Odds of Alien Life 'Very High,' House Panel Hears

Breitbart News ^ | 12/05/2013 | Breitbart News

[Carbonsteel]

The likelihood of life on other planets is "very high," a planetary scientist told a House committee in a hearing some Democrats chided as evading U.S. issues.

"The chance that there's a planet like Earth out there with life on it is very high," Massachusetts Institute of Technology planetary science and physics Professor Sara Seager told the House Science Committee.

"The question is: Is there life near here, in our neighborhood of stars? We think the chances are good," she said, answering a question from Rep. Ralph Hall, R-Texas, who asked: "Do you think there's life out there, and are they studying us? And what do they think about New York City?"

[cloudmountain]

I got my stuff from the Internet. They said it differently.

[cloudmountain]

Our first priority has to be dealing with remains of past civilization in our own system, we can worry about the stars later.

I think our priority is dealing with the poor and destitute of today. The past has pretty much already been dug up and done. My opinion only.

[jpsb]

"Second, the laws of quantum mechanics permit the creation of matter ex nihilio.

No they don't, no time, no space, no matter, Nothing. QM allows for the appearance of matter from nothing but really it is not matter from nothing. It is matter attaining a higher energy state that allows it to appear in our time/space. Absolutely nothing is quite a bit difference from just changing energy states. I am surprised you did not know this, being the smartest guy in the universe and all. I mean one would have to consider themselves extremely smart to tell someone they know NOTHING about that "none of them would pay the slightest attention to a remark that betrays so much ignorance." It is my understanding that gravitational singularity will over time evaporate away (Hawken's Radiation) not explode. If you have information to the contrary please explain. I love to hear it.

At first there was nothing and then it exploded is a pretty good tongue in cheek description of the big bang. Now you can argue all you want that you know what existed just prior to or in first instant of the big bang and good luck with that. And you would pretty much need to know what existed prior to the big band in order to DEFINITIVELY tell me it was not nothing. So once again I ask given nothing what is the probability of something?

[FredZarguna]

It is matter attaining a higher energy state that allows it to appear in our time/space.

No. This statement is false.

You are confusing two different things. The movement of quantum states from one energy eigenstate to another is not what I'm talking about.

Matter and energy literally appear from fluctuations of the vacuum state, in which there is NOTHING in conventional terms. [And I'm not surprised you don't know this, since you clearly know nothing about quantum mechanics.] Get started here, since you've clearly never heard of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_fluctuation

It is my understanding that gravitational singularity will over time evaporate away (Hawken's Radiation) not explode.

Your understanding is of black holes, which have collapsed in ordinary spacetime. But the singularity at the beginning of spacetime was not a gravitational singularity in the same sense as a black hole. Black hole radiation couldn't have radiated away from it into spacetime, because there was no spacetime. Again, I'm not surprised you don't know this, because you don't even known who Stephen Hawking is.

I'm not going to give you a course in cosmology. You need to start reading basic articles until you have some rudimentary understanding. Until you do, attempting to teach you is a waste of time.

At first there was nothing and then it exploded is a pretty good tongue in cheek description of the big bang.

It's a pitiful straw man set up by people whose god is not the real God. It is wrong because: 1) there was no "at first" [time did not yet exist] and 2) there was no "explosion." So, on both ends of your supposedly "witty" description you're talking nonsense that has nothing to do with the vacuum, the initial singularity, and the inflation in which spacetime came into existence.

I don't need to tell you what existed "before" the singularity, because there was no "before." And I have bad news for you. If you're a Jew or a Christian, your theology agrees with this: God is outside of time.

As for the rest of it, in your pitiful version of cosmology, there was a Great Big Dude with a white beard who waved a magic wand over some water and created the earth before he created the sun, the moon and the stars. Unlike your description -- which has nothing to do with what physicists have put together for the beginning instant of time -- my tongue in cheek description is pretty much exactly what Genesis says.

And it's 100% baloney. It's a legend by a primitive tribe attempting to understand how things started, and not an actual description of what the real God did when the universe began.

[varmintman]

"There's only one thing I can think of which would have much of an impact on poverty and destitution, i.e. outlaw the demoKKKrat party and ban it. Get rid of the Gaea worship, rebuild our energy and public infrastructures, rebuild our space program......

[varmintman]

“Big Bang(TM) is a bunch of bullshit, just like evolution.

[jpsb]

"there was a Great Big Dude with a white beard who waved a magic wand over some water and created the earth"

I am pretty sure I never made such a claim, please correct me if I did. Waiting. I'd really like to debate your contention that something can spring into existence from nothing. I have real problems with that. E=MC^2, put a zero anywhere you like and the result is zero. So I am interested in hearing how zero turns into something other than zero.

[cloudmountain]

"There's only one thing I can think of which would have much of an impact on poverty and destitution, i.e. outlaw the demoKKKrat party and ban it. Get rid of the Gaea worship, rebuild our energy and public infrastructures, rebuild our space program......

Christ DID say that "the poor will always be with us."

As for Gaea worship: I don't know of a single person who worships Gaea. Do you? There are 3.3 billion Christians. We worship Jesus as God.

Gaia, from Ancient Greek Γαῖα, a poetical form of Gē Γῆ, "land" or "earth"; also Gaea, or Ge) was the personification of the Earth, one of the Greek primordial deities. Gaia was the great mother of all: the primal Greek Mother Goddess; creator and giver of birth to the Earth and all the Universe; the heavenly gods, the Titans and the Giants were born from her union with Uranus (the sky), while the sea-gods were born from her union with Pontus (the sea). Her equivalent in the Roman pantheon was Terra.

The space program. I would love to see that rebuilt, but it won't happen with the Democrats in power. They want all Americans on the government nipple, worshiping THEM, not God.

[varmintman]

“Gaea-worshiper” is a sort of a generic term for tree-huggers, greens, and all of the sundry Malthusians who want to return our planet’s human population to medieval levels to save the planet.....

[cloudmountain]

“Gaea-worshiper” is a sort of a generic term for tree-huggers, greens, and all of the sundry Malthusians who want to return our planet’s human population to medieval levels to save the planet.....

Thanks for the explanation.

Population control. The Chinese one-baby policy created the "Bare Branches." Because of so much female infanticide, there weren't enough women for Chinese men to marry. There were enough single, fatherless men to bring forth that most descriptive name for those single men.

There is enough land and water for double our population. However, distribution of that land, its crops and wealth preclude, probably, a fair distribution of it. Original sin created the Seven Deadly ones. Nothing has changed since the fall of man.
THIS country and the West, generally, have the best life for the most people. "Save the planet"? We might do better to save ourselves--from ourselves. Everything good would follow. Now is that Pollyanna or what? :o)

[FredZarguna]

1) Read Genesis. My synopsis is actually closer to what is written there than what you've written in regards to the Standard Model cosmology. 2) If you want to understand how a non-zero mass (or energy) can come into existence, I gave you a reference to vacuum fluctuation. Read it. 3) E=mc² is an expectation value of the Klein-Gordon Hamiltonian in the stationary reference frame. More properly E² = (pc)² + (m₀c²)². In quantum field theory, these are operators, not numbers, and the time/mass formulation need not hold for a massless field. Furthermore, in that formulation the momentum is never zero, and energy is never exactly equal to rest mass (times c²) alone.

But of course you already knew that.

[jpsb]

I have my doubts about Quantum Mechanics, yes I know the math works. But I am reminded of the theory of epicycles when ever I read about it. The math worked quite well with theory of epicycles too.

"The theory of epicycles - the idea that celestial bodies moved in small circles as they traced larger orbits around the Earth - is arguably the most famous aspect of Greek astronomy. Although often scoffed at, it was actually very good at explaining the apparent movements of the Sun, Moon and planets through the sky, and it pretty much defined our view of the cosmos (see top three pics for various examples) until Kepler came up with the idea of elliptical orbits in the early 17th century AD."

I suspect we are lacking some fundamental knowledge of the nature of our Universe. Take gravity for example, we are very good at explaining its effects but we have no idea of what it is or how it bends space/time. Ergo I have every hard time believing correct any theory that creates something from absolutely nothing. When I said nothing I am not talking about a zero point energy system. I am refering to what existed before anything existed.

I will now take a look at your something from nothing reference, and thank you for providing it.

[jpsb]

I have my doubts about Darwinism, aka “survival of the fittest” but the fossil record demonstrates beyond doubt that there is some mechanism that creates more complex living organism from simpler ones. Cosmic rays? Cross breeding? Our Creator? Who knows, certainly not me.

[FredZarguna]

Just a word of caution: There is some confusion in the popular literature on the Internet about so-called "zero point energy" and fluctuations in the vacuum. Properly speaking, the words "zero point energy" should probably be banned, because in professional theoretical literature this has referred to the energy of the ground state of a system at absolute zero. The ground state is not vacuum; the ground state is an energy eigenstate. [The electronic ground state of a hydrogen atom, for example, is the energy eigenstate in which one electron has its minimum spherically symmetric average distance from the proton.] As such, a ground state has real existence and real non-zero energy. The vacuum is something else. It arises when you apply an annihilation operator to the ground state, destroying it. It does not have definite energy, and does not contain real particles.

I don't understand why you'd be uncomfortable with a God whose mere Word -- the Laws of Universe -- would in itself be sufficient to cause the universe to create itself. God is not substantially removed from the process of creation by that modality. Indeed, it seems to me to identify the ongoing process of creation -- countless particles spring out of the vacuum and return to it in your own body every second, for example -- with the sustenance and guarantee of the Creator.

[jpsb]

"I don't understand why you'd be uncomfortable with a God whose mere Word -- the Laws of Universe -- would in itself be sufficient to cause the universe to create itself."

Actually that is my argument. What I am trying to say is that without G*d the universe is not possible. Something from nothing violates the laws of physics. I also believe that the Big bang might not have in fact been the beginning of everything. Our universe probably, everything? I doubt it.

[MrB]

the fossil record demonstrates beyond doubt that there is some mechanism that creates more complex living organism from simpler ones

dogma

[FredZarguna]

It doesn't violate the laws of physics. It is a law of physics.

Most people -- including cosmologists -- are badly misusing the word "universe" which means, by definition, everything that there is.

[lonevoice]

Some unusually good commentary and discussion following this article, at least to the point of this ping. I think you’d enjoy it.

[jpsb]

Well I will say this, you’ve got me brushing up on math and physics that I have not used in a long time. I am researching how the big bang did not violate conservation of energy. I’ve always ignored “inflation” because I thought it improbable. Now I have to dig in to really understand current theory on the creation of the universe. :(