Posted on 11/20/2013 9:33:30 AM PST by Dysart
THE recent announcement by a team of astronomers that there could be as many as 40 billion habitable planets in our galaxy has further fueled the speculation, popular even among many distinguished scientists, that the universe is teeming with life.
The astronomer Geoffrey W. Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley, an experienced planet hunter and co-author of the study that generated the finding, said that it “represents one great leap toward the possibility of life, including intelligent life, in the universe.”
But “possibility” is not the same as likelihood. If a planet is to be inhabited rather than merely habitable, two basic requirements must be met: the planet must first be suitable and then life must emerge on it at some stage.
What can be said about the chances of life starting up on a habitable planet? Darwin gave us a powerful explanation of how life on Earth evolved over billions of years, but he would not be drawn out on the question of how life got going in the first place. “One might as well speculate about the origin of matter,” he quipped. In spite of intensive research, scientists are still very much in the dark about the mechanism that transformed a nonliving chemical soup into a living cell. But without knowing the process that produced life, the odds of its happening can’t be estimated.
When I was a student in the 1960s, the prevailing view among scientists was that life on Earth was a freak phenomenon, the result of a sequence of chemical accidents so rare that they would be unlikely to have happened twice in the observable universe. “Man at last knows he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he has emerged only by chance,” ... Today the pendulum has swung dramatically..
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Yeah I’ve always wondered about the communications potential of spooky action at a distance.
When you get to the quantum level the physical laws of the universe seem to go out the window.
I know a couple of scientists who agree with you.
Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe
One of the most compelling books on the subject I ever read.
And both are atheists.
Well at least the Bills would make the Super Bowl.
Wow, I posted a link to the book before I even saw your comment!
All this may be true, but if they are more advanced than us, presumably they would have been at our current level some time in their past. They would have had to discover radio, studied space spectroscopy, and had some form of SETI. We should be able to pick up some form of coherent radio signal. Again, the more apparent habitable planets there are, the greater the chance that we should see this, but don’t.
Where do you think Barky and Moochelle came from? :-)
Huh? A cell, by definition, is already alive.
Part of the problem is that radio waves deform over distance. After a few dozen parsecs, they have deformed to the point where you could not listen to the amplitude or frequency modulation. Thus, they are pretty useless for interstellar communications. So if any interstellar civilization exist, they probably communicate using something different that is beyond our technology level. Thus, we would not hear them.
And perhaps no one uses radio except us, since radio and the entire EM spectum is but one small subset of possibliities - cf: James Clerk Maxwell.
Or a graveyard. War is a huge technology driver, as you noted. I doubt many civilizations (if such existed) would get past their nuke stage. We probably won’t. Or rather we’ll knock ourselves back to the Stone Age and then start over unless God intervenes. That is probably a common story (again, if other intelligence existed).
This also might address why we don’t hear electromagnetic transmissions from anyone else: once you invent radio, nukes follow fairly rapidly on a geological (let alone cosmological) time frame. Therefore, most civilizations (if they existed) probably transmit at fairly low power for a fairly short time. They then wipe themselves out or knock themselves back to their Stone Ages.
Cheery thoughts, eh?
Currently we only know how to pair particles by having them start out physically together however it may be possible to tune in a time and space location without having been there before. Quantum experiments for the last 100 years keep showing that time and space as we perceive them are definitely an illusion of some kind.
“I’m sure there are space aliens out there but what the hell good are they?”
Two words: free proctoscopies.
I’ll take your bet. 40Billion:1 versus 10^161:1
That means there wouldn’t be enough money in the entire world to pay your bet off to me.
As discussed in various abiogenesis threads such as this one
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/religion/2986560/replies?c=62
Oops. Starting with 1/10^23 is far too generous. It’s 1/10^161.
http://www.tedmontgomery.com/bblovrvw/creation/crea-evol.html
DeNouy provides another illustration for arriving at a single molecule of high dissymmetry through chance action and normal thermic agitation. He assumes 500 trillion shakings per second plus a liquid material volume equal to the size of the earth. For one molecule it would require “10^243 billions of years.” Even if this molecule did somehow arise by chance, it is still only one single molecule. Hundreds of millions are needed, requiring compound probability calculations for each successive molecule. His logical conclusion is that “it is totally impossible to account scientifically [naturally] for all phenomena pertaining to life.”32
Even 40 years ago, scientist Harold F. Blum, writing in Time’s Arrow and Evolution, wrote that, “The spontaneous formation of a polypeptide of the size of the smallest known proteins seems beyond all probability.”33
Noted creation scientists Walter L. Bradley and Charles Thaxton, authors of The Mystery of Life’s Origin: Reassessing Current Theories, point out that the probability of assembling amino acid building blocks into a functional protein is approximately one chance in 4.9 × 10191.34 “Such improbabilities have led essentially all scientists who work in the field to reject random, accidental assembly or fortuitous good luck as an explanation for how life began.”35 Now, if a figure as “small” as 5 chances in 10191 is referenced by such a statement, then what are we to make of the kinds of probabilities below that, which are infinitely less? The mind simply boggles at the remarkable faith of the materialist.
According to Coppedge, the probability of evolving a single protein molecule over 5 billion years is estimated at 1 chance in 10161. This even allows some 14 concessions to help it along which would not actually be present during evolution.36 Again, this is no chance.
Since becoming convinced that Time is a volume, I have toyed with the notion that Dimension Space and Dimension Time are like the positive and negative of some initial condition when God started it all.
In addition, we have only been sending signals out for a couple decades. If even that much. The Arecibo signal (late 70s?) was beamed at a star cluster 25k light-years away, which means it’ll take 25k years to get there. Although by then the cluster will have moved on. If you do a quick search, there’s only about 50 stars less than 17 years away from Earth. We’ve been sporadically sending signals out for maybe 50ish years, at most? We haven’t even gotten stray signals out of our spur/arm of the Galaxy, much less to another one.
http://tzontonel.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/national-geographic-milky-way-reference-map1.jpg?w=6000&h=3887
The problem is that a generic, non-aimed radio signal is going to suffer massively in quality until it becomes just background noise. A tight-beamed signal will be much stronger, but the narrow aim means millions of times less likely to go to the right spot. Combined with the sheer distances, I doubt our signals have even reached one of these potentially habitable worlds.
The only way we would find anything would be signals we receive, and these signals, as such, would be from thousands of years ago. And any society insufficiently advanced to be using such basic radio communications, would almost definitely not have the technological means to travel here. Until humanity has reached the point where we spread out to other worlds, and travel beyond our solar system, I find it hard to believe we’ll even have any kind of contact.
You are correct sir. I believe there is life on other worlds. It is angelic life, as God's angels are patrolling the universe.
Exactly. Who gives a crap besides the navel gazers?
>> “If a planet had life …, they would be able to contact us and communicate with us.”
No one has ever been able to explain all the UFO sightings (there has to be genuine sightings among the bogus ones); or explain the crop circles that are getting more sophisticated by the day. Apparently some entities have been visiting us and are not shy about letting us know, while taking care not to interfere with our lives.
>> “… they are probably millions of light-years away”
That is true only in terms of our current body and the physical laws of planet Earth. We are more than just a body and can all look forward to the time when, once again, we can travel at the speed of our thoughts, going anywhere in the universe instantaneously, unlimited in time and space.
Whatever you say, Elvis.
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