Are we alone?

aeon magazine ^ | 6/25/13 | Caleb Scharf

[onedoug]

I think within a few thousand light years, yes, we’re very alone. But God’s out there with the same chemistry and physics as here. So, maybe.

[jboot]

From a purely scientific perspective, it is not yet possible to say if we are alone or not. Statistically it is very likely that we are not, but there is not yet any evidence to support the statistics.

That said, alone is actually good. There is no guarantee that other intelligent beings would be friendly or benign. The could just as easily be lovers of conflict, implacable xenophobes or worse. The residue of civilization can be deadly. Intelligent supermachines like Saberhagen's Berserkers are not impossible, but unintelligent but prolific self-replicating machines would be just as problematic. But even the friendliest extraterrestrial neighbors would surely cause technological, cultural and religious shockwaves that would change human civilization forever.

I can live with alone.

[Alex Murphy]

I have had many occasions to remember it in adulthood because it speaks to one of the most fascinating, challenging and frustrating questions that astrobiologists such as myself confront every day in our quest to find life elsewhere in the universe. There is a commonality between the puzzle of a lonesome bulb in a mass of soil and the puzzle of whether or not we’re alone in the cosmos. Until quite recently we knew of only one life-harbouring planet in a single planetary system — adrift within a universe of more than a billion trillion stars. Our home was that single speck, the lone bulb in a great cosmic garden, and it raised essentially the same question: is this all? Or are there more?

Question: Why is Carl Sagan so lonely? (pick one)

    (a) Sagan is lonely because, as a true devotee of science, a noble and reliable method of attaining knowledge, he feels increasingly isolated in a world in which, as Bronowski has said, there is a failure of nerve and men seem willing to undertake anything other than the rigors of science and believe anything at all: in Velikovski, von Daniken, even in Mr. and Mrs. Barney Hill, who reported being captured and taken aboard a spaceship in Vermont.
     (b) Sagan is lonely because, after great expectations, he has not discovered ETIs in the Cosmos, because chimpanzees don't talk, dolphins don't talk, humpback whales sing only to other humpback whales, and he has heard nothing but random noise from the Cosmos, and because Vikings 1 and 2 failed to discover evidence of even the most rudimentary organic life in the soil of Mars.
     (c) Sagan is lonely because, once everything in the Cosmos, including man, is reduced to the sphere of immanence, matter in interaction, there is no one left to talk to except other transcending intelligences from other worlds.

-- from Walker Percy's Lost In The Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book

[Northern Yankee]

I think within a few thousand light years, yes, we’re very alone. But God’s out there with the same chemistry and physics as here. So, maybe.

Does that mean you might have to change your Freeper name to twodougs? ; )

Happy Landings!

[blueunicorn6]

We were going to be the generation that went to the stars. We can’t even send people to the moon. I doubt if we will be able to keep sending people to the space station. We laugh at the story of The Tower Of Babel, yet, we live it every day. Some of us have hearts that long to explore the universe, but, while we can escape the earth’s gravity, we cannot escape the people on earth with all of their fears and needs and jealousies. The realities of earth destroy the dreams of space. And it isn’t overpopulation or pollution or war.....it’s our smallness that holds us back.

[Idaho_Cowboy]

The could just as easily be lovers of conflict, implacable xenophobes or worse.

---

...but they would have so much in common with earth.

[LibWhacker]

If interstellar space travel is possible, I think in the end we may find that the biggest threat to us is other humans — or, rather, former humans. Over cosmic timescales, humanity will move out among the stars and isolated populations of humans may evolve into, or engineer themselves to be something different and, deliberately or not, utterly incompatible with the rest of us.

In fact, evolution and engineering needn’t even be brought into it; we don’t like the Russians, Germans don’t like the French, China doesn’t like Japan, and Arabs hate everyone. And we are all still human beings. The far-distant future could be very bleak, even if the only life in the universe right now is here on Earth.

[jboot]

but they would have so much in common with earth.

True, like us but with near-godlike technology. That's a bad mix...

[Aqua225]

But that smallness is what we have to work with.

I think in the end, I think it will be much like the idea that Ian Banks forwards in his Culture novels: we end up designing vast artificial intelligences that are friendly and benign to humanity and get us to the stars. It is not clear to me that any committee or super-human-brain could do it. A system so smart it can navigate our regulatory structures like walking through a pasture is for us, and yet can comprehend the extreme physics required to get us out there safely and cheaply.

Yes, we can do small very focused missions out, but we really need to solve the energy problems of getting into space. Right now, we sit ourselves on piles of explosives and basically control explode ourselves into space. It will never make for a mass transit system. Even the access means of Virgin Galactic is not incredibly efficient, just leaps and bounds above how we do it commercially now.

Still very dangerous and very fuel intensive.

There has to be a better way...

[Democrat_media]

with all the radio telescopes and tech we have not heard or seen a single piece of communication or evidence of Aliens .not a peep. So we are alone. face it.

[reed13k]

statistically you cannot prove a negative, though you can prove a low probability. To prove a negative you must look at all samples.

If you do not look at 100% of the group then there is always a potential that you just haven’t included the few positives that exist in your sample size.

So while observation of life one time proves the positive, we would need to look at every star and every planet to prove the negative and that requires an order of magnitude that is likely unachievable.

[jboot]

I tend to agree. Human nature does not change. We are as we always have been and always will be.

A complicating factor is the creation of non-human intelligent entities by humans. These counld take virtually any form from useful servitors to berserk destroyers. This behavior is already taking place and can only become more sophisticated. There is a real danger that humans will "foul the nest" with destructive artificial entities before we can "escape" into space. The grey goo scenario isn't really that far-fetched.

[ImaGraftedBranch]

“...,Imagine, for a moment, an alternative reality....”

That’s what it comes down to. For crying out loud...the lengths people go to in order to escape the concept of our creator. To escape the idea of being held accountable.

I was raised religious, then became too smart (for my own good) to believe in a God, and considered those that did as weak.

Then I learned about quantum physics, and realized that wave/particle duality and the uncertainty principle was God’s way of saying “you may know this much, but NEVER more than that.”

Sealed it for me. There’s just no getting around it.
Now, with the grace of God, I know better, and my hubris has been humbled.

Can I get an Amen?

:)

[fella]

We are the seed of life, one of the first tasks our Creator has given us is to “Go forth and multiply”. Unfortunately the dark one has lead us astray and we have wasted much time and effort in silly games of ambition instead of doing our work.

[jboot]

Unlike many, I see no conflict between the existance of God and the possible existance of non-human intelligent life. Why some find the two mutually exclusive is beyond me.

[albionin]

Here is what we know so far. Life is possible in the universe. Intelligent life is possible in the universe. Processes are universal and certain, outcomes of those processes are not. Natural law operates the same throughout the universe as far as we know. Other natural phenomenon such as comets, planets, galaxies, black holes, gas clouds and stars are universally present. We know that simple organic compounds exist in vast quantities in space. Scientist have proven that these compounds can spontaneously form more complex molecules such as amino acids and even some precursors to DNA. Science has more recently shown that self replicating molecules can form spontaneously from these simpler building blocks including self replicating RNA. Science has also shown that lipid compounds can form spontaneous in hot springs and spontaneously form miscelles, or microscopic spheres. It is reasonable to assume that these miscelles would trap some of these self replicating molecules and the catalyst molecules they require inside. So now you have a simple cell membrane with self replicating RNA inside which utilizes molecules around it to make more of the self replicating molecules. Interestingly, the scientists found that these self replicating molecules were subject to evolution, with the ones that most readily self replicate predominating over time and that these molecules were subject to copying errors producing variation. So We don’t have any evidence that life exists elsewhere in the universe but we can see now some of the ways in which it could arise given the right conditions.

[jboot]

There has to be a better way

Clarke's Space Elevator from "The Fountains of Paradise" is an elegant solution to the problem of getting into orbit. The advent of nanomaterials has made Clarke's vision seem far less preposterous. But the biggest hurdle to creating a space elevator is not materials science but ecomnomics and politics. Such a machine would be astronomically expensive to build and maintain, and the issue of who controls it would be non-trivial. It is not as if you could move it once constructed, and it is unlikely that we could ever afford to build more than one of them. The world will need a more powerful economic system and a more stable political climate before any space elevators can be built.

[MHGinTN]

With mastery of electro-gravitics the elevator concept is obsolete.

[jboot]

With mastery of electro-gravitics the elevator concept is obsolete.

Perhaps, if electro-gravitics turns out to be more than Art Bell twaddle. But the elevator is built on known physics and materials and is attainable in a timeframe of several decades or at most a century. Electrogravitics-even if real-are a long, long way from being understood or put to practical application.