I firmly believe that there is a wealth of intelligent life through out the universe, simply because of the unbelievably huge number of star systems. As much as I hate to say it, though, I don’t think we’ll ever make contact.
I’ve seen no persuasive evidence that we’ve ever been visted by aliens, and that makes me think there is a good reason that we haven’t. That, in turn, makes me believe that we never will be visited for the same reason.
The way I see it, interstellar travel can only be possible if we find a way to approach the speed of light or preferably exceed it. That is something that either is or is not possible. Unfortunately, everything I know about modern physical theory says that it is not possible. Now it’s always possible some revolutionary discovery will prove that wrong, but in the absence of that discovery I have to defer to the science we know.
I’m not saying that there is no chance of it, but the odds seem heavily stacked against it.
Anyway, the reason I ask is that I genuinely want to hear the thoughts of the wise people of this board. Agree? Disagree? Someone please give this poor Star
Trek fan some hope.
p.s. please forgive spelling errors, I’va had a few beers and that always makes me philosophic, but my spelling pays the price
A move to IMHO doesn’t preclude people from providing factual answers, it just allows those who want to be more speculative to do so more freely than in GQ.
I’ll grant that we’re likely to never meet aliens face to face. But I’d consider any form of communication to be “contact”, and there, I think, the odds are much more realistic.
N is the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which communication might be possible;
and
R* is the average rate of star formation per year in our galaxy
fp is the fraction of those stars that have planets
ne is the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
fℓ is the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop life at some point
fi is the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop intelligent life
fc is the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space
L is the length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space.[2]
figuring out most of those numbers isn’t an exact science. However, guesses can be made. I personally think that although fp and ne can be high, fℓ, fi, and fc are in the exceedingly small number and L isn’t in the billions either, L is more like 10k at best, but we only began releasing signals and “listening” to them. The numbers won’t even be all that high if you punch in reasonable estimates. So I believe in our lifetime it’s highly unlikely.
One thing that doesn’t get mentioned a lot is that not only are civilizations likely to be spread out in space, but also in time. We’ve been emitting radio waves for more or less about a century now. That’s only about .001% of the time humans as we know them have been around, and only .0000002% of the time Earth has been around. It’s only when civilizations last on the scale of millions of years can you start talking about them realistically meeting, but so far we don’t know if we’re gonna last anywhere near that long.
I’ve seen this equation before, and it has never rang true for me. For one thing, it doesn’t take into account that, despite the fact that we have been scanning for an artificial signal for decades, we have never detected one.
Second, is a detectable signal even possible? I always hear that our radio and tv signals are being broadcast across the galaxy, but these signals weaken as a factor of distance, to the point they completely fade into the background radiation. Would we have any chance of picking up a radio signal from light years away? I don’t think so, so why would anyone else out there? Even the signal from powerful lasers would spread out to nothingness over those distances. And if you used a laser you would have to know were to point it in the first place.
just because we haven’t detected one doesn’t exactly mean there were never intelligent life. Universe and Earth are TONS more older than human civilization’s existence. We’re talking about a blip on the radar of the universe’s age, not to mention earth’s age. Who’s to say that there weren’t older more advanced civilizations on earth that we dont know of?
That’s why the equation is somewhat reliable. It doesn’t give a big number and nor should it.
let me throw this out there. it’s something I just thought of for a possibility for face to face contact, which is what I was really thinking about in the original post.
The idea is that the best chance we have lies not traveling the speed of light, but in manipulating time.
We know that time is flexible. I remember reading a while back about an expirement where scientists took two atomic clocks that were perfectly synchronized, and placed one at the top of a tall building and another at the bottom. The lesser affect of gravity on the one at the top caused a variation in the passage of time and it became unsynchronized.
Earth’s gravity is a relatively weak force. We can overcome it simply by jumping. And yet it is enough to change time to a mesurable degree. This makes me think that we may eventually find a way to use concentrated energy to manipulate time in a limited area.
It may sound far fetched, but quantum physics is make great theoreticel strides in understanding the nature of gravity based on the concept of extra demensions.With the LHC they are actually trying to detect these demensions. It seems possible that if we can grasp these concepts on which gravity is based we stand a chance of being able to manipulate time.
Anyway… what I’m suggesting is creating a pocket of slow time around a craft. That way it doesn;t matter if it takes fifty thousand years to get to another star, for the traveler it may only be minutes.
just because we haven’t detected one doesn’t exactly mean there were never intelligent life. Universe and Earth are TONS more older than human civilization’s existence. We’re talking about a blip on the radar of the universe’s age, not to mention earth’s age. Who’s to say that there weren’t older more advanced civilizations on earth that we dont know of?
That’s why the equation is somewhat reliable. It doesn’t give a big number and nor should it.
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Thanks for replying by the way, I love this message board. To reply to your post, I think the equation is fairly reasonable about simply predicting existence of civilizations, but the communication part I find shaky.
Kurzweil’s argument is that it only takes a few hundred years for a civilization to go from having radio waves to be advanced in ways we cannot possibly imagine right now, possibly (but not guaranteed) in ways where information can be transmitted faster than the speed of light via some manipulation of physics. So according to him if a civilization is intelligent, it should’ve left some sign by now. Especially if there are millions of civilizations out there, with many being advanced in ways we cannot imagine.
time is something we made up. Clocks telling time are based on something changing. Gears, number of vibrations of a cesium atom.
So the experiment of 2 different clocks synced perfectly would always unsync due to forces outside of the clock.
It’s all based on change. Time in reality doesn’t exist. Would you say time passes if everything in the universe stood still but your conscious mind can observe the universe and see nothing moving? What exactly is time? Just a simple counter that always moves forward? How is time measured correctly? We made that concept up and it’s a fundamental part of physics. Time is very complicated.
If there were more advanced civilizations on earth, they would’ve left some signs that archaeologists would’ve uncovered by now. As it stands all archaeologists uncover are small cities made of mud from 5,000 years ago. They have not found any nuclear reactors built 2 million years ago, or any signs of advanced civilization other than our own. A civilization that advanced would leave some signs behind.
As far as earth, it takes at least a 2nd generation star system to have intelligent life. The first stars were just hydrogen and helium but as they burnt up they created all the elements up to Uranium which you need for life (carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, iron, etc). So you would need a solar system that was made up of debris from an older sun that created all these heavy metals. The first few billion years of the universe could not have supported life as there would not be anything above helium to use as building blocks.
However, I find that extremely optimistic for the fate of intelligence. It takes at least a 2nd generation sun to have the possibility for life. Our sun is either a 2nd or 3rd generation sun (meaning it is made up of debris from 1-2 previous generations of stars that eventually died off and left their raw materials to reform into new suns), and our universe is only 16 billion years old. I believe stars are expecte to keep existing for 10^14 years (100 trillion years).
So think about that. It takes at minimum a 2nd generation star to create life, and stars are expected to exist for about 100 trillion years (about 10,000 generations of stars).
Our solar system has a 2nd or 3rd generation star in it. That means that if you consider the timeline of the universe where it is possible for life to exist (from 5 billion years after the big bang up until 100 trillion years) intelligent life already arose after 16 billion years. The universe is barely out of the starting gate and we already have intelligent life capable of understanding astrophysics. So if the period which the universe is capable of supporting life is 100 years, and intelligent life could not being until January 3rd of the first year, we already ahve intelligent life in this universe despite it currently being about 3am on January 6th of the first year.
see that’s where you are wrong. You assume that there should be evidence that a civilization existed before us. Who’s to say they weren’t super smart enough to leave all evidence of themselves gone before they left. Or their remains are buried under the sea to which we dont have uber access to. You assume that they were like us, leaving garbage sprawled around and had the same morals, emotions and ways of thinking. It’s highly unlikely yes, but you can’t rule something out just because you don’t think it can possibly happen. It’s the same thing as saying we’re here today because one amino acid decided to become a cell and reproduce and make a shit ton of organisms that live and lived on the earth today. If you can believe that theory then anything should be possible.
If you want to believe that a civilization that is capable of high levels of technology would not leave any signs behind, then feel free. As it stands, in 2009 we have a global civilization. Some of the metal objects we have created will still be recognisable in tens of millions of years. Mt Rushmore might be distinguishable 7 million years from now.
However, why would they hide every piece of evidence? Why would this previous civilization go over every square inch of the earth and hide every piece of evidence showing they were here?
Did this civilization replace all the coal, natural gas, iron, nickel, zinc and oil they probably extracted from the ground? Why do we not see signs of large scale mining (which is necessary to sustain a civilization)?
We have found hand axes that homo sapiens from tens of thousands of years ago were using. Why have we not found one metal object from a previous civilization that existed millions of years ago? I have dozens (probably over 100) of metal objects in my possession. They will be recognizable in some form for millions of years.
As far as the OP goes; if humanity doesn’t manage to destroy itself in the relatively near term, I expect we or our descendents or our creations eventually will. Once civilization establishes itself in a self sustaining fashion is space and begins spreading, it will be nearly indestructible. And will only grow more so over time. So our descendents will have time on their side.
Indeed, this is a fantastic book…if one is stuck in the loo without toliet paper. Otherwise, Kurzweil’s arguments are unsubstantiated prognostication, and the history of futurism has demonstrated that nearly every detail prediction that is made is not just wrong, but badly wrong. Even near misses, like H.G. Wells prediction of the facsimile machine, or Vannevar Bush’s memex (a hypertext-like system using microfiche) missed on the significant technologies required for implementation.
If there is other intelligent life within communication distance, it may simply be that they have no more desire to talk to us than we would to dialogue with an ant colony.