Posted on 01/22/2016 12:32:08 PM PST by Trumpinator
Study: Maybe we can’t find aliens because they’ve all died already
By Rachel Feltman January 22 at 12:27 PM
he hunt for extraterrestrial life is one of humanity's most exciting endeavors. The pieces are all falling into place: We're finding more and more planets outside of our own solar system, and soon the James Webb Telescope will give us unprecedented looks at these distant worlds. We've populated Mars with robots looking for signs of ancient habitability. Orbiters dive through the icy geysers of ocean-covered moons in hopes of catching some life-giving minerals. Our radio telescopes are tuned in to mysterious stars, listening for the sounds of a hustling and bustling civilization.
In spite all of that, we've yet to find a single measly microbe off-world. So where is everybody?
In a new study published in Astrobiology, researchers from the Australian National University offer up one possible explanation: Maybe all of the other life in our neighborhood has already come and gone.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Point well taken. When one looks at some ancient buildings I wonder what we lost in time. The knowledge they had of astronomy is unexplainable. What all did the ancients know.
That’s just what they want us to think.
After having read about the paradox I found it to be very interesting. There are brilliant minds out there for sure
Maybe they all smoked.
We thought we were going to get the Starship Enterprise but instead we’re getting allah akbar.
Maybe they all went socialist and finally ran out of everyone else’s money.
Yeah—I feel that way sometimes. When we were younger, we were promised “The Jetsons”. All we got was a smartphone and boatloads of Muslims.
The answer to Fermi’s paradox is that any species sufficiently advanced to have mastered Interstellar travel is sufficiently advanced to conceal themselves from primitives species they are observing, assuming they find anything worth observing to begin with.
No flame suit required.
A reading of the Bible leads to that conclusion. Although it does not directly say so, the clear inference is that there is only life on Earth - and Man alone was made in the image of God. We now have a very damaged image - since our first parent's disobedience brought sin into the world - but when Christ comes back again, the heavens and earth will be consumed with fire and God will remake the Earth wherein will dwell Righteousness.
2 Peter 3
9 The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.
10 But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.
11 Seeing then that all these things shall be dissolved, what manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy conversation and godliness,
12 Looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of God, wherein the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat?
13 Nevertheless we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.
That is very interesting-I had a science teacher in the mid 60’s who said something like that-I thought he might be onto an interesting theory, but most everyone else in class thought it was a bummer that his theory meant the Martians and other aliens had gone extinct...
“In spite all of that, we’ve yet to find a single measly microbe off-world. So where is everybody?”
This is a sort of conflation Not finding microbes on the moon or Mars (the only 2 solar bodies we have sampled) equals not finding aliens in the entire universe.
That the entire universe (of at least 200 billion galaxies each with 300 billion stars each of those with possible multiple planets) has no life because it is all dead is absurd.
Did it ever occur to these learned wise men that maybe everyone else uses some other form of communication other than the limited bit of the electromagnetic spectrum we use?
The electromagnetic spectrum is a poor way to communicate over interstellar or galactic distances. So what else is there? Who knows, but that isn’t it.
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Or hunts down and eliminates potential competitors.
boatloads of muslims WITH smartphones. :-|
our descendants learned how to travel thru time and came back and destroyed all other life forms except us
The statistical theories could all be true about how much life “should” be out there. The problem with intelligent life? If we knew where it was, communication could take hundred or thousands of years to establish a single idea or thought simply because of the time it takes light to travel. We haven't existed long enough for that to happen. Hell, we actually were "just born yesterday" in the grand scheme of things. If intelligent life on a planet exists for 1 million years, the possibility that they evolved in a solar system at the same rate we did (within a few thousand or hundred thousand years) would be very rare. Billions of years are a lot of years. We may indeed one day realize that the universe has “teemed” with life at varying levels in varying locations. But, as the article points out, relating to all of time (tens of bilions of earth years), planetary systems are rarely stable enough to go relatively undisturbed for a length of time suitable for intelligent life to evolve.
Anyway you slice it, either we are very lucky or our existence is planned, engineered and created. ;o) I don't believe in luck.
“Well, Is there life in outer space?†His reply was there mathematically had to be. Not only did it have to exist but millions of times over.
The math on this seems to have changed. This is directly addressed through the Drake equation.
Also relevant is the anthropic principle that the universe has been fine-tuned to permit our existence. The leading secular position seems to be that there must be an infinite number of universes, and that we hit the cosmic jackpot. The intelligent design position is that our good fortune is not fortune at all, but God’s great design. You are free to choose what to believe, which, I think, was the whole idea.
However when Fermi discussed his paradox there was no clear understanding of how many planets there were that could harbor intelligent life.
This is more about the Drake equation. The good news (if contacting aliens turns out well) is that we are significantly increasing some of the factors in the Drake equation. However, there are a lot of factors we still have no idea about.
There was a time during the period not too long after the Big Bang when the space between planets and even galaxies was room temperature ... after all it had to cool from exceedingly hot at the beginning to exceedingly cold now.
There could have been thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years when various carbon compounds were stable in space. Maybe that's why it seems like every meteor or asteroid we find seems to have some organic material on it.
All those organics attaching themselves to meteors and asteroids and then bombarding planets could mean lots and lots of planets where life had at least a chance to begin.
I'll wait a while before I write off the chance of alien civilizations.
Ridiculous. The only way to study that is to dig up the remains of thousands of deceased to test their DNA.
Besides, the assumption that non-Earth creatures look exactly like us is stupid.
I knwo there is an alien base in Mexico. where do you think all those illegal aliens are coming from. they are called illegal aliens not illegal Mexicans or central Americans.
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