Posted on 11/20/2013 9:33:30 AM PST by Dysart
“If only three ants lived on planet earth, one in the Americas, one in Japan, and one in Africa, they would each be effectively alone.”
Please read post 56 on the fermi paradox. In your example, if each ant lives for 50 million years, it would have plenty of time to walk every inch of the globe and make contact with the other two ants.
How about I give you 40 billion to one odds that neither Jacksonville or the Redskins will win the Super bowl.
I think the Planet Of Cow Anuses has found us.
Life is easier to do than you know.
In a methane atmosphere, you can add a little lightning and hydrocarbons will rain out of the sky.
These hydrocarbons will float on the surface of water.
Add some splashing due to wave action and you get spheriods with water on the inside of a hydrocarbon shell.
Do this in a tide pool and you get a little chemistry experiment going.
So how many tide pools are there ? I don’t know but maybe trillions.
How many willing sailors would Columbus have had if they all knew for certain that they were going to die on the first day of the journey?
Presuming that our science fiction writers are wrong, and there is no magical propulsion system in our future, the tyranny of time is going to prevent colonization by sentient beings, who do not desire to die for the collective.
A high estimate of Earth-like planet systems is 20%, however, Mars and Venus are both Earth-like planets, so that 20% doesn't mean a lot. 25 stars are within 12 light years of Earth, so best case would be that 1 of them has a habitable planet.
System to system movement would likely only occur as the result of a Diaspora, fleeing a failing star. The colonizers would then stop as soon as they reached a final destination. Should propulsion to 50%+ of C or suspended animation be possible, then all of a sudden colonization would be feasible, but the question would remain, "to what end?". The most likely answer would more resemble the Pilgrims than Magellan. Even if we find and confirm a definitive alien Earth, say 16 light years away, what would we do? Send a probe, that might return information in ~75,000 years? The final answer might just be that things are too far apart for biological beings to colonize, not because they can't, but because they won't.
Mathematical odds and reality aren't the same thing. If it were, a monkey would have typed out at least a single paragraph of William Shakespeare by now.
Also, there is no mathematical proof that life began spontaneously on this planet, so extrapolating that equation is meaningless.
I asked the question early on,
if there “has to be” life in another location,
where did that life come from.
Of course, they avoid “spontaneous generation” like the plague, so won’t answer.
Seriously? Why don't you stomp your foot too, before you take your ball and go home.
Assuming that they aren't just mistaken observations and can actually be put to any real application, action at a distance and quantum entanglement are at best going to allow you to communicate over long distances, but you are still going to have to get your entangled atoms there. Back to square one.
It sounds like you just came out of your mom's basement and discovered that Star Trek wasn't a documentary.
I never stated that faster travel would never be possible. I stated that if its not possible, then we are effectively alone in the universe. I like to call that math.
LOL ... nice try.
I mostly agree, but we may find evidence of far away (and thereby long ago) civilizations in their transmissions or even by analyzing the atmospheres of their planets. And I don't really know the ultimate limit on our telescope abilities, but we might see some cool stuff within our galaxy.
And if you do the mathematical probability calculations of all that stuff happening (as Coppedge & others did), over the 15B year life of the universe, with ALL of the atoms of the earth available for reaction at any moment, it will happen in 10^139 years, which is HUNDREDS of orders of magnitude beyond impossible. Life is harder than you know.
Interesting graph.
UFO technology is just post WWII boundary layer control aircraft, a secret weapon.
Anything other meaningless assertions that you'd like to further tie your disintegrating credibility to?
Again, nice try. Keep trying to put words on my keyboard, showing your desperate state. If I keep responding will you become totally irrational, or do you have a stopping point?
In exactly which post did I exclude any possibilities?
Clearly you do not understand English, but I'm not rushing to presume that there must be grammatically powered warp engines awaiting in mankind's future.
I have stated that if there is no way to move large masses at large fractions of C, then we aren't likely to colonize the galaxy. You have insinuated that if we cannot prove that such technology will never exist, then we must presume it likely will. My statement is logic, your statement is nonsensical wishful thinking.
So again, if new methods of increasing our speed by several magnitudes does not exist, then we are effectively alone in the universe. Applied mathematics.
I have math, facts, and logic supporting a definitive statement.
You have wishful thinking...along with what is apparently a problem with admitting when you are wrong.
“How many willing sailors would Columbus have had if they all knew for certain that they were going to die on the first day of the journey?”
Actually, I believe about 50,000 people have signed up to be the first people to colonize mars and this is a one way trip for everyone involved.
This makes Mars cheaper by about 90% because you don’t need fuel and supplies to get back and you don’t need the fuel to carry the fuel and supplies to get back.
relativity does not really kick in until about 90% of C.
so you can still go really fast.
the galaxy is only a few hundred thousand light years wide.
so we could colonize the galaxy in a few hundred million years easily without exotic tech
the fact that no one else has done this is the premise behind the fermi paradox.
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