ET Visitors: Scientists See High Likelihood

Space.com ^ | 14 January 2005 | Leonard David

[Sam Cree]

"It took conscious man on Earth 3,000 years to achieve that level of technology -- control of nature."

IMO, "alter" or "use" are more accurate descriptions of what we do to nature...I don't think we begin to actually control it, except in relatively minor ways.

[KevinDavis]

Here is my take on the whole UFO thing:

1. I don't believe the nut jobs who had alien probes up thier you know what or the Roswell incident. Who know what happend.
2. After seeing pictures from the soon to be departed hubble, there is no way in heck that we are alone in this universe or in this galaxy.
3. It seems to me that people who think we are alone are the flat earthers of the 15th century.
4. We will make contact with other lifeforms. When I don't know.
5. As for them not contacting us.. Quite frankly with abunch islam facist and other vermin, it is safe to say they would probaly want to avoid us period.
That is my take..

[onedoug]

Well, you can dance about what's unknown. I said "most likely" twice. Sheesh!

[eno_]

Truly intelligent beings would strive to live as simply as possible by controlling their population growth such that their planet's resources would be sufficient without needing to complicate their lives with any but the simplest technology.

Don't get out of the cave much, do you?

The post-oil world will have few limits other than capital allocation on how much energy can be applied to a task. That means that creating a livable environment on other planets will become possible the moment we can apply enough capital to getting a large-enough power source on another planet.

The limits to human population growth are somewhere out at the limits of how many humans could be flung out beyond the solar system.

Our "environment" is anything our brains can envision and our machines can manipulate.

[Kevin OMalley]

Can you please explain #3?

"It seems to me that people who think we are alone are the flat earthers of the 15th century."

Weren't most people in the 15th century flat earthers? They happened to be wrong, but they were in the majority. Flat earthers didn't become a minority until they were presented with some rather compelling evidence (Ferdinand Magellan comes to mind). Don't most people today think that we're not alone?

[Frank_Discussion]

'Morn Kevin,

1. "I don't believe the nut jobs who had alien probes up thier you know what or the Roswell incident. Who know what happend."

What don't you believe about the Roswell incident? There was an event there, all interested and/or involved parties know this. And the USAF has offered up a number of explanations over the years, most recently their claim that the beings reported by a large number of witnesses where actually atmospheric test dummies. Of course, these test apparati where not in use until the 1950's... not July 1947. I truly do not know what happened in Roswell, but it certainly do know that the story has not been truthfully presented to those who make inquiries.

2. "After seeing pictures from the soon to be departed hubble, there is no way in heck that we are alone in this universe or in this galaxy."

I agree with you wholeheartedly.

3. "It seems to me that people who think we are alone are the flat earthers of the 15th century."

I know what you mean, though I think you meant the 21st century.

4. "We will make contact with other lifeforms. When I don't know."

I don't know, either. I also don't know that we haven't.

5. "As for them not contacting us.. Quite frankly with abunch islam facist and other vermin, it is safe to say they would probaly want to avoid us period. That is my take.."

What, you don't think ET's couldn't be agents provocateur, or hoping we neuter ourselves and become easily dominated? I am not saying that outworlders are necessarily hostile, but based on solely your reasons to avoid us, that's what popped into my thoughts.

This last item, regarding ET's and their motivations, it depends on your worldview. I certainly am not the "Age-of-Aquarius- Children-of-the-Sun" type, and such don't think that a technologically advanced race is necessarily benign. Neither do I think they would be particularly dominating, a la Independence Day. It my belief that life seeks resources, ranging from primal material needs to more cerebral/emotional yearnings for communication. Those requirements may vary from intelligent species to intelligent species, but I think it's a pretty universal expectation of biological behavior.

[Sam Cree]

"Our "environment" is anything our brains can envision and our machines can manipulate."

I haven't agreed with everything you've posted on this thread, but I love that statement...you ought to use it for a tagline.

[PeterPhilly]

The Drake occasion is pseudoscience masquerading as science. Each of the numbers is nothing more than a prejudiced guess. N=N*fp ne fl fi fc fL where N is the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy; fp is the fraction of stars with planets; ne is the number of planets per star capable of supporting life; fl is the fraction of planets where life evolves; fi is the fraction where intelligent life evolves; and fL is the fraction of planet's life during which the communication civilizations live. The problem is that none of the terns can be known, and most cannot even be estimated. The only way to work the equation is to fill in with guesses. And guesses are merely expression fo prejudice. There can't even be "informed guesses" If you need to state how many planets with life choose to communicate, there is simply no way to make an informed guess. It is simply your prejudiced belief for or against the possibility that shows through. Therefore, depending on your "guesses", the equation gives you a value of anything ranging from billions and billions to zero. An equation that can have any value has no value.
I guess there's a reason why Sagan's "equation" to "prove" nuclear winter took the form of: Ds= Wn Ws Wh Tf Tb Pt Pr Pe.....etc. (The amount of tropospheric dust = #warheads x size warheads x warhead detonation height x flammability of targets x target burn duration x particles entering the troposphere x particle reflectivity x particle endurance.....etc.) The original study here mapped out different wartime scenarios and assigned numbers to some of the variables, but even so, the remaining variables were and are simply unknowable. Nobody knows how much smoke will be generated when cities burn, creating particles of what kind, and for how long. No one knows the effect of local weather conditions on the amount of particles that would be injected into the troposphere or how long they would remain there, and so on.
This is nothing more than consensus....and consensus isn't science. The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science, consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with consensus.
This article merely states the prejudice of the scientists. They believe in the existence of extraterrestrial life. This, in itself, is neither good nor bad. In fact, it may open them to looking at things in ways other people don't, since, following consensus, most scientists dismiss the simple possibility of life existing elsewhere or, if it does exist, of it being able to make its existence known to us. But don't make the mistake of taking their belief and treating it as evidence, which is a mistake scientists and the general public do with increasing frequency!

[PeterPhilly]

A way of stating this is "Abscence of proof doesn't equal proof of abscence."

[Kevin OMalley]

3. "It seems to me that people who think we are alone are the flat earthers of the 15th century."

>>I know what you mean, though I think you meant the 21st century.

***OK, now his statement is making more sense, assuming that's what he meant. Is that what you meant, Kevin Davis?

[Outlaw76]

eno_ "Because, to the best of our knowledge, no information has ever moved faster than the speed of light, since the Universe was born. No matter how long you work on the math, some numbers never change."

muir_ "Exactly. If one views the lights in the sky as time machines from our own distant future, one does less violence to physics than if one assumes they are ET's that have come from hundreds of light years away."

Quantum Teleportation FR thread

Apparently Information can move faster than the speed of light.

There is much about this universe we do not yet understand. Wonders and mysteries are waiting for to be found by those bold enough to dare.

[KevinDavis]

I stand corrected.. I should have said the flat earthers of the 21st century..

[RightWhale]

Weren't most people in the 15th century flat earthers?

Persians of the 12th century or even much earlier knew that earth was suspended in space--whether by being pulled equally in all directions or by being pushed equally in all directions was not known.

[KevinDavis]

I don't buy this we are not ready crap.. To me there are different types of aliens in when they contact us:
1. Independence Day -> Just kill to get rid of us real fast.
2. V -> Claim to come in peace, but in reality take our resources and basically kill us.
3. Alien Nation -> Crash Land. No choice but to live on this planet with us.
4. Star Trek -> Peaceful coexistence.

[Kevin OMalley]

Thanks for your post. I don't really agree that the Drake equation is "pseudoscience masquerading as science." I think it is more along the lines of science venturing into inductive realms, which are traditionally more suitably described as philosophies or religions. It's not an attempt at masquerading as much as a way to generate useful results, but it can appear as a masquerade to those who double-check the initial assumptions.

The Drake equation was used to justify the SETI operation spending, and that's where it becomes a scientific and political question. Much of what goes into the equation reflects the biases of the individuals, and I agree with you that for the fl term, this is not science. But the Drake equation did strike me as an evenhanded approach to the issue.

The author of the article I cited seems to be the only one I could find who was operating within the triangle, i.e. he seemed to have no axes to grind. The Drake equation seems to have a large achilles heel, which is that fl element. When I survey the discussions taking place, I see the inputs for fl range from 10^211(or more) from creationists down to 10^6 or so from the evolutionists, and the figure of 10^125 was the only term reflecting the lack of an apparent agenda, except perhaps to spend money elsewhere, which is a legitimate approach. Note that even the creationist threads tend to push fl for the Drake equation back into a result which suggests we shouldn't be spending money on this operation.

To an engineer, it's astonishing to see significant figures bandied with so much flippancy. 200 orders of magnitude delta between 2 camps? That's not science, that's philosophy. And this scientism is on its way to becoming a religion, judging from the activism of its followers. To put it into perspective with my elephant/flea analogy, the elephant is the size of our Sun, the flea is 10^10 smaller -- about the weight of a molecule, and it is moving 5 inches per millenium rather than 5 miles per hour. There is NO WAY the flea's kinetic energy would disrupt the elephant, and we still have about 80 orders of magnitude remaining as an error bar.

It appears that we are more in agreement than we are in disagreement, perhaps just to a matter of degree.

[Frank_Discussion]

"I don't buy this we are not ready crap..." Me neither.

I would add:

5. Babylon 5 -> There is a vast alien culture that we will stumble upon someday with differ levels and type of cultures, technologies, and motivations interacting in an environment defined on a cosmic scale. Sometimes we'll like the aliens, sometimes we won't. Sometimes they'll like each other, sometimes they won't.

Sometimes they'll want to eat us, and we'll hope we're poisonous... ;)

[Outlaw76]

Another thought struck me, it may well be possible for an object to move at sub light speeds through another medium to arrive at a far greater distance from the point of origin than light alone would allow.

Of course that's just BS at the moment, but quantum physics does allow for such odd things to happen. We may never harness a worm hole or other statistical oddity but that doesn't mean we should count out such possibilities either.

[Kevin OMalley]

I stand corrected.. I should have said the flat earthers of the 21st century..
***Very well, then. I am one of those who thinks we are alone, at least in this galaxy, on the basis of the best evidence available to us in the Drake equation (knowing its obvious faults as well). The flat earthers maintained their belief systems in contradistinction to the obvious physical evidence that was plainly available. Is there some kind of plainly available evidence that you'd like to cite that suggests the Drake Equation should be generating more than 100k planets of intelligent life? Keep in mind that the Drake Equation already tallies up the fact that there are billions & billions of stars out there.

There appears to be a lot of speculation on threads like these. Therefore I will venture into speculand and offer a view that we are the very first intelligent beings capable of extraplanetary travel in a relatively (geologically speaking) young universe. It will be up to us to colonize the galaxy, and thousands of years from now, our posterity will wonder what the "founding fathers" intended for the governments of their respective planets similar to how we shape our constitutionalist views on some of the available contextual literature of the time of our nation's founding. All of the moral choices we make now on this planet could be reflected in hundreds of generations across the galaxy. It's no better or worse than any of the other speculations I have seen.

[PeterPhilly]

If it is science venturing into more inductive realms, which are traditionally more described as philosophies or religions, then you have conceded my point that it is pseudoscience, and not science. I am of the old school who believes that science consists of testable hypotheses. The Drake equation is not testable and therefore is not science. It is important to make the distinction. Venturing off into philosophical or religious realms is fine. But it isn't science and shouldn't pretend to be. The Drake equation was used to justify SETI. The Drake equation cannot be tested and isn't science. SETI isn't science, it is religion. Faith is the firm belief in something for which there is no proof. The belief that the Bible or the Koran represent the word of God is a matter of faith. That doesn't speak to whether or not the belief is correct or not, just that it is a belief, not something that can be tested. Where we run into trouble as scientists and non-scientists is by trying to apply science to things which are untestable. We think by acknowledging that things are matters of faith that they are somehow less relevant, or conversely, by shrouding them in the trappings of science that they become more respectable to espouse. Similarly, the belief that there are other life forms in the universe is at present a belief, a matter of faith. There is not one shred of evidence for any other life forms and after 40 years of searching with SETI, none has been discovered. There is absolutely no evidentiary basis to maintain this belief and therefore, SETI is a religion. Again, this doesn't deny the possibility that life exists elsewhere. BUT from a SCIENTIFIC view, the evidence to make that claim doesn't exist, and the Drake equation is useless in getting it. While it may be evenhanded, it is still completely unscientific and calling it an equation doesn't make it scientific. It remains purely speculation. That is my only objection. I personally believe that life probably does exist elsewhere, but I'm careful to express it as belief and not a scientific conclusion. This distinction may seem to be a lot of excitement about nothing. Who does it harm to present it as science? Directly no one, but by allowing such subject matter to presented as science we end up with other sloppy consensus science like global warming which uses computer models with as many, if not more unquantifiable variables as the evidence that it is occurring. The models are fine for speculative purposes, but nothing more. The actual evidence points very strongly against the so-called consensus that global warming is occurring and that it derives from human activity.

[Kevin OMalley]

Well said.

As I stated earlier, "it appears that we are more in agreement than we are in disagreement, perhaps just to a matter of degree."

Pseudo means false. I don't think this is a good example of false science along the lines of L. Ron Hubbard. It is more of a "venturing off into philosophical or religious realms", which you say is fine.

About the only open issue is whether Quix would say you suffer from "Stubborn myopia, indeed."