Posted on 04/29/2008 1:25:02 PM PDT by null and void
People got very excited in 2004 when NASA's rover Opportunity discovered evidence that Mars had once been wet. Where there is water, there may be life. After more than 40 years of human exploration, culminating in the ongoing Mars Exploration Rover mission, scientists are planning still more missions to study the planet. The Phoenix, an interagency scientific probe led by the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, is scheduled to land in late May on Mars's frigid northern arctic, where it will search for soils and ice that might be suitable for microbial life. The next decade might see a Mars Sample Return mission, which would use robotic systems to collect samples of Martian rocks, soils, and atmosphere and return them to Earth. We could then analyze the samples to see if they contain any traces of life, whether extinct or still active.
Such a discovery would be of tremendous scientific significance. What could be more fascinating than discovering life that had evolved entirely independently of life here on Earth? Many people would also find it heartening to learn that we are not entirely alone in this vast, cold cosmos.
But I hope that our Mars probes discover nothing. It would be good news if we find Mars to be sterile. Dead rocks and lifeless sands would lift my spirit.
Conversely, if we discovered traces of some simple, extinct life-form it would be bad news. If we found fossils of something more advanced, perhaps something that looked like the remnants of a trilobite or even the skeleton of a small mammal, it would be very bad news. The more complex the life-form we found, the more depressing the news would be. I would find it interesting, certainly--but a bad omen for the future of the human race.
(Excerpt) Read more at technologyreview.com ...
I used to watch Road Runner when I was a kid.
The coyote always bought his stuff at the ACME store.
That where you guys get yur stuff?
(Just joshin ya... sort of! I’m a mainframe admin/installer for the last 25 yrs or so. So I am a bit prejudiced in favor of stuff that actually works and gets the job done...)
A rather self-indulgent piece, with a few logical errors.
However, to examine the axiom, let’s start with the two obvious problems of “intelligence meeting intelligence” in the galaxy. They are distance and time.
Distance is pretty obvious. The nearest star to Sol is about 4 light years away. The nearest habitable star? Good question. Probably between 200-2000 light years away. But just because it can support some kind of life, doesn’t mean it does support life, much less intelligent life.
And this is where the time problem comes in. About 99% of the species that once lived on Earth are gone. A lot when you consider the profusion of life that currently exists. People have only been intelligent for maybe 100,000 years, and only technologically capable for a little over a hundred.
One hundred years in a world that is about 4.5 billion years old. In a galaxy about 12 billion years old.
About every 100 million years in the last half billion years, the Earth has had a major extinction event, wiping much of the slate clean, with most of the major forms of life having to start anew. There might have been 15 other such events that weren’t quite as bad, but still awful in that last 540 million years.
And there are far more things that *could* completely wipe out life on Earth than have been inflicted on us. And I mean a sterilized world, not even bacteria left.
So how long can an intelligent species last? If we remain on Earth, perhaps another 100,000 years, if we’re lucky.
200,000 out of 12 billion years. 1/60th of the life of the galaxy. If it is anything like other intelligent life forms, it really reduces our chances of meeting somebody else. If the distance doesn’t get you, the time will.
How many galactic empires could have risen and fallen in that time?
Don’t even get your hopes up for finding artifacts from alien civilizations. The best we could probably hope for is to find very long-lived nuclear isotopes that don’t occur in nature. The ones we have created will most certainly survive mankind.
Ironically, those may be our best chance at contacting another intelligent species. If we created an asteroid-like projectile, then sent it into space at high speed, even if it was completely melted ten thousand times, such isotopes would not be destroyed.
A couple of basic fallacies in this argument (even assuming that the basic Fermi Paradox argument is correct, and there is no explanation for "we haven't found any aliens" other than "there aren't any aliens to find"):
1. There's no reason to assume that one specific stage between solar system formation and highly advanced civilization is a narrow "choke point". Perhaps they're all somewhat narrower than we think (so that only a few worlds in a given galaxy get through them all) but none of them is special in that regard.
2. Having a narrow "choke point" behind us says nothing about how easy or difficult the steps still ahead might be. Connecting the two is a form of the "gambler's fallacy" -- it's equivalent to assuming that a coin that came up heads ten times in a row is less likely to turn up heads again in the future because that bit of luck has been "used up".
3. Even if there aren't any aliens out there, it doesn't necessarily mean that advanced technological civilizations are particularly unlikely. Somebody has to be first; maybe it's us.
Life elsewhere in the universe would certainly lead to some new and interesting interpretations of the Bible.
a "Great Filter," which can be thought of as a probability barrier….The filter consists of one or more evolutionary transitions or steps that must be traversed at great odds…The Great Filter must therefore be sufficiently powerful--which is to say, passing the critical points must be sufficiently improbable--that even with many billions of rolls of the dice, one ends up with nothing: no aliens, no spacecraft, no signals.
Reading this I would almost think this guy was a proponent of Intelligent Design.
Life appears against great odds.
Life evolves to an intelligent level against great odds.
His Great Filter could easily have been the Great Architect.
I write science fiction. When asked in an interview if I expected to meet aliens, my answer was: “Yes. No, they’re not dropping by every Tuesday dragging out grandmas for probing. However, I expect to meet them in my life time. Whether genetically engineered creatures or artificial intelligences gone sentient or uplifted dolphins or the next evolution of humanity, I don’t know.”
OK,I looked...
As far as magnetic classification of silicon/Silica.
It's the WWW. Anyone can publish anything.
Why would the government hide anything? All of the UFO's ever spotted came with various bright lights blazing and blinking so that no one would ever miss one.
Of course they haven't - their little ships are all corroded and rusty...
I seriously doubt bacteria could ever be totally wiped out, short of the Earth itself plunging into the sun.
They’ve found them living in the 20,000 foot depth range, and it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if that’s up to 30,000 or so by now.
And I have no doubt there’s life out there. Earth life on Mars, at least. Given we’ve found Martian rocks in Antarctica, the odds are so close to certainty that you could bet the farm on it that sometime in the past, at least once, some Earth impact put some infected rocks and junk in orbit and it made it’s way to Mars.
The Sudbury event could have done it. 1.2 billion years ago, a little bitty rock crashed into the Canadian shield not far north of Lake Huron.
Except the rock was bigger than mount Everest, and struck with such fury that it literally flipped over part of the crust like a pancake!
And deposited hundreds of millions of tons of high grade metal ores in the process.
I guess they want to keep a lid on the true scope of the thing ... seriesly ... when you’ve got USAF officers traveling through wormholes collecting alien technology, you don’t want the whole world to know what you’ve got until you have a chance to fully exploit it.
Martians pee gasoline, 89 octane
Great Filter, singular?
I prefer the take on it I saw on the Science Channel a couple of weeks ago: “Intelligent life on Earth won the big jackpot in the lottery, not just once but ten or twenty consecutive times.” That’s the “Great Filter.” It’s a filtering process.
In other words, Earth has a large moon that stabilizes our seasons, a series of meteorite/comet impacts occurred at just the right moment in evolutionary history to allow humankind to arise, we may have had a couple of snowball earth episodes that occurred at just the right moment and pumped up oxygen levels to exactly where they needed to be to give rise ultimately to humans, we miraculously survived the Toba Event, etc., etc.
Jackpot, jackpot, jackpot, jackpot... We could’ve lost at any point, and should have, probabilistically speaking.
Any other similarly advanced form of intelligent life in the universe will have to get just as lucky as we did, and that’s extremely unlikely.
The Great Filtering is surely not finished with us yet either. We’ll certainly have to survive our own Sun going nova someday. We may have to survive a nearby supernova or gamma ray burster in the future, among other potentially even more catastrophic things we can anticipate (are you ready for the Milky Way and Andromeda to collide?).
IMHO, to be on the safe side and guarantee the continued existence of intelligent life for the remaining lifetime of the universe, we and/or our descendants will have to colonize all of the galaxies in the Local Group over the next two billion years or so.
It's not "faith", but Copernican inference. We have discovered, successively, that the Earth is not the center of the universe; nor is the Sun; nor is our galaxy; nor is the time we live in. Each finding of "we're not special" improves the possibility that life, and perhaps intelligence itself, is not special in the universe. So why, given this, are we not seeing evidence for it? (Fermi's Paradox)
Perhaps we are like inhabitants of a small island in the Pacific, speculating whether intelligent life exists anywhere else on Earth. So every morning the wise man of the village goes down to to the beach to look for a message in a bottle...
Ping for Later.
I did not know that! Can't wait to see how the government spins this!
read at home tonight BUMP!
I have a picture around here somewhere .............
My Vulcan half says “illogical”
My Human half says “Oh la la!”
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