meets our criteria for intelligence, would be sufficiently similar to us so as to render radio a viable means of communicaiton for it to use or comprehend. This would be entirely dependent on that species' sensory and cognitiva aparatus which might be wildly different form our own. A concept such as radio communication might be meaningless to another species in much the same way a bat or dolphin's echo location is unitlellgible to us -- and these are species to which we are (relatively) closely related.

Posted: Wed May 16, 2007 10:50 pm

"It's life Jim, but not as we know it"

Posted: Thu May 17, 2007 12:24 am

^^^^ And ye cannot change the laws of physics. The electromagnetic spectrum [of which radio is just a small part] is a constant, and independent of the evolution of life. There's enough variation here on earth in the spectra used for communication to make any speculation about the preferences of possible extra-terrestrial life-forms meaningless. Radio seems like a great communication medium to us, and it may well be used elsewhere in the universe, but we have no basis for assuming it would be more popular than any other type of radiation.
But of course, it does absolutely no harm to try. Good luck with it, and imagine if you did get lucky.

Posted: Thu May 17, 2007 2:04 am

^^No harm in trying? Try this on...

"Rockaway, have you been talking to the aliens with the computer again? There are pods all over the house and the dog has a human head."

Wink

Posted: Thu May 17, 2007 2:39 am

Well, you can never be too careful I suppose. It wouldn't hurt to wear some protective gear if you're going to try and communicate with aliens. Like the guy in Gnasher's avatar for example. I've got no intention of trying myself, but I await the next update with great anticipation.....

Posted: Thu May 17, 2007 4:30 am

rockaway wrote:

It wouldn't hurt to wear some protective gear if you're going to try and communicate with aliens. Like the guy in Gnasher's avatar for example....

Whaddaya mean? That's ME !!!! Very Happy

Posted: Thu May 17, 2007 4:43 am

WOW .. you guys are something.

I think that that SETI assumes that life will necessarily have the same structure as ours - oxygen breathing, water dependant protein based existence. Because that is the only form of life we know? And any such life form would be similar to us in every way - right down to the use of radio waves.

However, if those little green men were totally different from us - not DNA based, not communicating using sound waves .... ? Borrowing an idea from Isaac Asimov (I think the story was Victory Unintentional), if they had the "mass sensing organ" instead of our light sensing one, what then ... ? Would they still use radio waves?

Perhaps not.

And anyway I thought this whole question was answered ... hasn't ANYONE seen Independence Day?

Posted: Thu May 17, 2007 4:50 am

Quote:

Whaddaya mean? That's ME !!!!

Sorry mate. I didn't know that. Not taking any chances there are you. Laughing

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