"I prefer my Earthlings rare..."
Posted on 03/23/2013 6:00:14 PM PDT by BenLurkin
“It is dangerous to assume life is common across the Universe.” These were the words of Charles Cockell at a Royal Society event on March 11 this year. While many people have freely debated the existence of extraterrestrial life, Cockell’s words carry a bit more weight than most. He happens to be the director of the U.K. Center for Astrobiology, based at the University of Edinburgh.
Bringing to mind the argument made by Fermi’s paradox — if the universe is teeming with life, where exactly is everyone? — this may seem at first to be a slightly pessimistic outlook. Evidently, however, the intention is not so much to pour cold water on the astrobiology research community, but to call into question our assumptions in the search for life elsewhere.
As Cockell went on to explain, ”People are encouraged to think that not finding signs of life is a ‘failure’ when in fact it would tell us a lot about the origins of life.”
In fact, this one single statement sums up what is potentially the biggest problem in astrobiology. We, quite simply, have no idea how life started. We don’t know where, how, when, or why molecules managed to replicate themselves into ever-more-complex forms and, eventually, living organisms.
Earth is the only example of a living planet that we have in the entire universe, and we don’t even understand it. Even now, biologists can still argue over what really constitutes a living thing, highlighted a couple of years ago by the discovery of giant viruses with genomes larger than some bacteria. And even if we did fully understand life here, there’s nothing to say it would be the same elsewhere.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.discovery.com ...
Excellent video!
The book is Rare Earth. Highly recommended reading.
The gist? More fine-tuning was needed to create conditions for life on Earth than we had realized under the Drake Equation. Much more. As science progressed in the 60's through the 90's, we began to understand that the Star Trek way of thinking about life being common was just dead wrong.
Nope, the authors stay utterly neutral about God. Not mentioned on the book; they keep it to science only. Therefore, it should be readable by anyone. One of the authors was a geologist, IIRC.
Basic premise is that microbial life may be common enough Out There, but intelligent life? Probably not.
Book essentially leads you to a mild despair, with the realization that there may not be plentiful intelligent life out in the Milky Way...we could be alone, or cohabiting with only one or two races. It's not a book about science, I realized when I finished it.
It's a horror book.
It shook me up a bit.
I'd recommend it. I'd even link it, but I forgot the hypertext sandbox training I gave myself. Have to review it...later. ;)
If you didn’t I’d know I was losing you:)
From what I hear, it is Us, The Short Greys, The Tall Greys, The Reptilians (who may or may not like to eat us) and thats it.
Thats not a lot
If the universe is infinite, then the ratio of non living mass to living mass is 1:1, because they are both infinite.
"I prefer my Earthlings rare..."
The jury’s still very much out on the question if earth has “intelligent life” in any meaningful sense.
Anyone who is aware of results in a branch of mathematics called Ramsey theory will be completely underwhelmed by arguments that purport the universe is so large and so old that there must be life elsewhere.
Ramsey theory deals precisely with the inevitability of ordered subsystems in sufficiently large arbitrary systems (thus including both genuinely random systems, and those constructed precisely to avoid the ordered subsystem specified). The reason this branch of mathematics (which seems from its subject matter to be purpose built to support such arguments) gives no comfort to such argumentation is the rate at which the size of the arbitrary system has to increase to make larger and larger specified ordered subsystems — or more and more rigidly ordered subsystems — provably inevitable. Proofs sometimes involve numbers so huge their binary expansion could not be inscribed on the observable universe with one bit per Planck volume.
If life here was not delivered and is home grown the odds of whatever created that spark could be trillions to one.
While I can not say anything for absolute certain, I would say that Earth is not the only place where life is. Life is common in the universe. Logic says so. We haven’t seen it because we don’t have the technology to, but the time for that is very close.
Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe, and oxygen is plentiful also, and so is carbon. Water is water here, so it will be the same everywhere hydrogen and oxygen exist together. Carbon and hydrogen will be hydrocarbons here and everywhere else as well. Thus, methane is found in our solar system, and it wold be absurd to think that it could not exist elsewhere. By extension, amino acids and DNA will exist everywhere in the universe that the chemical processes can occur. The ingredients exist everywhere, and all that is needed is a supportive environment.
Even with creationism, it is simple to imagine God creating a universe where the same laws apply uniformly everywhere. If it was not created then the laws will apply uniformly everywhere. The same matter exists everywhere, and the same laws apply everywhere, and the same energy exists everywhere, therefore, life exists everywhere. It is way simple.
Scientists should not be trying to prove whether life exists, it does. They should be showing us where. We may not find intelligent life right away, but organic life will be actually found very soon. They just need to look for chlorophyll.
For life to exist on any planet, the main requirements are temperature range, and mass of the planet. All the other planets in our solar system are either too cold or too hot because of distance from the sun. Size matters because it must have the right size to keep gravitational force large enough to keep air from escaping.
Our solar system is part of the milky way galaxy. There are literally millions of suns in our milky way galaxy. On top of that there are millions of galaxies in our universe. Some scientists claim there are many more universes out there.
What it boils down to is this. We have no clue on the exact number of planets out there similar to earth. We do not have telescopes strong enough to detect every sun, much less every planet, in the universe. The distances are just so vast between solar systems and galaxies. The distances are measured in light years. Light travels 186,300 miles per second, so how many miles does it travel in a year? It is an unimaginable number = 186,300 x 60 x 60 x 24 x 365! I bet your calculator can’t even display the result. That is just ONE light year.
Now consider this... the closest galaxy to earth is the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy and it is 25,000 light years from us! Even if we had a machine which can fly at the speed of light, it will require 25,000 years to reach the nearest galaxy!
My conclusion is that there are Gazillions of planets in the universe and life exists in at least 1% of those planets. But have no fear, they are just too far away to fear any invasion.
Until we can travel faster than light, or, we meet our maker, we’ll never know if we are all alone or not.
"It is dangerous to assume life is common across the Universe."s/b
"It is dangerous to assume life is uncommon across the Universe."or better yet,
"It is dangerous to claim that hypothesis formation is dangerous."The Fermi quote is just a joke, but is trotted out almost as often as Sagan's anti-intellectual diatribe, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof".
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It’s ironic that we human beings living here on earth who have developed senses such as sight, hearing, touch, and smell, and have developed concepts such as “life”, “time”, “space”, “thought”, and even “existence”, wonder if, by some remote coincidence (about equal to the percentage expressed in post #6, to the bajillionth power), there are other “beings” in the universe who actually share one or more human senses and notions in some equally remote way.
The vanity of human beings is priceless!
The book “Rare Earth” is utter nonsense.
LOL!
The fastest plane, SR-71 also known as Blackbird flew at Mach 3+ speed. Mach = speed of sound = 768 miles per hour = 0.213 miles per second. So the maximum speed achieved by a man made object is 0.65 miles per second.
You can see we are a very long way away from speed of light = 186,000 miles per second (compared to 0.65 miles per second by SR-71).
Heh heh...
LOL!
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