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There Have Probably Been Aliens

nytimes.com

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Re: There Have Probably Been Aliens

#71

Post by XorNot »

madaxe_again wrote: post #6

The most likely reason that nobody seems to be out there is the great filter. The author asks if our civilisation will last millenia or millions of years - but I think a more apt scale would be decades or centuries. It just seems pretty obvious that we have an ever increasing set of opportunities to extinct ourselves, and therefore the probability of a civilisation ending disaster only grows. All the aliens either bl…

Conversely, by 2025 there might be living humans on Mars (if Elon Musk gets his way). And while that's not enough to form the basis of a backup civilization, I'm somewhat more interested in the effect on global zeitgeist it's likely to have. The feeling of the times is, I feel, an underestimated factor in how democracies pick their priorities - and the early 21st century has been very down on itself trying to figure out practical, post-conflict economic realities.

Re: There Have Probably Been Aliens

#72

Post by Dylan16807 »

andrewstuart2 wrote: post #4

Probably. Assuming they're correct. Our planet is 12,742km in diameter, yet we've only drilled 12.262km deep [1] (and we were wrong about how hot it was gonna be), and sent a human down ~10.900km [2] (and we still can't decide how deep we've actually been). Do we really think we understand the probability of alien life on another planet that well, given the amount of data we have on those planets, and that we're cons…

I like your post for the most part, but "Unless we can make it there in 1.198 years." is just nonsense for the sake of being pithy. We could do a decade easily. And it still doesn't get us to anywhere. No need to act like people die from a year in space.

Re: There Have Probably Been Aliens

#73

Post by Houshalter »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #69
Houshalter wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many reasons alien races would interact with primitives. Morality - they might be utilitarian and desire to relieve the suffering of other sentient beings. Or force their weird alien morals onto them. Competition - we might not be a threat now, but given a sufficiently long time, we could evolve into one. If they really don't care about us, it would cost them very little to exterminate us early.

This assumes we'd recognise the interaction as an interaction. A super-intelligent species would have no trouble modelling and manipulating human politics from behind the scenes. It's naive to assume that an interaction will look like the old explorer or conquistador model - a ship arrives, someone gets off it, and then demands to talk to the chieftain, or starts killing people and blowing shit up to make a point abo…

Why would they want to hide? You are making a very strong claim about the motivations of aliens.

Re: There Have Probably Been Aliens

#74

Post by wtbob »

> Specifically, unless the probability for evolving a civilization on a habitable-zone planet is less than one in 10 billion trillion, then we are not the first.

And … nothing is provided to indicate that said probability is higher than that.

Re: There Have Probably Been Aliens

#75

Post by wtbob »

apsec112 wrote: post #9

"In other words, given what we now know about the number and orbital positions of the galaxy’s planets, the degree of pessimism required to doubt the existence, at some point in time, of an advanced extraterrestrial civilization borders on the irrational." This is terribly silly. It reminds me of the Onion talks: "Step 1: Devise an idea to create a car that runs on compost. Step 2: Create the car. We’ve already compl…

> Specifically, the odds of abiogenesis are ~1/2^n, where n is the complexity in bits of the smallest self-replicator. n is bounded below by ~100 or so (or it would have happened in a lab somewhere), and is bounded above by ~1 million (the smallest existing bacteria), so we know it's somewhere in there.

If the odds of abiogenesis are 1/2^128, and if that is the source of life, then we're the only life in the Universe. As the article indicates, there are only 2^73 stars.

Re: There Have Probably Been Aliens

#76

Post by ThePhysicist »

throwaway_yy2Di wrote: post #56
ThePhysicist wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what will really help us to get at a better estimate is to answer the question whether there exists life in our solar system that evolved independently of that on Earth. If we should find traces of bacteria on Mars or another planet, that would immediately take the corresponding probability factor in the Drake equation to a number close to 1 (i.e. most solar systems with planets in the habitable zone produce…

I think what will really help us to get at a better estimate is to answer the question whether there exists life in our solar system that evolved independently of that on Earth. That's definitely the big question. But you left out the elephant in the room: is there life right here on Earth that's evolved independently? Abiogenesis doesn't simply halt after it's achieved its "goal". Perhaps we take the common-origin h…

Fascinating, thanks for pointing this out! Discovering a new kind of life on Earth that has coexisted with us without being noticed would be a huge event of course, and it would probably challenge what we regard as life in a general way.

This would be good stuff for a science fiction story as well.

Re: There Have Probably Been Aliens

#78

Post by ThePhysicist »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #67
throwaway_yy2Di wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what will really help us to get at a better estimate is to answer the question whether there exists life in our solar system that evolved independently of that on Earth. That's definitely the big question. But you left out the elephant in the room: is there life right here on Earth that's evolved independently? Abiogenesis doesn't simply halt after it's achieved its "goal". Perhaps we take the common-origin h…

As soon as you get v1.0 life, it starts bioforming its environment. v2.0 life would have to evolve in the changed environment - which would be considerably less hospitable, because the most useful chemical processes and energy sources will be colonised by v1.0 life. v1.0 life will (more or less literally) get the low hanging fruit. v2.0 would have to evolve around the edges, which means the probability gradient is hi…

But I think this actually happens with normal life as well: Individual species of bacteria try to conquer a biological niche by shifting conditions such that only they can survive. But by doing this they invariably create chemical by-products that can be harnessed by other life forms, thereby fueling their growth. It's an interesting question whether there are any biospheres on Earth that are colonized exclusively by a single species of life (I doubt it).

So although it's a very valid point I'm not sure if it's a sufficient argument against the hypothesis of having two independently evolved and fundamentally different types of life on a given planet.

Re: There Have Probably Been Aliens

#79

Post by SonicSoul »

jstanley wrote: post #3

Title is mild clickbait. There's no evidence for the claim, just a persuasive argument that it's probably true. Interesting nonetheless.

it's not mild clickbait. it's the definition of click bait. it states a very controversial conclusion, as if the argument is finally settled, while the body has little new information and fudges around with statistic that "it's likely probable that there is or once was another species".
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