Posted on 12/09/2020 10:17:59 AM PST by Red Badger
>> red dwarf Proxima Centauri was caught belching out a colossal flare 10 times more powerful than the largest eruptions<<
Rosarita Refries and beer makes one inhospitable to life.
That wasn’t Proxima Centauri belching out a colossal flare, it was Jerry Nadler!!
Wow, the Democrat Party Cabal (including "Science!") continues becoming progressively more Gloom-and-Doom as this 2020 Presidential (Democrat-perpetrated) election-fraud year drags on ...
/s
I had such high hopes. I hate it when they get dashed against the rocks like that. What a miserable Christmas this is going to be with my dampened hopes.
Rosarita Refries.......I had those for lunch!...................
Habitable for us, maybe. Who’s to say other species need oxygen and water?
There is no life out there.
When I played with the numbers years past I got 0.000000000000852687% chance that life is at any given star (based on the Drake equation).
Not considering the ability to travel or communicate over such distances (makes it all sort of a moot point), just based on the probability of life, when you look at a spec in the sky at night and wonder, accept that there is only a 0.000000000000852687% chance that life is there.
Even if we offset that with the vast size of our galaxy (assume 200,000,000,000 stars), we are still just at a .l7% probability for the entire Milky Way. That’s .17%, as in 99.83% chance the answer is no.
Most of space is cold, a void, dark, and if you are near a star, or on a rock near it, it’s likely a very inhospitable place.
"On October 16, 1997, the United States is gearing up to colonize space. The Jupiter 2, a futuristic saucer-shaped spacecraft, stands on its launch pad undergoing final preparations.
Its mission is to take a single family on a five-and-a-half-year journey to an Earthlike planet orbiting the star Alpha Centauri".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_in_Space#Overview
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Hope the little green men there read this and hop in their saucers to move to another solar system.
Your math is correct as far as it goes, but the Milky Way is not the entire universe. If we consider your probability to be accurate and look at 1,000 galaxies of similar size as the Milky Way, the probability of no life drops to about 18%.
Of course any calculation based on the Drake equation is suspect. The equation is a product of multiple probabilities, not all of which are well-known. IIRC there is at least one that could be anywhere between zero and one, meaning you can obtain pretty much any value you want from the equation. For example we have no clue what fraction of planets that develop life will develop intelligence, what fraction of intelligent species will develop communication means that we can detect, or even the fraction of planets with suitable conditions that will actually develop life. The value of the Drake equation is the consideration of the things that must happen for us to make contact, not in any actual calculation of the likelihood of that contact actually happening.
Somebody has to be ‘first’.............. why not US?................
Dwarf stars have a reputation for way more intense flare activity—not new.
LOL
"We need to talk about your flare."
I agree, but even then, we’re still at 82% “no” and not past the issue of distance (i.e. travel and/or communication).
While I like good scifi (very little out there), I tend to believe that time is linear and C is absolute.
Like you, I don’t believe we’re going to make contact. However, I think I failed to clearly word my previous post. If we accept the probability you gave, then in 1000 Milky Way sized galaxies, the probability of 82% is the probability that there IS life, not the probability that there isn’t.
Personally I do think it’s likely that there is life somewhere out there. The universe is huge, and there are many opportunities for it to have developed. But that very fact of the size of the uniois why we will likely never make contact. Where do we look? It would be extremely fortuitous to pick out the right planet to point our radio telescope at. There’s also the added issue of temporal displacement — they might have been out there but quit broadcasting thousands or millions of years before we were capable of listening.
Even if they’re out there, and they’re broadcasting now, they may be so far away that we can’t distinguish the signal from background noise. We are unintentionally sending out weak signals; one would think that’s the type of signal we’re looking for. If it’s a planet that’s millions of light years away, we’d probably not detect it. The case against this is that another intelligence might intentionally broadcast a strong signal. But why would they, and why would they direct it toward us? We are listening; we’re not sending. That’s in part because it is technically easier that way, but I’d say it’s also a matter of getting results — we know right away if we listen and detect a signal; it might be millions or billions of years if we send a signal and await a reply. Other intelligences might well think likewise.
I have no real scientific basis to think this way; it’s just a personal opinion. Like I said, we really have no idea how improbable it is that life will arise. I’m a hard-headed realist like you; c is the speed limit — even if we did make contact , there’d be essentially no chance we’d ever physically meet them. Sci-fi is fun and enjoyable, but I’m like you — meeting aliens is not realistic.
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